South Carolina Supreme Court Blocks Efforts to Conceal Lethal Injection Information

On January 26, South Carolina’s Supreme Court ordered the state to turn over infor­ma­tion about its attempts to obtain lethal injec­tion drugs, as part of a suit chal­leng­ing aspects of the state’s meth­ods of execution.

South Carolina has not car­ried out an exe­cu­tion since 2011, stat­ing that it was too dif­fi­cult to obtain lethal injec­tion drugs. The Court’s order required the state to dis­close what efforts it has made to acquire them. A low­er court had ruled that the alter­nate meth­ods of exe­cu­tion — elec­tro­cu­tion and the fir­ing squad — vio­late the state constitution’s pro­hi­bi­tion on cru­el and unusual punishment.

The ini­tial lit­i­ga­tion chal­lenged a statute passed in 2021 that pro­vid­ed for exe­cu­tion via elec­tro­cu­tion, lethal injec­tion, or the fir­ing squad, allow­ing pris­on­ers to choose among the three, with elec­tro­cu­tion as the default if the oth­er two were not ​“avail­able.” At that time, the state attempt­ed to sched­ule sev­er­al elec­tro­cu­tions, declar­ing that lethal injec­tion was not avail­able because it could not access the nec­es­sary drugs, and that the fir­ing squad was not avail­able because it did not have pro­to­cols in place. The low­er court had held that the term ​“avail­able” in the statute was too vague and unde­fined, and hence unconstitutional.

The high court’s rul­ing ordered the state to pro­vide infor­ma­tion about how it deter­mined that lethal injec­tion was ​“unavail­able” before it will rule on the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of the phrase. Due to the state’s dis­clo­sure laws, the infor­ma­tion will be pro­vid­ed to the par­ties to the law­suit, but not made publicly accessible.

The four pris­on­ers chal­leng­ing the statute are Freddie Owens, Brad Sigmon, Gary Terry, and Richard Moore.