Sigmon's lawyers wanted to delay his death so they could get a fuller hearing in court to learn more information about the drug South Carolina uses in lethal injections. Sigmon said that lack of information forced him to choose to be shot to death. The state also has an electric chair, but Sigmon said he didn't want to suffer being cooked alive by electricity.
Sigmon's attorneys also argued that his lawyers in the original 2002 trial did a poor job of trying to save his life after he pleaded guilty by not submitting enough evidence of his mental problems.
Simon, 67, beat his ex-girlfriend's parents to death with a baseball bat in their Greenville County home. His plan was to kidnap his ex-girlfriend, spend a romantic weekend together and then kill her and himself. She escaped from his car as he drove away.
"If I couldn’t have her, I wasn’t going to let anybody else have her. And I knew it got to the point where I couldn’t have her,” Sigmon said in a confession typed out by a detective after his arrest.
Sigmon will be strapped into a chair at 6 p.m. Friday in the death chamber used for all South Carolina executions at Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. A target will be placed over his heart and a hood over his head. Three shooters, all with live ammunition, will fire from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.
Sigmon would be the first inmate killed by firing squad in the U.S. in 15 years.
