By Avi Bajpai
The Herald-Sun, Durham, N.C.
RALEIGH, N.C. — For nearly two decades, legal challenges have blocked the death penalty in North Carolina from being carried out.
Now, Republican lawmakers who want to lift the state’s de-facto moratorium on capital punishment are advancing a bill this week ahead of a key legislative deadline that would approve two new methods of execution. Or more precisely, two very old methods.
House Bill 270, which will get a second committee hearing on Tuesday, would allow inmates sentenced to death to choose between lethal injection, the current method of execution that has been challenged in court; electrocution, which the state stopped using several decades ago; or firing squad, a method that was recently approved and carried out in South Carolina for the first time nationwide since 2010, and only the fourth time since the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976.
Rep. David Willis, one of the bill’s primary sponsors, said during a committee hearing last week that the bill follows the model of what lawmakers in South Carolina did by authorizing alternative execution methods including the firing squad to end their own pause stemming from legal challenges, which lasted 13 years.
“It’s not something that’s used every single day, obviously, but I think our (district attorneys) and our courts need to have this option on the table to combat some of the heinous crimes and murders and things that we’re seeing,” Willis told The News & Observer last week. “And as a tool in their belt, to at least have as a possibility, I think, goes a long way, and helps our prosecutors in that regard.”
Top Republicans support resuming executions
Asked about the bill, House Speaker Destin Hall said he wasn’t familiar with the specifics of it, but said he agrees that there needs to be some resolution to the moratorium on executions.
“The law is the law, and our law, as it has for a long time, allows the death penalty in North Carolina, and I think that when a jury decides something, that the will of that jury ought to be carried out,” Hall told The N&O last week.
Hall said that the bigger issue, regardless of what method lawmakers allow, is that “you’ve got to have the governor being willing to carry out that sentence.”
“I think it’s something we should look at,” Hall said of the bill. “But at the end of the day, we can pass all kinds of things, but you have to have an executive branch willing to carry it out.”
Republicans, like Hall, control the legislature. Gov. Josh Stein is a Democrat.
Court disputes have blocked executions since 2006, centering on methods of lethal injection and claims of racial bias during capital trials and sentencing.
The bill was filed in early March but only started moving forward last week. If House Republicans decide to vote on it, it could move to the floor quickly this week. It’s scheduled for a second hearing in the House State and Local Government Committee on Tuesday, after which it’s slated to go to the Rules Committee, which is the last stop before a vote by the full House.
That vote would likely need to happen by Thursday, the legislative deadline for most bills to pass at least one chamber in order to be heard by the other chamber this session.
A flurry of bills are expected to move through the House and Senate this week, ahead of that deadline.
The top Republican in the upper chamber, meanwhile, also supports taking legislative action to try to lift the pause currently in effect.
“I agree with the sentiment that for way too long, the judicial branch has found ways to frustrate the will of the legislature, and the will of the people of North Carolina,” Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters last week.
Berger said he wasn’t familiar with the House bill but would take a “serious look” at it if it passes and is sent to the Senate.
Condemnation from death penalty opponents
Opponents of the death penalty were quick to condemn the new effort by Republicans to resume executions and expand the methods to the electric chair and firing squads.
North Carolina used three methods between the time it began administering capital punishment in 1910, taking that responsibility from individual counties, and when the last execution took place in 2006, according to the Department of Adult Correction.
From 1910 to 1938, the state used the electric chair. In 1936, the state began using the gas chamber. In 1983, inmates on death row were given the choice between the gas chamber or lethal injection. In 1998, the state made lethal injection the sole method.
Jennifer Copeland, the executive director of the N.C. Council of Churches said during the committee hearing last week that the death penalty isn’t just ineffective and flawed, but inhumane.
“Electrocutions are gruesome,” Copeland said. “Prisoners catch fire, cook from the inside, there’s a smell of burning human flesh, and possibly even jolting a conscious person multiple times to bring about their death.”
The N.C. Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, which launched a two-year campaign in December 2022 calling for all death sentences that have currently been handed down in North Carolina to be commuted to prison terms, said the bill would fail to deter crime and “only cause further harm to corrections officers by requiring them to carry out brutal execution methods.”
Noel Nickle, the coalition’s executive director, said in a statement last week that the bill “does nothing to improve public safety” and “forces our already overburdened state employees to carry out executions using violent methods we know will be extraordinarily damaging to their mental health.”
More than 100 Racial Justice Act claims pending
Besides the issues surrounding lethal injection — the constitutionality of the method, the supply of drugs and the participation of doctors — more than 100 of the 121 people currently on death row are challenging their death sentences with claims of racial bias during jury selection or sentencing in their trials.
These claims are allowed under the Racial Justice Act, a state law that was passed by Democrats in the General Assembly in 2009.
Four death row inmates successfully challenged their sentences under the law in 2012, and had their sentences commuted to life without parole.
A year later, the General Assembly, which was then under Republican control, repealed the law, arguing that the death penalty was a necessary deterrent.
But a door ultimately remained open to Racial Justice Act claims moving forward, when, in June 2020, the N.C. Supreme Court — then under Democratic control — ruled that inmates who had filed challenges before the law was repealed could still be heard in court.
In February, after a two-week hearing last year in the first Racial Justice Act claim to be heard since the Supreme Court’s ruling, a Johnston County judge ruled that race was “a significant factor” in the jury selection and sentencing of Hasson Bacote, a Black man who was sentenced to death in 2009 and who was spared from death row last year.
Prosecutors at the N.C. Department of Justice have appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which currently has a 5-2 Republican majority.
Firing squad used in two South Carolina executions this year
Lawmakers in South Carolina adopted the firing squad, and reintroduced the electric chair, as execution methods in 2021. The state’s Supreme Court ruled in July 2024 that the death penalty with these new methods was legal.
In March, South Carolina executed Brad Sigmon, who was sentenced to death for killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat, by firing squad. It was the first such execution in the United States since 2010, when Utah put Ronnie Lee Gardner to death by the same method, according to the Associated Press.
Only two others were executed by firing squad anywhere in the country after the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976; both executions took place in Utah .
South Carolina executed a second death row inmate by firing squad last month: Mikal Mahdi, who was sentenced to death for killing an off-duty police officer, the AP reported.
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