USA - Stephen Bryant (SC)

USA - South Carolina. Stephen Bryant, 44, White, was executed. By firing squad

November 14, 2025:

November 14, 2025 - South Carolina. Stephen Bryant, 44, White, was executed. By firing squad

It is the state’s third such killing in year

Between October 5 and October 13, 2004, in Sumter County, 23-year-old Stephen Corey Bryant perpetrated a series of shootings that led to the deaths of three people.

His victims were Clifton Gainey, Willard Tietjen and Christopher Burgess. He also shot and seriously wounded a fourth man, Clinton Brown. At his trial in 2008, he pleaded guilty to three counts of murder and several other charges. He was sentenced to death for the murder of Tietjen and to life imprisonment for the other two murders.

Bryant’s lawyers had argued in final appeals that the sentencing judge had been unable to consider his brain damage from his mother’s alcohol and drug use during pregnancy, but South Carolina’s supreme court declined to halt the execution on Monday.

Republican Gov. Henry McMaster denied clemency for Bryant, according to his office. No South Carolina governor has offered clemency since the death penalty resumed in the U.S. in 1976.

Bryant made no final statement and briefly glanced at 10 witnesses in the execution chamber before prison officials placed a hood over his head, according to the Associated Press, one of the media observers. There were three prison shooters in the room, and shots rang out roughly 55 seconds later.

After the bullets were fired, Bryant made no noise and a red bulls-eye target that had been placed on his heart flew forward off his chest, the AP reported. He appeared to take a few shallow breaths and then experienced a final spasm a little over a minute later, with a doctor pronouncing him dead at 6.05pm.

South Carolina has revived executions over the last year and has now killed seven people in rapid succession after a 13-year pause in capital punishment. In March, the state conducted its first firing squad execution, a method human rights advocates have called “barbaric”, which had not been used anywhere in the US in 15 years.

South Carolina death row defendants are now directed to select how they will be killed – electric chair, lethal injection or gunfire. While lethal injection is the most common method in the US states that have continued executions, there have been growing concerns that the use of pentobarbital, a sedative, can cause a prolonged and excruciating death.

What happens during a firing squad execution. The curtain opens in the death chamber of the Broad River Correctional Institution, with fewer than a dozen witnesses sitting behind bulletproof glass.

The person is strapped into a chair. A white square with a red bull’s-eye target is placed over his heart by a doctor. Their lawyer can read a final statement. A prison employee then places a hood over the person’s head, walks across the small room and pulls open a black shade where the firing squad waits.

Without an audible or visual warning to witnesses, the shooters then fire high-powered rifles from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.

A doctor will then come out within a minute or two, examine him and declare him dead.

Brad Sigmon, the first man to be killed by firing squad in South Carolina this year, chose gunfire because he was concerned by reports that the three men executed before him, whom he knew well, had experienced painful deaths that took more than 20 minutes, his attorneys said at the time. He preferred gunfire to being “burned … alive” by electrocution.

Lawyers for Mikal Mahdi, the second man shot to death by South Carolina officials, said he chose the “lesser of three evils”. Mahdi’s lawyers said his autopsy showed the execution was botched, with the shooters allegedly missing the target area on his heart, causing a prolonged death. State corrections’ officials disputed the lawyers’ claims, saying the autopsy showed the shooters struck his heart before hitting other organs.

With Bryant’s execution, South Carolina has cemented its status as a leader of firing squad killings. Under the modern death penalty over the last five decades, Utah is the only other state to execute three people with gunfire, with its last firing squad killing in 2010. Idaho is moving to make firing squads its primary execution method, and killings by gunfire are still legal in Mississippi and Oklahoma.

Bryant is the 5th person to be put to death this year in South Carolina, the 50th person to be executed in South Carolina since the state restarted capital punishment in 1985, the 43rd person in the US to be put to death in 2025 so far, and the 1,650th overall since the nation resumed executions in 1977.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/14/south-carolina-firing-squad-execution
https://www.kbtx.com/2025/11/15/south-carolina-man-executed-by-firing-squad-killing-3-people-during-crime-spree-2004/