South Carolina officials want to shoot Richard Moore to death because in 1999 the now 57-year-old shot and killed Nikki Speedy Mart clerk James Mahoney. They settled on that method after forcing Moore to decide between a firing squad or the state’s 110-year-old electric chair. In short, South Carolina wants to commit murder to punish a man it convicted of murder relegated to death row for the past 21 years.
There’s no other honest way to describe what South Carolina is trying to do as it revamps its infrastructure of death to return the state to its barbaric past. The state is acting like a famished vampire who hasn’t been able to satisfy its bloodlust in more than a decade. It wants blood, and it wants blood now despite calling itself a Christian state.
Vengeance isn’t the Lord’s, it’s Gov. Henry McMaster’s.
“The families and loved ones of victims are owed closure and justice by law. Now, we can provide it,” McMaster wrote in a tweet. No word on if his lips were salivating as he typed those hollow words.
Moore committed an evil act. But McMaster, S.C. Department of Corrections Director Bryan Stirling and the three men who will volunteer to shoot Moore when the courts allow them to will be taking evil a step further. Moore was scheduled to be executed later this month before a court postponed his state-sponsored murder.
When Moore walked into that Nikki Speedy Mart convenience store in Spartanburg County, he was not armed. He did not walk in with the intent to kill Mahoney but rather to steal money to buy cocaine. Mahoney had guns for protection behind the counter and during a scuffle with Moore, the gun went off, killing Mahoney. Moore drove off and was later caught with a bag with $1,408 in cash.
That’s an evil act, but not premediated murder – a fact only Associate Justice Kaye Hearn had the courage to point out among her colleagues when the case went before the S.C. Supreme Court. What McMaster, Stirling and three as-of-now unknown volunteers do will be premediated. It will be purposeful, done with foresight and malice. In every other setting, we wouldn’t hesitate to call it what it is: first-degree murder. It’s an unnecessary, pre-planned, unwarranted killing. It neither reduces nor deters violent crime. And we’ve executed innocent people, including 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. He was so small he had to sit on books for his head to reach the electric chair’s headpiece. Seven decades later, he was exonerated. But we like to pretty it up when it’s the state doing the murdering in our names, funded by our tax dollars, backed by our votes.
That’s why for years we opted for the lethal injection route even though the electric chair was sitting there the entire time, though one inmate forced its use in 2008. Because we know how barbaric it is. The drug cocktail we had been using to murder men on death row is no longer available because manufacturers of the drugs don’t want to be associated with such routine inhumanity.
It’s a shame that for-profit businesses are willing to forfeit money to not be party to the savagery of our death chamber even as elected and appointed officials who call themselves men of God decided to reinstate a firing squad to pair with an electric chair to ensure that they get to continue tying people down to murder them to satisfy a craven bloodlust we should have left behind in the Dark Ages.
We call ourselves a pro-life state but when it comes to state-ordered murder, we’re not much better than North Korea.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer based in Myrtle Beach.
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