COLUMBIA, S.C. — An associate justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court issued a rare and blunt dissent Wednesday in an Upstate death penalty case about a 1999 convenience store robbery that four of the five justices agreed to uphold.
"In the nearly 13 years I have served on this Court, I have voted to affirm eleven death sentences on direct appeal and have never dissented," Associate Justice Kaye Hearn wrote in her 14-page dissent.
But the spur-of-the moment killing committed by Richard Moore in 1999 during a convenience store robbery in Spartanburg County is so different from the usual brutal premeditated slayings for which South Carolina juries give out the death penalty that condemning Moore to death is disproportional, or so far out of line, as not to be lawful, Hearn wrote.
