Moore, 59, awaits clemency from the governor as his children plead for his life to be spared

South Carolina is on track to execute a man on death row on Friday, despite growing concerns about the validity of his sentence and objections from the judge who originally condemned him to death.

Richard Moore, 59, is due to be killed by lethal injection at 6pm unless the state’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, grants clemency. Moore’s children have pleaded for his life to be spared, and his resentencing efforts are now supported by the former corrections department director, two trial jurors, the judge who presided over the case and a former state supreme court justice.

The case has drawn scrutiny over racial bias and the unusual nature of his death sentence, and is part of a spate of rapid executions the state is pursuing.

  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    I’m just so surprised that in addition to not deterring crime at all (and possibly making it marginally worse), not being humane whatsoever, and being far, far more expensive, it’s also completely wrong all the time.

    Anyone who still supports the death penalty state-sanctioned murder at this point is either grossly mis-/underinformed or is a “but it’s fine as long as we make really, really sure they did it!” person (not realizing there’s a decades-long appeal process or that administrations who use it don’t actually give a shit about the certainty of a conviction). That, or revenge just makes their pp hard and they genuinely don’t care about the fact it’s categorically worse in every way.

    • Eiri@lemmy.ca
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      14 days ago

      And on top of that.

      If you must have the death penalty (and really I’d challenge that but for the sake of argument let’s say they must).

      Then injections are one of the worst ways you can do it. Hanging and beheading are much more humane ways to end someone’s life.

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        Yeah, but injections look much more precise and clinical rather than like brutally murdering someone, so they keep up an appearance of humaneness to the public. So it’s clearly still the preferable choice.

      • catloaf@lemm.ee
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        14 days ago

        You can fuck up those too, including intentionally. If the hanging drop is too short, they’re strangled slowly instead of killed by the snap. If your beheading blade is dull or aimed poorly, it will probably not kill in one blow.

        • Eiri@lemmy.ca
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          14 days ago

          I didn’t say they were perfect. They just seem less bad. At things stand, lethal injections simply do no go well as a standard.

  • style99@lemm.ee
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    14 days ago

    This whole thing reeks of corruption:

    South Carolina recently resumed executions after a 13-year pause due to a lack of lethal injection supplies and challenges to its other proposed methods, of electrocution and firing squads. The state restocked pentobarbital, a sedative, after it passed a law to shield the identities of companies supplying the drug, which had feared public backlash.

    The state supreme court has authorized the scheduling of executions roughly every five weeks, an extraordinary pace that lawyers argued would strain attorneys representing multiple defendants and risk botched executions due to the rushed process.

    • DancingBear@midwest.social
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      14 days ago

      That’s crazy that the corporations don’t really mind assisting in the murder of human beings so long as the name of the company is kept from the public record.

  • foggy@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    Disgusting. I don’t have the words.

    I don’t have the words because I have 0 doubt that this man will be dead in less that 11 hours.

    No fucking way some republican governor in South Carolina is going to spare the life of a black man this close to an election that could damn well bring back slavery.

    Abhorrent.