The curtain shrieked as it was yanked open to reveal a 67-year-old man tied to a chair. His arms were pulled uncomfortably behind his back. The red bull’s-eye target on his chest rose and fell as he desperately attempted to still his breathing.

The man, Brad Sigmon, smiled at his attorney, Bo King, seated in the front row before guards placed a black bag over his head. King said Sigmon appeared to be trying his best to put on a brave face for those who had come to bear witness.

That was the kind of person Sigmon had become after his decades on death row, the kind who fretted over other people’s comfort at his own execution. Sigmon had agonized over the fact that his loved ones would have to see him die like this, gunned down, mere feet away from them.

“It was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.”

He had been faced with an impossible choice, if you can call it that. Die by lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad? Firing squad, he concluded, seemed the most humane. Now, he found himself strapped down, waiting for those three rifles pointed at his beating heart to fire.

Sigmon struggled in the chair as the sound of gunfire erupted and bullets tore through his chest. “He was pulling on the restraints so hard … I feel he was trying to cover the wound,” said King, who serves as chief of the Capital Habeas Unit for the Fourth Circuit. “It was one of those moments where every second felt like an hour.”

But within three minutes, the nightmarish ordeal was over. Blood glistened off of Sigmon’s black shirt, as the medical examiner called a time of death.

“6:08 p.m.”

Only later did King realize why his client was really dressed in black. Not for its slimming properties, as Sigmon had joked moments earlier, but because it hid the distinctive dark-red color of blood.

On March 7, 2025, Sigmon, who was convicted of a 2001 double homicide, became the first man executed by firing squad in the United States in 15 years. Others are expected to follow.

In July, the South Carolina Supreme Court resumed executions after a 13-year pause. Prior to the ruling, state lawmakers passed a law allowing people set to be executed to choose between lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad. The law was passed as a way to skirt

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