Niamh Shackleton
A man on death row has made a last-ditch plea in the days leading up to his execution.
Brad Sigmon has been on death row for over two decades after being convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend's parents, William David and Gladys Larke.
The couple were beat to death by a baseball bat wielded by Sigmon, who had broken up with their daughter just a week before.
Following his guilty conviction, Sigmon was handed two life sentences in addition to a 30-year jail term for first-degree burglary.
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While his lawyers attempted to have Sigmon be held behind bars for the rest of his life, a jury ultimately decided to sentence him to death.
Over 20 years later, Sigmon is due to be executed and will be killed on March 7.
In South Carolina — where Sigmon is being held — death row inmates can choose their means of execution, and Sigmon recently opted for firing squad.
Should it go ahead as planned, he'll be the first person to die by firing squad in the US since 2010.
But now his lawyer, Gerald 'Bo' King, is appealing to have his execution date pushed back. He claims that Sigmon was misinformed about the execution options available, and that he should be given more information about the state's lethal injection drug and procedures.
As per the Las Vegas Sun, the 67-year-old's team are claiming that he was 'forced' into choosing such a violent execution method because Sigmon had been lead to believe that the other two methods (electric chair and lethal injection) would be a much more torturous way to die.
King wrote in a letter yesterday (February 26): "Brad Sigmon has repeatedly asked for the basic facts needed to determine if South Carolina's drugs are expired, diluted, or spoiled."
Currently South Carolina execution laws requires officials to not reveal the doses of drugs used, how they are administered, who provides the pentobarbital and the names of members of the execution staff.
The letter goes on, as per Mail Online: "He has thus far been denied. He chose the firing squad because he was unwilling to risk the prolonged, torturous death that he fears his friends endured."
The friends King is referring to are Marion Bowman and Richard Moore; both of whom were executed in recent months.
The two former inmates died by lethal injection, but were found to have 10 grams of the lethal injection drug in their systems — double the amount of pentobarbital used in some other states.
Bowman reportedly needed twice the dose of the lethal injection drug for an unknown reason, while and autopsy for Moore 'found the same amount of pentobarbital was used to kill him over two doses given 11 minutes apart, according to his autopsy', writes Las Vegas Sun.
It's thought that it took both Moore and Bowman over 20 minutes to succumb to the lethal injections.
While it took them a while to die, the state has insisted that they showed no signs of consciousness or breathing after about a minute of the injection being administered.