I don’t write this to pick on Emily Botatch, who has written up a nice piece on the firing squad bill that is moving through the South Carolina legislature. But I do have to nitpick a little. Botatch describes the situation accurately, but not adequately.

The original bill that the [firing squad] amendment was tacked on is aimed at combating a nationwide shortage in lethal injection drugs, caused by drug manufacturers who have sought to clamp down on how their products were being used.

What Botatch fails to do is explain why drug manufactures don’t want their products used to kill people. The answer is that a lethal injection is a cocktail of drugs that are manufactured for different purposes, and the pharmaceutical companies, many of which are based overseas where the death penalty is outlawed, do not want the moral or potential legal problems that come with aiding and abetting an execution. There are also concerns about the reliability and humaneness of lethal injection.

As a result, states that use lethal injection cannot get the ingredients they need. Botatch reports that South Carolina has been unable to obtain the drugs since 2016 and this has already caused a delay in two scheduled executions, with a third likely to be delayed in the near future.

Under current South Carolina law, death row prisoners have the option of electrocution (the electric chair) or lethal injection, and their preference must be respected. The proposed change in the law would add death by firing squad as an option and also allow the state to use electrocution or firing squad if the prisoner opts for lethal injection and the drugs can’t be secured in a timely fashion.

Many Palmetto State lawmakers, including opponents of the death penalty, see getting shot to death as more humane and merciful than being burned to death by electricity, and they support this bill for that reason. But the whole debate would be unnecessary if there weren’t strong global opposition to the death penalty that makes lethal injection a nonviable option in the United States.

Rather than ponder why most of the world considers the death penalty barbaric, the South Carolina legislature is desperate to carry out executions on schedule. That’s a shame.