Electric Chair

The state Supreme Court ruled that Brad Sigmon and Freddie Owens have a statutory right to choose the manner of their execution.

Brad Sigmon and Freddie Owens are scheduled to die in South Carolina's 109-year-old electric chair, in what would be the state's first executions in a decade.

South Carolina is set to carry out its first executions in a decade due to a new law that compels condemned inmates to choose between the electric chair and a firing squad if lethal injection drugs aren't available.

Inmates are now faced with dying via the state's 109-year-old electric chair or by firing squad, options advocates are calling inhumane.

If put to death on Friday, Lee Hall will be the fourth person in Tennessee to choose the electric chair over lethal injection within the past year.

The El Paso shooter likely won't be executed by the electric chair if he's sentenced to death.

The inmates argued that the state has the means to orchestrate their deaths by firing squad.

"He [requested this method] not because he thought that it was a humane way to die, but because he thought that the three-drug cocktail that Tennessee had planned to use was even worse," a U.S. Supreme Court Justice said.

Three days before his scheduled execution, convicted killer Edmund Zagorski convinced Tennessee's Supreme Court to spare him death by lethal injection in favor of the electric chair.

The most important question is whether killing prisoners with nitrogen is cruel and unusual, the constitutional threshold for death penalty implementation.

A state representative employed a version of the president's famous "Make America great again" slogan in his death penalty push.

Cecil Clayton, who was found guilty of killing a sheriff's deputy in 1996, was missing parts of his brain's frontal lobe.

Despite missing a portion of his brain, Cecil Clayton is scheduled to be executed Tuesday afternoon.