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.
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.
On April 27, Sigmon entered the home of the Larkes, where he found 62-year-old David Larke in the kitchen and Gladys Larke in the living room. Armed with a baseball bat, Sigmon attacked the couple, beating them with the bat, going back and forth between the two rooms. Each of the Larkes sustained nine blows to their heads, which crushed their skulls. After murdering the Larkes, Sigmon stole David's gun and waited for Rebecca Barbare to return home.
He was a murderer, but that doesn't make the death penalty any less inhumane.
Edit: humane -> inhumane