On July 31st 2024, the South Carolina Supreme Court found that firing squads, the electric chair, and lethal injection were not cruel and unusual methods for execution and re-started the practice of the death penalty within the state. One inmate roughly every month is scheduled to executed in South Carolina until March of 2025. 

This means Richard Moore, a death row inmate whose sentencing was temporarily halted in April of 2022, and again in 2023 is in danger of being executed once again.

Richard Moore was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1999 shooting death of a white male store owner by an all white jury (11 White and 1 Latino) during what was reported to be a robbery.

The trial occurred in Spartanburg, South Carolina which is one of the four counties that make up over 51% of all the death penalty cases in S.C. The prosecutor in the case purged all of the eligible Black jurors from the trial, and the incumbent Spartanburg County Solicitor Holoman Gossett had a clear history of racial bias against Black defendants, with all but one of the 16 people put on death row in Spartanburg county being Black men. 

Mr. Moore has maintained that he entered the convenience store unarmed with no intent to kill, and did not own the gun that was fired during the altercation. The altercation began over Mr.Moore being just 12 cents short for his purchase, causing the two men to argue, and the store owner pulled two guns in response. Both Mr. Moore and the store owner were shot, but the store owner of the store was killed during the incident. There is no other death penalty case in South Carolina where a person has been sentenced to death for a non-premeditated murder. 

During the 2021 legislative session, South Carolina state lawmakers passed a law that would require death row inmates to choose between the electric chair or a firing squad, with electrocution the default if they declined to choose.

But, in September of 2022, Circuit Court Judge Jocelyn Newman, found both the firing squad and electric chair unconstitutional due deeming them cruel and unusual.

Judge Newman wrote in her opinion regarding the reinstatement of these execution methods, “In doing so, the General Assembly ignored advances in scientific research and evolving standards of humanity and decency.”

People of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43 % of total executions since 1976 and 55 % of those currently awaiting execution. Furthermore in South Carolina, of the 282 people who have been executed since 1912 (when South Carolina started keeping official records of executions), 208 (74%) were Black.

In a state known for wrongfully convicting the youngest person in American history to death, 14 year old George Stinney, the reinstatement of these methods are barbaric, démodé, and must be abolished.

We demand justice for Richard Moore and request that he be granted clemency.