This Bloody Spectacle
I make more than my fair share of mistakes on the air. As a recovering perfectionist/lawyer, it used to haunt me. Now I realize I can’t know everything, and even all that I do know doesn’t always come out just right. Yes, I know Neptune is a planet. Canadian coins are called loonies and toonies (as if that’s better than doonies!) And most recently, I now realize I cannot live til the Year 3000.
The Jonas Brothers made me want to, and before putting pen to paper on the concept, I thought I had a shot. Thanks to math, reality, and several helpful commenters, I’ve revised my goal: now I want to live to the year 2100.
For one, I feel like it’ll be cool to see two millennium celebrations. I don’t care if I keel over at 12:05 AM on January 1, 2100, I just wanna get there, see the ball drop. Will there be a ball? Or Times Square? Or New York?
My plan so far is to stave off my inevitable demise as best I can through fitness, eating mostly plant-based foods, and taking care of my brain. I love reading all the new breakthroughs on longevity science. Between what I’m doing and whatever injectable nanorobot treatments are on the horizon, I know I can do it.
I bet the novelty year-themed glasses will have the two zeroes for eye holes.
The Spark
For further longevity insurance, I am also abstaining from any and all homicidal activities, especially given where I live. As Ron White joked during his set in the 2003 Blue Collar Comedy Tour: The Movie, “If you come to Texas and kill somebody, we will kill you back! That's our policy.”
So well delivered, that special is written on the attic wall of my mind. It’s also a pretty scary and real threat. Texas isn’t the only one, either. Missouri will kill you, even if you never killed anybody at all. We’ve done that, too, of course (see Cameron Todd Willingham), but theirs is more recent and we covered it on the show (Episode 255: The Wrongful Conviction of Marcellus Williams)
In the early chapters of Dave Lipsky’s The Parrot and the Igloo, he covers the war of the currents. The 1880s and 90s were aglow with the rivalry between Edison’s direct current power (DC) and Tesla and Westinghouse’s alternative current (AC) and how we first got power.
That whole process was RAMSHACKLE AF by the way! Just a crazy man - Edison - hand-installing his powerlines to the home of JP Morgan and later to JPM’s church and church gym (?!). Man knew what he was doing. Gotta get the influential people on board first, get them addicted and demanding it, then there you are - 1, 2, 3, let’s go, bitch - the whole world is lit. Literally.
Being first wasn’t enough. Edison was pissed at Telsa for giving his patents to George Westinghouse. The patents upped the electric game, upstaging Edison’s direct current with a more powerful alternating current, which was the key to moving electricity real far.
Edison hadn’t figured that out on his own and, in fact, kinda pooh-pooh’ed Tesla when he came to him with the idea, so Tesla bounced. Signed his shit over to Westinghouse, who was crazy enough to hook powerlines up to Niagara Falls, among other water sources, and thusly gave us far-traveling electricity.
For better or worse, this type of “no one said I could not” spirit is really how a lot of innovation happens, if dangerously and with unfathomable consequences.
So Edison was like, “Yo I heard Westinghouse figured out AC currents. So awesome. You know what else AC currents can do? Fucking kill you. Watch this.”
In an effort to turn Westinghouse’s name into a verb meaning, I guess, “to cook a human sous vide,” Edison invented the ELECTRIC CHAIR. Dude. He created an actual death machine in an effort to make his rival’s name a verb that didn’t even stick.
As a result, some guy named William Kemmler got fried up like eggs in a pan. Fried up so bad a reporter yelled out, “For god’s sake, kill him and have it over” and PASSED OUT. Fried up such that Westinghouse told the papers it would’ve gone better with an AXE. He got executed because he committed a crime, but he got fried up because… rivalry?
William Kemmler of New York. Convicted of bludgeoning his wife to death with a hatchet in a drunken rage.
Before he was cooked in front of some horrified journalists, Kemmler appealed his sentence all the way to the Supreme Court. The case, In re Kimmler, dated 1890, was cited as precedent in 2019 by Justice Gorsuch in Bucklew v. Precythe.
In case you missed that one, the Bucklew decision reminded us that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment does not guarantee a painless death. It only forbids using methods that superadd terror, pain, or disgrace. An inmate challenging a method of execution has to show both (1) the method presents a substantial risk of severe pain, AND (2) that there is a feasible, readily implemented alternative method that would significantly reduce that risk.
So, just to be clear: if the method presents a substantial risk of severe pain, but there’s no alternative, then is cruel and unusual punishment is on the table. Is that what I’m reading? I think that’s what I’m reading.
Gorsuch cited commentators and jurisprudential history, explaining that the Eighth Amendment’s bar on cruel and unusual stuff is about real freaky shit (my words), what one 1891 commentator more eloquently described as “the use of the rack or the stake, or any of those horrid modes of torture devised by human ingenuity for the gratification of fiendish passion.”
A commission was convened in New York and determined that the electric chair was more humane than hanging. The legislature passed a law in 1888 making Edison’s electric chair the primary method of execution. Westinghouse challenged the law, and Kemmler challenged his sentence. Both lost.
Kemmler’s executioners could carry out the act that would later be described as a fate worse than axe murder because nine judges who were alive when people rode penny farthings and read the latest Mark Twain hot off the presses said it wasn’t so bad.
Also, if somebody designs a death chair in order that their rival’s name be sullied, is the machine not “devised by human ingenuity for the gratification of fiendish passion”? Idk you tell me.
The unanimous decision sealing Kemmler’s fate was handed down May 18, 1890 and upheld his visit to the chair that August 6th. The electric chair was new and therefore unusual, the Court agreed, but that didn’t mean it was “cruel” in the constitutional sense.
Before they knew it would make a witness pass out screaming, the nine justices unanimously held, “[T]he punishment of death is not cruel, within the meaning of that word as used in the Constitution. [Cruelty] implies . . . something inhuman and barbarous, something more than the mere extinguishment of life.” In re Kemmler, 136 U. S. 436, 447 (1890).
The New York Times reported the next day that mere extinguishment of Kemmler’s life was “an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging.” Looks like the commission was wrong. Reporters described how, after the first current, Kemmler was unconscious but not dead. His chest heaved, he groaned, and blood vessels ruptured. Then the current was reapplied for a longer period. The news report was graphic: “the odor of burning flesh filled the chamber. It was as though a hot iron had been pressed to the body.”
If a mad man - albeit a demonstrated inventor with several patents to his name, but a mad man nonetheless - had a grudge and wanted to create a killin’ chair to show off and attach bad vibes to his #1 op’s name - and he asked YOU to be the crash test dummy for such a contraption, would you take the deal? In some states, it’s like a game of Clue: the gun, the rope, the chair.
If it were you, what would you choose? The scenario where it’s merely a switch to flip? (Merely is doing a lot there.) The rope, where someone kicks a floor out from under you? A gun to the heart? Does your choice change depending on which end of the weapon you’re on?
What is it about the death penalty that grips me so? The irony of it, I think. You killed someone so we are going to kill you back. Do unto others…? Or wait, is it? We’re supposed to do unto others as we would have them to unto us, yeah?
Okay, given that, I would not have someone cooked nor would I want someone to cook me. I would not shoot someone in the heart or hang them, nor would I have someone shoot me in the heart or hang me. I wouldn’t want needles in me, pumping me full of poison that drowns me on land. I wouldn’t want to put a needle into someone else and have them drown on land before me, either.
I know part of punishment for crime is the punishing part, but where does the doing unto others start and stop?
I think of the guy pulling the trigger. The man flipping the switch. The fella slipping a needle into another fella’s veins. They’re given a pass because of the uniforms they wear and the titles they hold. They’re not going to jail or anything. If they do it all properly, I’d wager they even get a raise.
But violence stripped bare of its context remains violent.
For the good, you’ll hear. A righteous kill. The punishment of death is not cruel, within the meaning of that word as used in the Constitution.
Violence always begets more of itself. Blood, vengeance, settling scores. It’s oh so easy to slip from Defense to War. The bloodlust we all have within us grows commensurate with what we feed it. Take a moment the next time you find yourself in awe at an act of righteous vengeance - ask yourself, as I have to ask myself all the time - why do you feel good watching this? Do you feel good?
When context is stripped, the violent acts remain, but we don’t live in a contextless society. That’s why planning a lunch for months then poisoning the four elderly relatives in attendance is treated differently than a negligent truck driver who kills a carload of passengers on accident or someone who launches a rocket into a hospital that kills a bunch of people then they wait and shoot a second rocket that’s meant to kill all the first responders and journalists who showed up after the first one.
The actors are treated differently; the bodies remain dead.
The Shot
Electric chairs seem medieval when you see them up close. We saw one when visiting the Ohio State Reformatory while on tour. An ancient wooden thing with black straps. Nebraska outlawed its use in 2008, finding it inhumane, but nine states still use them. In Alabama, the prisoners are roasted on Yellow Mama, named for the yellow highway paint its coated in. Louisiana’s old timer, Gruesome Gertie was reinstated in 2024. Tennessee’s is called Old Smokey, while Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, and South Carolina call theirs Old Sparky.
Some guy back in the early 1900s flipped a switch at Niagara Falls and here we are.
In 2021, following a shortage of lethal injection drugs, South Carolina passed a law that made the electric chair the default method of execution and added the firing squad as an option as well.
Chair. Needle. Bullet.
On March 7, 2025, South Carolina executed Brad Sigmon by firing squad, the first in the state’s history.
Brad Sigmon killed two people back in 2001. The people he killed were the parents of his ex-girlfriend, Rebecca. Their names were David and Gladys Larke. He killed David and Gladys in the same county where three employees of the Department of Corrections took three loaded guns and shot him through the heart at the same time with three separate bullets.
His crime was gruesome. Sigmon was enraged at having been broken up with, so he stalked his ex for months. Rebecca had ended their relationship, and Sigmon couldn’t cope. Reading back through the details, all I can think is that he’s the villain from a horror film come to life. My worst nightmare, certainly. After getting intoxicated on booze and cocaine, Sigmon declared his plan to a drinking buddy/proposed accomplice: come with me to tie my ex’s parents up, lie in wait for her to return from dropping her kid off at school, and win her back. The drinking buddy thought better of it and went home. Brad Sigmon went to the Larkes’ house.
On the morning of April 27, 2001, Rebecca was out, dropping her child off at school. Brad entered the elderly couple’s Greenville home armed with a baseball bat. Once he finished destroying the skulls of Rebecca’s parents, each had sustained nine blows to the head. Sixty-two-year-old David and his 59-year-old wife, Gladys, had been caught off guard, unarmed, and never stood a chance against the enraged Sigmon.
With the bodies lying around what was once their house, Sigmon stole David’s gun and waited for the couple’s daughter. When she returned home, Rebecca was met with the business end of her father’s gun in a nightmare scenario every stalking victim has played out in their head a thousand times while trying to fall sleep.
Her tormentor then forced her into her own car with plans to drag her across state lines. Terrified but determined, Rebecca threw herself from the moving vehicle and ran. The relentless Sigmon stopped the car and began shooting at her. She lost him, but not before one of Sigmon’s bullet struck her foot. She got help from a passerby, while Sigmon went on the run for 11 days. He made it all the way to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, about 130 miles away, before he was caught at a campground. Police had wiretapped his mom’s phone and tracked his location.
After a conviction on all counts, Sigmon’s defense attorneys asked the jury for mercy, citing their client’s distress over the end of his relationship. Later appeals argued Sigmon’s trial attorney failed to present critical mitigating evidence like his undiagnosed Bipolar II disorder and his severe neurological impairments. In the end, he got two death sentences, plus thirty more years for stealing David’s gun.
From the gavel fall at his trial to the bullets in his heart, twenty-two years, eight months, and five days elapsed. About 11.9 million minutes, give or take.
Just 23 hours and a few minutes before the crack of shots echoed from behind a brick wall and into his chest cavity, Brad Sigmon was eating fried chicken. I can’t prove it, but I’d wager he was using that chicken to scoop up the mashed potatoes and gravy he had on the side. Did the biscuit sit on his plate or did he let it soften in the spray of the gravy? I wondered, when he had put on the black t-shirt and sweatpants that final Friday morning and slipped his feet into that state-issued pair of Crocs, what was he feeling?
Sigmon’s appellate attorney, Bo King, wrote an excruciating opinion piece for USA Today, titled, “I saw South Carolina use a firing squad to execute a man. I am sick with rage.” The sweatsuit he was given were the comfiest clothes Sigmon had been given in his time behind bars. He then joked to his attorney, “It’s true what they say, black is slimming.” They laughed, then Sigmon was led away.
He handed over his final statement to King. In it, Sigmon pleaded for an end to the death penalty, not to save himself, but for the sake of his comrades on death row. Did he make that plea, quote those Bible verses in earnest?
My cynicism is admittedly colored by my prejudice, which I’ll gladly disclose to you here: I fucking hate stalkers. I really do. Not a hot take, I know, but there is never an excuse for stalking. It’s selfish; it’s terrorizing. It’s not nearly policed enough, so all too often cases end up like Peggy Klinke or like Rebecca and David and Gladys.
They let the inmates in South Carolina choose their own method of execution nowadays: electric chair, lethal injection, or firing squad. Jeffrey Collins of the Associated Press was one of the eyewitnesses on the other side of the bulletproof glass. I saw the unedited news conference live on TikTok immediately after it happened. Somewhere a thousand miles away, a state employee zipped Brad Sigmon into a body bag while I sat at my kitchen table, drinking some electrolyte water, staring into my phone.
Collins told the gathered press that, after watching Sigmon’s death, he had now witnessed one of each kind of execution available in South Carolina. This was the first firing squad he’d seen, which he said was comparatively "much quicker.”
Collins explained how lethal injections are complicated ordeals, often taking twenty minutes or more to kill the offender. The electric chair isn’t as fast as you think, either. Collins described it as a big jolt, followed by a little jolt, lasting for another minute or two. Doesn’t sound much different than Edison’s days.
After Sigmon was strapped into his chair, he mouthed “I love you” and “I’m okay.” They placed a loose sling-like gag on his mouth. He smiled at his lawyer and spiritual advisor as they watched a Department of Corrections officer pull a hood over his head. On the black shirt’s chest area, the state had sewn a white rectangle with a red bullseye - a Target logo, essentially - for the shooters to aim at.
The shooters lined up behind a brick wall, 15 feet away from Sigmon, pointing their weapons at his heart through three cubbies. They pulled each of the three triggers at 6:05:50 PM Eastern time.
Bo King watched his client die before his eyes. King later wrote, “A wound opens on his chest before the sound reaches us. The target is gone. Maybe the bullets vaporized it. Maybe they pushed it into the fist-sized hole streaming blood over Brad’s stomach and into his lap. Blood flows from Brad’s dying heart steadily, with occasional spills. Like someone tipped a glass behind his broken ribs, sloshing onto his black shirt, which conceals red very well.”
At the press conference, Collins had pointed out that Sigmon’s black attire was “unlike the other executions [he’d] seen.” Like his attorney later, it also took me a minute to realize - they had him wear black to hide the blood.
The room with the witnesses was separated by bulletproof glass from the official business. The room was quiet, Collins reported, “outside the shots being fired.”
By 6:08, a doctor had entered, examined, and declared dead the 67-year-old.
Sigmon’s lawyer said it wasn’t that he wanted to die by firing squad, it’s just that lethal injections can’t be trusted, especially not after January’s botched execution of Marion Bowman Jr. Rather than the chemical stopping his heart as intended, Bowman “died with his lungs massively swollen with blood and fluid,” in line with a drowning, according to official reports. The two others recently executed the same way as Bowman suffered similarly. They were the state’s first executions in thirteen years.
Sigmon’s lawyer in a filing: “He’s made the best choice that he can, but the fact that he had to make it at all is horrifying.”
His choice was made, but the other option wasn’t far away. A photo released by the South Carolina Department of Corrections shows the electric chair covered in the foreground, with the firing squad chair in the background.
To my untrained eye, the firing squad chair looks like a medieval lawn chair with vinyl straps in the back. It wasn’t always an execution chair. Before Brad Sigmon bled out on it, the steel under him was just hot molten metal. The straps were threads before they were vinyl. Brad was a guy going through a breakup before he took a blunt piece of sports equipment to the gray hairs on top of the fragile skulls of his terrified stalking target’s parents.
When do things turn irrevocably from liquid to solid? Once the steel has become the chair? The change, I suppose, comes before the blows. It’s down in the alchemy somewhere, like anything, built one molecule upon another until the final result is an object that brings death.
One man got to choose. Horrifying that he had to choose? Yes. Three options. Two choices. Nine blows. Two skulls. Eighteen horrifying choices. Eighteen steps that take you from free to this.
When is something - someone - transformed from molecules to existence to annihilator?
Brad Sigmon is dead. Is the world better for that? You’re free to say yes, but only if you’re willing to look at the balance sheet in its entirety and add it up for yourself.
“They missed all that,” Rebecca told USA Today. She’s now 59, the oldest age her mom ever was. The reporter had asked Rebecca about the birth of what would’ve been multiple grandchildren for the Larkes. Births of all their great grandchildren, plus all the concomitant birthdays, weddings, and graduations that have happened in the last 24 years.
Elder care, so often seen as a burden to many, is something Rebecca and her siblings yearn for.
“I didn’t get to see them grow old,” she told the paper. “I didn’t get to take care of them, my brothers and sisters, we missed that.”
She was not in the room when the shots rang out. The only ones present were Brad Sigmon, three family members of the Larkes; Sigmon’s attorney, Bo King; his spiritual advisor; two law enforcement representatives; three reporters including AP’s Jeffrey Collins; and the three men holding the guns.
“It is unfathomable,” King said in a statement, “that in 2025 South Carolina would execute one of its citizens in this bloody spectacle.”
Sigmon, at least, took responsibility at his trial years ago, admitting, “I have no excuse for what I did. It’s my fault and I’m not trying to blame nobody else for it, and I’m sorry.”
In his final statement delivered via a microphone by his attorney just before he was killed, Sigmon invoked the Christian Bible, pleading “nowhere does God in the New Testament give man the authority to kill another man.”
At his trial, he admitted the breakup and Rebecca falling out of love with him “set [him] off.” When he begged then to avoid the death penalty, it was for his family, for his mom and sibling’s sake. He mused in his statement at trial, “Do I deserve to die? I probably do,” yet he still asked for mercy on his family’s behalf.
Rebecca, for her part believed his death should be left up to God. She told the Des Moines Register, "The Bible tells you, I know it says 'an eye for an eye' and 'a tooth for a tooth' but if you read on down in there it says, 'Revenge is not mine, says the Lord, revenge is God’s.”
She continued: “I don't think somebody being put to death is gonna bring me closure ... It bothers me and gives me anxiety about him being put to death, and especially him picking the firing squad."
In Wilkerson v. Utah in 1879, the Supreme Court permitted an execution by firing squad while observing that the Eighth Amendment forbade the gruesome methods of execution described by Blackstone “and all others in the same line of unnecessary cruelty.” Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U. S. 130 (1879) The old timey definition books they cited as proof mentioned torture tactics such as burning at the stake, embowelling alive, beheading, quartering, and gibbeting aka leaving a corpse up to rot.
Those gruesome methods are too gruesome, you see. Unconstitutionally gruesome. Destroying bodies, putting them on display to deter others from crimes. Yuck. So we don’t do those anymore.
Instead, three marksmen volunteered. Each of their .308 caliber rifles were loaded with live Winchester 110-grain TAB urban rounds. Three live rounds. One heart. No blanks. Per the spokesperson from the Department of Corrections, the marksmen will be offered “an extensive array of resources” as a follow-up to their part.
King described what happens after the shots ring out: “Brad’s body shudders. His arm launches forward, pulling on the restraints with all of his strength. For a second, I think he will break free and press his hands over the hole, holding and pushing himself back together. He heaves twice, his stomach rising. The blood still flows as his arm, trembling with the strain, starts to slacken and twitch.”
Rebecca told USA Today she misses her “mom and daddy.” Repeating her pain like the refrain in a song, “They missed so much, they missed so much.”
When we see and hear these things, we have to ask ourselves - are we like the reporter in 1890, watching that first execution by electric chair, horrified and screaming, begging for mercy on behalf of our charred brethren?
Or are we like the journalist at the firing squad, having seen them all no, so entrenched in the anguish we speak clinically of the horrors on a livestream?
Will the fraying shreds of our sanity allow us to remain perpetually flabbergasted at the cruelty we are willing to inflict on one another? Or is it inevitable that we become the gawkers, the flat affected, the shoulder shruggers - if not out of callousness, out of mere self-preservation?
Me? I’ll keep screaming and keeling over till I can’t. And when that final time comes, when I hit the ground in pain and anguish for the last time, finally deflated by all that we are capable of doing to one another and can’t get back up again, I just hope it’s on New Year’s Day 2100. I hope the glasses use the zeroes for the eyes. And I hope I’ll see you there.