N.C. Lawmakers Consider Bringing Back the Firing Squad

UPDATE 5/2/25: The bill that would reinstate death by firing squad and the electric chair as capital punishment methods advanced out of a House judiciary committee. It now moves to the House state and local government committee.

If a group of Republicans in the state House of Representatives has their way, North Carolina could join the handful of states that allow a firing squad to carry out capital punishment.

On Tuesday afternoon, a House judiciary committee is scheduled to take up HB 270, which would revise execution methods available for the death penalty. The bill also would bring back the electric chair, an execution option that has not been used in this state since 1938, according to the state Department of Adult Correction’s history of capital punishment in North Carolina.

Republican Reps. David Willis of Union County, Reece Pyrtle of Rockingham County, Charles Miller of Brunswick County, and Bill Ward of Pasquotank County are co-sponsoring the bill, which was introduced several days before South Carolina used a firing squad to execute Brad Sigmon, a 67-year-old death row inmate convicted of murdering an ex-girlfriend’s parents. Sigmon’s execution on March 7 was the first by firing squad in this country in 15 years, according to the Associated Press, and only the fourth in the United States since 1977.

North Carolina has had a de facto moratorium on the death penalty for nearly two decades. The last person the state executed was Samuel Flippen in 2006, who was convicted of murdering his 2-year-old stepdaughter, by lethal injection. A series of lawsuits challenging the death penalty as cruel and unusual punishment and death row inmates seeking relief from their sentences under the Racial Justice Act have essentially put executions on hold until resolution of the cases. One hundred and twenty-one people are currently on death row in North Carolina, according to the state Department of Adult Correction. 

Lethal injection has been North Carolina’s only legal method of execution since 1998, when state law was changed to eliminate both electrocution and lethal gas. Questions have arisen across the country about the humaneness of lethal injection in recent years, especially after three failed executions since 2022 because executioners did not correctly insert catheters used to deliver the fatal drugs.

Support for the death penalty has been waning across the country since a peak in 1994, when 80 percent of Americans were in favor of it. A 2024 Gallup poll found the percentage has dropped to 53.

But there’s a generational and political divide on the issue. Support for capital punishment has remained relatively steady nationally among Republicans older than 43, hovering around 80 percent between 2000 and 2024. Among Republicans 43 and younger—Millennials and Gen Zers—support has dropped from 73 percent between 2016 and 2024 to 69 percent from 2020 to 2024.

Support among Democrats and unaffiliated voters dropped in both age groups during the same period.

A 2019 poll of North Carolina voters asking whether the state should keep the death penalty or replace it with life without parole found that 51 percent of the respondents supported replacing it, 44 percent favored keeping capital punishment, and 6 percent were undecided. While some public support remains for the death penalty, prosecutors have been taking fewer capital cases to juries. 

In late 2020, the first Trump administration expanded federal execution methods to include hanging, the electric chair, gas chamber, and firing squad in the wake of states having difficulties getting drugs for lethal injections.

In 2021, at the beginning of former President Joe Biden’s administration, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a moratorium on federal executions. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office directing the U.S. attorney general to seek the death penalty for “all crimes of severity demanding its use,” charting a different course than his predecessor.

It’s unclear whether there’s widespread lawmaker support for the bill to bring back the firing squad and the electric chair in North Carolina. The House judiciary committee is the first in the General Assembly to give it a public airing, and two of the four primary sponsors are on that committee. Rep. Todd Carver, an Iredell County Republican who also has signed onto the bill, is part of the 10-member Republican-dominated committee, too. There are only four Democrats on the committee.