Stephen Bryant, a 44-year-old convicted killer, is scheduled to face a firing squad in South Carolina on Friday, marking the state’s third such execution this year.
Bryant was condemned for killing three people over five days in a rural area in 2004.
His execution, set for 6 p.m. at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, will be carried out by three volunteer prison employees, each armed with live ammunition.
With no appeals pending, Bryant’s final hope rests on a clemency decision from the governor, to be announced just minutes before.
No South Carolina governor has granted clemency since the U.S. reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
The firing squad, with its violent global history in military discipline and political repression, has recently been revived in the U.S. Some lawmakers contend it offers the quickest and most humane method of execution.
That is because a number of executions have been botched by other methods, including lethal injection drugs. South Carolina and other states have struggled to maintain adequate supplies of lethal injection drugs.
In part because of this, South Carolina paused executions for 13 years. The state then restarted in September 2024, after which four men have been executed by lethal injection and two by firing squad. The state is among several where the electric chair is still legal.
Execution by firing squad is also still legal in Idaho and a backup method if others are not available in Oklahoma and Mississippi.
The 2004 murders
Bryant admitted to killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen in October 2004 after stopping by his secluded home in rural Sumter County and saying he had car trouble.
Tietjen was shot several times. Bryant then answered Tietjen’s phone after it rang several times telling both his wife and daughter that he was the prowler and had killed them, prosecutors said.
Bryant burned Tietjen’s eyes with cigarettes after shooting him and painted “catch me if u can” and other taunting messages on the wall with the victim’s blood, investigators said.
Bryant also killed two other men — one before and one after Tietjen. He gave the men rides and when they got out to urinate on the side of the road, he shot them in the back, authorities said.
During the search, officers stopped nearly everyone driving on dirt roads in the area just east of Columbia, and told people to be leery of anyone they did not know asking for help.
Bryant’s lawyers said he was troubled in the months before the killing, begging a probation agent and his aunt to get him help because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused as a child by a group of relatives. They said he tried to cope by using meth and smoking joints he sprayed with bug killer.
Bryant will be the 43rd man killed by court-ordered execution so far this year in the U.S. At least 14 others are scheduled to be put to death during the remainder of 2025 and next year.
Bryant will also be the 50th person executed in South Carolina since the state restarted the death penalty 40 years ago.
What happens during a firing squad execution
At 6 p.m. Friday, the curtain will open in the death chamber at a Columbia prison with fewer than a dozen witnesses sitting behind bulletproof glass.
Bryant will be strapped into a chair. A white square with a red bull’s-eye target will be placed over his heart by a doctor.
Bryant’s lawyer can read his final statement if he has one. A prison employee will then place a hood over Bryant’s head, walk across the small room and pull open a black shade where the firing squad waits.
Without an audible or visual warning to witnesses, the shooters will fire high-powered rifles from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.
A doctor will then come out within a minute or two, examine him and declare him dead.
Lawyers for the last man executed by a firing squad said the shooters nearly missed the heart of Mikal Mahdi. They suggested by barely hitting the bottom of the heart that Mahdi was in agonizing pain for three or four times longer than experts say he would have been if his heart had been hit directly.
