(RNS) — When 67-year-old Brad Sigmon was put to death on March 7 in South Carolina for the murder of his then-girlfriend’s parents, it was the first time in 15 years that an execution in the United States had been carried out by a firing squad.
United Methodist minister Hillary Taylor, Sigmon’s spiritual adviser since 2020, said the multifaceted, months long effort to save Sigmon’s life, and to provide emotional and spiritual support for his legal team, and the aftermath of his execution has been a “whirlwind” said Taylor, the director of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Her organization has advocated for three other death row inmates in the state over the past six months as South Carolina ramps up executions after a 13-year hiatus; the delay was caused in part by legal challenges to the lethal injection method. In 2021, a state bill gave those on death row the simplified options of electrocution or death by firing squad, which has had the effect of expediting executions.
After Sigmon chose the firing squad, suddenly, said Taylor, “I got catapulted into the movement to save his life.” She was introduced to anti-death penalty organizers around the country, and in time what had been a volunteer position with the anti-capital punishment group became a paid position.
Taylor was introduced to the work 10 years ago when she joined an (unsuccessful) campaign to save the life of Kelly Gissendaner, a Georgia prisoner convicted of persuading her lover to kill her husband in 1997. Gissendaner, who had taken theology courses offered by Emory University while on death row, sang “Amazing Grace” on the way to her execution.
Taylor, then a first-year student at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, learned about Gissendaner while working with women in solitary confinement at Lee Arrendale State Prison, where Gissendaner had spent time before being transferred. Taylor learned that Gissendaner “had sobered up, become a Christian and reconciled to her children.” When other inmates had suicidal episodes, Taylor had heard, they would be placed in a cell next to Gissendaner, who would “literally preach and counsel them back to life.”
The more Taylor reflected on Gissendaner’s faith, the “more it reminded me of people in my own life who could have ended up on a similar path if they didn’t have access to power and privilege.” Over time, she became convinced that “we’re more than the worst thing we have done, or the worst thing that ever happened to us, and that the worst thing is not the last thing.”
Despite Gissendaner’s execution, Taylor is proud of the faith leaders and others who organized to save her life. “It’s possible not to just say sorry, but to ‘do sorry,‘” she said.
When Taylor arrived in South Carolina in 2020 to pastor two UMC congregations, she called a local justice reform organization and asked them if they needed a spiritual adviser or a pen pal for an inmate on death row. A few months later, she was connected to Sigmon, who had taken a Bible College course at Broad River Correctional Institution, where he died.
He “had kind of exhausted the spiritual resources available to him,” she said. “That began our pen pal connection,” recalled Taylor.
Like Gissendaner, she said, Sigmon, who became an “informal chaplain” to other prison inmates, tried to become a different person. After his prison conversion, she said, “he loved to share with people the ways the love of Jesus changed him. His objective was to save the other prisoners, who were like his brothers,” she said. One of his last requests was to share a last meal with his friends. (It was denied.)
In the years before his execution, Sigmon and Taylor only met four times in person but exchanged a multitude of letters. As they got to know one another, said Taylor, she was able to confide in him about the challenges of pastoring two small rural churches during COVID-19, “which was, at the time, a lonely and isolating experience. He was the person who could hold a lot of my fear and my anger. That was a gift I will treasure.”
They teased each other about their affection for rival football teams, Clemson versus South Carolina. “He was always making me laugh,” she said.
She learned from Sigmon, she said, about mercy, compassion and forgiveness, particularly the realization that “even when you are mad, you can come back to a place of kindness, compassion and humanity.”
As the end neared, he was at peace, Taylor said, able to seek reconciliation with some of the people he had harmed.
In her last in-person encounter with Sigmon, on Ash Wednesday (March 5), they both took Communion, and she was able to anoint his head with ashes, the symbol of repentance and mortality many Christians receive on the first day of Lent.
“When I delivered ashes to him, I got to hug him for only the second time.” As she pressed her forehead, already imprinted with ashes, against his, she told him how grateful she was that he knew the power of love in Jesus.
Being a spiritual companion to a condemned person can be traumatic, particularly when the prisoner loses their final appeal. Shane Claiborne, an evangelical Christian anti-death penalty activist, wrote in an email interview, “It is a terrible thing to accompany someone as they are executed,” but added that the only thing worse is being executed without accompaniment. “That’s why we do this holy work, and it is also why we are working so hard for alternatives to the death penalty. The closer you are to the system that executes, the more convinced you become that violence is the problem, not the solution.”
Sister Pamela Smith, a member of the congregation of Saints Cyril and Methodius, has participated in anti-death penalty vigils on the state capitol steps since South Carolina resumed executions.
Smith, who directs the office of ecumenical and inter-religious affairs for the Catholic Diocese of Charleston, is also a board member of South Carolina Alternatives. “I see this as another way of taking public action to try to raise consciousness to help people understand what actually goes on with the death penalty. Because I live in a state where executions are unfortunately becoming commonplace, you know, I have a passion as part of my overall pro-life commitment to try to do something about it.”
Though not directly involved in prison ministry, the nun was on hand when South Carolina’s first execution in more than a decade took place. “You know the clock is approaching the hour, even though you don’t hear something happening. There’s just something chilling about the fact that you’ve got a scheduled time of death for this person for whom you’ve been praying and sending letters and presenting petitions.”
Taylor said the most painful part of her work “is just how ready people are to say things like ‘a firing squad is too merciful for him’ — as though those folks were not victims of somebody else’s violence first, and didn’t have anybody to intervene on their behalf. There are ways we can hold people accountable. That’s part of what rehumanizing is.”
There is also, said Taylor, a reward in introducing outsiders to someone who is kind and compassionate — “telling a story that maybe hasn’t been told before.”
Former death row prisoners talk about the powerful effects of spiritual witnesses. Sentenced to death as a 20-year-old for killing a man and wounding another during an armed robbery, the Rev. Jimmy MacPhee was re-sentenced to life with the possibility of parole during a brief national death penalty hiatus in the 1970s. After 45 years in prison, he is now free, ordained and married.
He spends a lot of time on the road sharing his story — and that of Frankie San, the man MacPhee credits with transforming a furious, violent young man into a writer, speaker and mentor and finally a minister. A Japanese immigrant, now in his 90s, San began visiting McPhee when he first arrived in prison.
MacPhee said his personal experience of redemption inspires him to help others to transition back to life outside the cell block: “We all were washed by the blood. There’s none of us beyond the reach of God’s power I know blessed to be one of them. I know the transformative power is Grace, how powerful it can be, and I’ve witnessed it in so many others.”
As it became more likely that the execution would move forward, recalled Taylor, Sigmon told her that if she saw a bird, she would know he was nearby. “That’s too many birds, Brad,” she said. “How about a finch,” he suggested. This week, said Taylor, she is going to go out and buy a bird book.
