South Carolina: Richard Moore executed – although he was unarmed

On Friday evening, 59-year-old Richard Moore was executed by lethal injection in the US state of South Carolina. He was sentenced to death for killing the employee of a grocery store in September 1999.

Moore had entered the store unarmed. While the prosecution nevertheless accused him of robbery, Moore explained that he had wanted to buy cigarettes and beer, but an argument had broken out between him and the clerk because he was a few cents short of the purchase price.

Either way, it was the store clerk who pulled out a gun and pointed it at Moore. He was able to wrestle the gun away from the sales clerk, but he had a second gun. In the end, Moore was shot in the arm and the clerk was shot in the chest, killing him. Moore fled the scene with the cash from the store register.

Moore’s attorneys argued that, regardless of the details of the shooting, their client should not be eligible for the death penalty because he entered unarmed and, as a result, had no premeditated plans to commit armed robbery or murder.

Moore’s attorneys had also filed a final appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that prosecutors had systematically and unlawfully excluded black jurors, but the court declined to halt the execution. Moore is black, but was convicted by a jury that did not include one black person.

Richard Moore had a plethora of advocates arguing for clemency: They included the former director of the state’s Department of Corrections, three of the jurors, the judge who presided over the case and a former South Carolina Supreme Court justice. Supporters argued that Moore had become a role model behind bars and had been a very good influence on many of his fellow inmates.

His two children, who were close to him during his imprisonment, also asked for clemency. However, Governor Henry McMaster, who himself used to be Attorney General of the US state of South Carolina, was unimpressed and at the very last minute refused to grant a pardon and thus commute the sentence to life imprisonment.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/01/richard-moore-south-carolina-death-penalty