Man executed for 1999 murder

Photo: Courtesy of Justice 360 ​​via Associated Press Archives Death row inmate Richard Moore at the Kirkland Reception and Evaluation Center in Columbia, South Carolina, on August 17, 2018.

Agence France-Presse

Published on November 1

• United States

A black man convicted in the US state of South Carolina by an all-white jury for the 1999 murder of a cashier that he claimed he committed in self-defense was executed on Friday, according to US media.

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The execution of Richard Moore, 59, is the 21st in the United States since the beginning of the year. All have been carried out by lethal injection except for two in Alabama by inhalation of nitrogen, a method denounced by the UN which compared it to a form of “torture”.

Mr Moore was sentenced to death in 2001 for the murder of James Mahoney, a cashier at a convenience store he had entered unarmed.

An argument broke out, the cashier pulled out a gun and both men were wounded, James Mahoney fatally. Richard Moore then walked out of the store after taking money from the register.

A petition to spare him had been signed by more than 50,000 people.

The initiative received support from a former director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, Jon Ozmint, who in a video recording noted that “this would not have been a capital case in most states.”

The judge who presided over the trial, Gary Clary, wrote to the governor urging “leniency,” saying that Richard Moore's case was “unique” among death row inmates in South Carolina.

His lawyers have argued that he was the only one among them to have been tried by a jury that did not include any black people.

South Carolina carried out its first execution since 2011 in September.

The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 American states. Six others (Arizona, California, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee) observe a moratorium on executions by decision of the governor.