Supreme Court Sides With GA Inmate Who Wants Firing Squad Death

GWINNETT COUNTY, GA — The U.S. Supreme Court approved Thursday a Georgia death row inmate’s request to choose how he dies, WSB-TV reported.

According to a federal lawsuit, Michael Wade Nance sued the Georgia prison system after he learned that lethal injection could cause him excruciating pain. The suit said that his veins are “severely compromised and unsuitable for sustained intravenous access.” Lethal injection is currently the only option for death row inmates in Georgia.

“Execution by firing squad is both swift and virtually painless,” reads the federal lawsuit

Nance was sentenced to death in 1997 for shooting and killing 43-year-old Gagor Balogh in Gwinnett County. He was trying to find a getaway car after robbing Tucker Federal Savings and Loan in Lilburn.

On appeal in 2000, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed Nance’s death sentence and remanded for a new sentencing trial, after discovering the trial court had erred by failing to excuse an unqualified juror, Courthouse News reported. A year later, the court declared electrocution to be unconstitutional and Georgia switched to lethal injection as the sole method of execution.

In 2021, the federal appeals court in Atlanta refused to reconsider an earlier ruling that denied Nance’s request to die by firing squad, The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported.

Nance suggested death by firing squad as a “feasible, readily implemented” alternative to lethal injection, according to the lawsuit. Georgia’s Department of Corrections argued it has never executed a prisoner that way and lethal injection is the state’s only statutorily authorized method of execution.

The court’s ruling means that Nance can challenge the state’s method of execution through a civil rights lawsuit.

The court returned the case to the Atlanta-based Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit for proceedings that line up with the Supreme Court’s new ruling, WSB-TV reported.