Brad Sigmon, 67, personally requested the unusual punishment after fearing the electric chair would “burn and cook him alive,” his attorney Gerald King wrote in a statement.

As South Carolina plans to carry our the first firing squad execution in 15 years in the United States, Professor Deborah Denno of the Fordham School of Law talks about the history of the unusual method to carry out the death penalty,

Brad Sigmon, 67, convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend's parents in 2001, is scheduled to be executed on March 7.

It was a punishment for mutiny in colonial times, a way to discourage desertion during the Civil War and a dose of frontier justice in the Old West. In modern times, some consider it a more humane alternative to lethal injection.