Jeffery Collins is an Associated Press reporter who witnessed the firing squad execution of death-row inmate Brad Sigmon in South Carolina on Friday, March 7, 2025.
Collins’ credentials, according to his first-person account, is that he witnessed three different methods of execution, nine lethal injections plus an electric-chair execution. Unfortunately, Collins’ account was more about himself and his feelings on capital punishment rather than the victims that Sigmon had suddenly brought to an end.
Collins pointed out he had researched the case, but he didn’t mention much about it in his account. He didn’t dwell much on the torture and pain Sigmon had perpetrated on his victims, when he bashed his ex-girlfriend’s parents nine times each in the head with a baseball bat. The reporter mentioned it took less than two minutes for this devastation in Greenville County in 2001, as if the brief length of time of torture meant anything. He then complained about the execution protocols which he thought were prolonged and kept in secret. Collins also complained about a single gunshot coming from one anonymous rifle that was shot at close range.
The reporter seemed to have a problem with the violence of a firing squad as opposed to the seemingly pristine lethal injection. Did Collins forget about the violence Sigmon had perpetrated and how the state mercifully put a hood on him before the single fatal shot was fired? Sigmon certainly did not blindfold his victims.
Collins cited the lack of warning or countdown given to Sigmon. He artfully described the crack of the rifles, the red bull’s-eye on the inmate’s chest and flinching body. The description was graphic, meant to evoke emotions in his readers. These words, which we were taught in journalism school as being “loaded” or opinionated, were somehow missing when he described the violence of Sigmon’s acts on his victims.
I could imagine the sounds that were made when the bat struck those poor victim’s heads. But perhaps for an outraged journalist like Collins, these actions were too much too violent to put into words. However, Collins does not attempt to hide his opinion about the cruelness of the state. He keeps returning in his comments to his feelings from that electric-chair execution he witnessed 21 years before. Perhaps, the PTSD that this writer suffered has clouded his judgment and his partiality. This should have eliminated him as an impartial witness to this South Carolina execution. But instead, his words were allowed to go worldwide to a captive audience. This is how the worldwide media operates today. Only it’s not journalism.
Perhaps Collins can be proud of his descriptive writing, but as a journalist who spent more than four decades in the business, I don’t believe this reporter did his readers any justice, let alone the victims of Brad Sigmon’s heinous crime. Maybe Collins was assigned one too many executions to witness and perhaps his credentials as an expert in “impartial” death-penalty debates should forever be disabled.
It is journalists like Collins who permeate the websites and social discourses over divisive issues like the death penalty. They question the morality of the state for executing the most heinous of criminals in our society, often their words are the only ones heard, but the views of those who say the presence of the death penalty can lift a society to high moral standards, are muted.
This is why I have taken a job trying to give people like Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins a voice in this public discourse.
Watkins says the heinous deeds of Kenneth Biros, James Trimble, Stanley Adams, and the Boston marathon bomber — who caused 17 persons to lose limbs — are acts of “monsters from hell who need to go to hell.” Convicted murderers like these have no legal standing to complain about the death penalty.
“Danny Hill and Tim Combs had a torture marathon with little Raymond that lasted up to an hour. The court’s opinion called it a blood lust,” Watkins has written. “Who did what becomes irrelevant because even they could not possibly remember every detail as they enjoyed their frenzied delight.”
“These public executioners, i.e. marathon bomber and the killers of worshippers, have absolutely no moral standing to complain about their pain they will feel at execution when in reality they received a merciful ending,” Watkins continues.
In times when the moral order has been turned upside down with failed public policies prioritizing criminals’ rights over those of the ostensibly moral majority, we need leaders who will follow the law and use a “big stick” as a deterrent to crime to restore this society to where it needs to be.
Guy Vogrin is a lifelong journalist who has 42 years’ experience as a newspaper reporter and editor as well as two years working as an investigator / public information officer for the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s Office.
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