COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A man in South Carolina is scheduled to be executed Friday by a firing squad, the third person to die by that method in the state this year.

Three prison employees, all with live ammunition, have volunteered to carry out the execution of Stephen Bryant, 44, who killed three people in five days in a rural area of the state in 2004.

Bryant has no appeals pending before the 6 p.m. scheduled execution at the death row facility at Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia.

He can ask the governor for clemency and that decision won’t be announced until minutes before the execution is set to start. But no South Carolina governor has offered clemency since the death penalty resumed in the U.S. in 1976.

Firing squad vs. lethal injection drugs

The firing squad has a

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