Carrying out an execution is always a complicated business that takes a horrible toll on anyone who is associated with it. When that business is rushed, that toll gets worse, and the possibility of error grows.

Those are the lessons of America’s death-penalty history. They are the lessons that the state of South Carolina should heed as it contemplates getting back into the execution business.

On Monday, the South Carolina Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for the state’s next execution and also agreed to consider a request from four of the state’s death-row inmates that South Carolina wait at least three months between executions. In the meantime, no other death warrants will be issued.

Several of the state’s death-row inmates have already exhausted their appeals and are now facing the prospect of execution. They include Richard Moore, who was convicted of killing a convenience store clerk in 1999; Brad Sigmon, who was convicted of beating to death his estranged girlfriend’s parents in 2001; Marion Bowman, who has been on death row since 2001; and Mikal Mahdi, who was sentenced to death for shooting an off-duty police officer in 2004.

South Carolina’s latest round of executions is scheduled for Sept. 20. On that date, Freddie Eugene Owens will be put to death for the 1997 killing of a convenience store clerk.

In setting that date, as the Death Penalty Information Center reports, the court gave the director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections “five days to determine that all three [of the state’s] methods of execution [electrocution, firing squad, and lethal injection] are available.”

Owens will then have just a week to choose a method of execution. If he does not decide, he will be executed by the electric chair.

Under existing law, the state can........

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