CONWAY, SC (WBTW) – Jerome Jenkins, the Horry County man sentenced to death last week for the 2015 Sunhouse robberies and murders may never be executed due to the nation-wide shortage of the lethal injection, according to Horry County Solicitor, Jimmy Richardson.

Out of the 30 people on death row in South Carolina, five are from Horry and Georgetown Counties, including Jenkins. However, since the company that manufactured the lethal injection stopped producing the drug, no one has been executed in South Carolina since 2011.

“Lethal injection, for now, is a thing of the past,” Horry County Solicitor, Jimmy Richardson said.

South Carolina legislators have tried to solve the lethal injection issue with bills that would bring back the firing squad and make electrocution the default execution method, but so far, none have passed.

Richardson says the death penalty was banned in the ’70s after the Supreme Court ruled electrocution too gruesome, and as a result, the lethal injection was introduced. He says if they bring back some of the old execution methods, the Supreme Court could ban the death penalty again.

“You’re walking on this tight wire of the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which says this is a cruel and unusual punishment, and that’s sort of what has the legislators stumped.”

Richardson says even though South Carolina doesn’t currently have the means to execute someone, he won’t stop pushing for the death penalty when it’s warranted, like in Jerome Jenkins’s case.

“Here, we very judiciously use the death penalty, but we do use it on the worst of the worst, and then once they get up on death row, that’s up to our elected legislators to figure out what to do with them at that point, realizing that the lethal injection may not be an option,” Richardson said.

“The only other solution for us is to give in and say we’re just not going to seek it anymore, and I’m not willing to do that.”

Richardson says not pursuing the death penalty in certain cases where it’s needed would cause a downward spiral for prosecutors.

“Once you get down to the highest penalty (being) life (instead of the death penalty), there will be the same attacks on that sentence as there are presently on the death penalty. Then it will be life is too much, 30 years is too much, 20 years is too much, and I don’t think we need to go down that slope,” Richardson said.

Richardson says even before the lethal injection shortage, it would take decades for someone on death row to be executed because of the appeals process.

He adds that even if the inmate is not executed, being put on death row is still a worse punishment than life in prison, because death row inmates are only allowed out of their cell for one hour a day.