U.S. Attorney Bryan Stirling, pictured at the U.S. attorney's office in Columbia, S.C., on Friday, Sept. 12, 2025, is seeking the death penalty in a kidnapping and murder case out of Marion County. (Photo by Skylar Laird/SC Daily Gazette)
COLUMBIA — The state’s top federal prosecutor is seeking the death penalty for a man charged with kidnapping and killing a paramedic, South Carolina’s U.S. attorney announced Wednesday.
This would mark the first federal death penalty case in the state since former President Joe Biden commuted nearly all federal death sentences to life in prison in December 2024, just before the end of his term.
At least three other people have faced the death penalty in federal cases since President Donald Trump took office.
Jaremy Alexander Smith, a 35-year-old from Marion, is charged with kidnapping 52-year-old paramedic Phonesia Machado-Fore from her home in March 2024. Smith is accused of forcing her to drive to a rural area, where prosecutors claim he killed her before stealing guns from her house, according to U.S. Attorney Bryan Stirling’s office.
Smith already has a life sentence in federal prison in New Mexico, where he was convicted of killing state police officer Justin Hare two days after Machado-Fore’s death.
Three men convicted of crimes in South Carolina were among the 37 prisoners Biden granted life sentences.
Dylann Roof, sentenced to death in 2017 for fatally shooting nine parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in June 2015, is one of three people still on federal death row.
Citing his conscience, Biden left on death row only those convicted of hate-motivated crimes and terrorism.
Trump has no such qualms.
He instructed the nation’s attorney general to pursue a death sentence for any person charged with killing a police officer or killing a person while in the country without proper documentation, calling capital punishment “an essential tool” to deter violent crime.
Courtesy of South Carolina Daily Gazette
