Joseph Carl Shaw (March 31, 1955 – January 11, 1985) was an American convicted murderer from Kentucky who was the first person to be executed by the state of South Carolina after the U.S. Supreme Court reauthorized the use of capital punishment by the states in 1976. Shaw was executed for the 1977 murders of three people in Richland County, South Carolina. One of his accomplices, James Terry Roach, was also sentenced to death, and was executed in 1986.