COLUMBIA – On June 18, 2010, convicted double-killer Ronnie Lee Gardner was strapped into a chair in a special room on the grounds of a Utah state prison withhis head held by a halo brace while a prison employee pinned a white, circular target over his heart.
Minutes later, a firing squad of law-enforcement volunteers let loose a volley of .30-caliber Winchester rifle shots from 25 feet away, killing Gardner quickly.
He was the last person in the nation to be executed by a firing squad. No other state has employed a firing squad in at least four decades.
But some lawmakers in South Carolina and elsewhere want to use firing squads again. They're determined to bypass the legal and practical logjams that have cut off the supply of lethal-injection drugs, as well as controversy over botched executions.
“At this point, the firing-squad bills seem to be more of an expression of frustration by death-penalty proponents at the inability to carry out executions,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which collects data on executions but takes no position on capital punishment.
He said firing squads constitutea “false issue” in this state“because there is nobody imminently facing execution.”
Yet Rep. Joshua Putnam, an Anderson County Republican, disagrees with that notion.
Putnam last week filed a bill to allow the use of firing squads in South Carolina executions, which are currently to be carried out using lethal-injection unless an inmate chooses the electric chair.
See More:Firing squads in South Carolina? Some say new bill complicates execution debate
A bill pending in the Senate would allow the state to use the electric chair if lethal injection is not available, regardless of the inmates' choice.Another pending bill would make secret the source of the drugs used in lethal injection, though a judge could open that identity to legal discovery upon a finding of good cause.
South Carolina has not executed anyone since 2011 — because of ongoing appeals.Officials say the state’s supply of lethal-injection drugs have expired and they cannot get any more because drug companies have refused to sell them if they are to be used in executions.
"A firing squad sounds barbaric—it sounds inhumane, I'm guessing," Putnam told The Greenville News last week,"but if you look at the data, it paints a whole different picture."
Dunham said firing squads have fewer botched executions than other means, but they also have been used less in recent decades.
Only three states use them as an alternative to lethal injection, according to his organization: Utah, Oklahoma and Mississippi. The vast majority of those executed in Utah since the 1850s have died from firing squads.
Their initial use in Utah has been traced to a pastMormon belief in blood atonement, the spilling of blood to atone for certain heinous crimes. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints no longer accepts such beliefs.
Utah inmates can select a firing squadas their means of execution, though it was stopped in 2004, then brought back as an alternative in 2015.
A state manual unearthed by MuckRock.com and confirmed by the state’s prisons agency lays out the details of how firing squads work there.
A month before the execution, the prison system assembles a planning team and selects five firing-squad volunteersplus two alternates. Each is a law-enforcement officer, and each must pass a proficiency test at the rifle range, firing at a target of the same size as the one used in executions from a minimum of 21 feet.To qualify, the officer must hit the target at least once.
The manual calls for the use of Winchester .30-caliber rifles.
At the time of execution, the condemned inmate is led to a sturdy steel chair in a special execution chamber.The chair sits on an elevated platform.Large sandbags are piled high on each side of the chair to catch any ricocheting bullets. Every part of the platform, including the sandbags, is colored a charcoal gray.
More:Execution bills advanced by South Carolina Senate Corrections Committee
The inmate is strapped to the chair, a black hood placed over his face.A halo brace holds his head in place.He is asked for any final words and is limited to two minutes.If he goes over that time or uses foul language, according to the manual, the execution proceeds.
Once the warden receives word that any final appeals have been exhausted and there are no stays, he directs a supervisor to proceed and a countdown begins.
The firing squad is assembled behind a wall with rifle ports about 25 feet away from the chair.Each squad member is given a rifle with two rounds.One is given non-lethal wax bullets, but none of the officers, whose identities are kept secret, knows who has the dummy rounds.
A target is pinned over the inmate’s heart.
At the end of the countdown, the officers fire.
Officials look for signs of consciousness.If there are some when the medical examiner checks for a pulse, a second firing volley can be ordered.If the inmate is unconscious but still has a pulse, officials wait for 10 minutes and check again.If there still is a pulse, a second volley can be ordered.
Just how lethal a firing squad is has been explained by Gardner’s brother, Randy, who tried unsuccessfully to persuade Utah lawmakers in 2015 not to bring it back as an alternative.
He said he could stick four fingers into the hole in his brother’s chest where the shots went, saying he believed the heart was blown out through his back.
Witnesses to Garner’s execution said when an official asked Gardner if he had any last words, he said, “No, I do not.”
After the volley at 12:15 am, witnesses said they saw his hand clench and then loosen. He was pronounced dead a few minutes later.
Gardner was sentenced to death after a 1985 failed courthouse escape attempt during which he killed a lawyer.He was in court at the time facing another murder charge over a killing at a bar.
"May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims,” Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said at the time of his execution.
Putnam believes the reliability of a firing squad’s work and the speed with which the inmate is killed make the method more humane than the current lethal-injection process.
But in 2015, YouGov, an international internet-based market research firm, conducted a poll asking respondents which execution methods they found to be cruel and unusual punishment.
According to the poll, 18 percent found lethal-injection cruel and unusualwhile 53 percent found a firing squad cruel and unusual.Of other forms, the poll found 54 percent classified the electric chair as cruelwhile 67 percent used that classification for hanging, 52 percent for the gas chamber and 81 percent for beheading.
“The problem with other methods is the public just doesn’t like them,” Dunham said.
He said what has happened with execution methods in the nation is both a paradox and an irony.
“States moved away from methods of execution, especially the electric chair, because of the growing public perception that, when done properly, an execution in the electric chair is cruel and unusual punishment,” he said.
It became worse, he said, after botched executions in Florida.Afterward,state supreme courts in Georgia and Nebraska declared electrocution unconstitutional under their state constitutions, Dunham said.
“It is likely that any attempt to bring back the electric chair will face very substantial constitutional challenges,” he said.
There are fewer constitutional challenges to a firing squad, he said.
“The difficulty with a firing squad is one of public perception and public taste,” Dunham said.
Alternatives to lethal injection are seen as too gruesome by the public, he said. Lethal injection had an appearance of peacefulness and civility until botched executions.
He said, however, that the image of peacefulness was made possible by drugs which caused the body to be sedated and paralyzed, preventing any indication of pain.Now that states are using other drug combinations, witnesses are reporting indications of pain, and those images are upsetting people, Dunham said.
“I think it’s paradoxical and ironic that the method of execution that states moved to to try and make executions more humane and to try and make them less overtly violent is now under attack for being inhumane and tortuous,” he said.
