Utah prepares firing squad for execution
Published 10:26 pm Tuesday, June 8, 2010
SALT LAKE CITY — Barring a last-minute reprieve, Ronnie Lee Gardner will be strapped into a chair, a hood will be placed over his head and a small white target will be pinned over his heart.
The order will come: “Ready, aim…”
The 49-year-old convicted killer will be executed by a team of five anonymous marksmen firing with a matched set of .30-caliber rifles. He will be the third person executed by firing squad in the U.S. since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
Utah was a long holdout in keeping the method, which it has used in 40 of its 49 executions in the last 160 years. Utah lawmakers made lethal injection the default method of execution in 2004, but inmates condemned before then can still choose the firing squad.
That’s what Gardner did in April, politely telling a judge, “I would like the firing squad, please.” Neither he nor his attorneys have said why.
Critics decry the firing squad as a barbaric method that should have been relegated to the dustbin of the frontier era.
“The firing squad is archaic, it’s violent, and it simply expands on the violence that we already experience from guns as a society,” Bishop John Wester, of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, said during an April protest. The diocese is part of a new coalition pushing for alternatives to capital punishment in Utah.
Even some death-penalty supporters would prefer not to see the method used. State Rep. Sheryl Allen, a Republican from Bountiful who pushed for the switch to lethal injection, said she’s not happy to see the reprise of the firing squad because it shifts attention away from the victim to the convicted killer.
Gardner is to be executed June 18, shortly after midnight. He was convicted of capital murder 25 years ago for the 1985 fatal courthouse shooting of attorney Michael Burdell during a botched escape attempt.
Allen said legislators allowed previously convicted inmates to keep the firing-squad option out of fear that changing the execution method would create a new avenue of appeal.
Utah’s switch to lethal injection was largely driven by an aversion to the negative worldwide publicity it received each time a firing squad was used, including the case of Gary Gilmore.
The convicted killer famously proclaimed, “Let’s do it,” before his 1977 execution by a firing squad. Gilmore’s story inspired author Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Executioner’s Song.”
Utah last used the firing squad in 1996 to execute John Albert Taylor, who was convicted of the 1989 rape and strangulation of an 11-year-old girl.
Utah is the only state that allows execution by firing squad, though Oklahoma law calls for that method if both lethal injection and electrocution are deemed unconstitutional.
