Barring any late developments, the U.S. is about to see its first execution by firing squad in 15 years on March 7, 2025.
Pictures launched by the South Carolina Division of Corrections recommend that the prisoner, Brad Sigmon, will likely be strapped to a steel seat in the identical small loss of life chamber that has been the placement of the state’s different executions by the use of the electrical chair and deadly injection. Sigmon, who was sentenced to loss of life in 2002 for the brutal killing of his ex-girlfriend’s mother and father with a baseball bat, selected loss of life by firing squad over different types of execution underneath a 2021 regulation that enables inmates that choice.
In accordance with the state’s firing squad protocol, the condemned man could have a hood put over his head and a goal positioned on his coronary heart. Three volunteers will then shoot him from a distance of 15 ft. They’ll stand behind a wall with a small opening.
However this technique of execution has raised concern over the protection of observers of the execution. In the meantime, others object to the usage of a firing squad as a relic of a brutal previous not becoming for contemporary instances.
As somebody who has studied execution strategies within the U.S., I see the resumption of loss of life by firing squad as a part of a morbid seek for “better” execution strategies. It comes amid concern over botched deadly injection makes an attempt and a shortage of the medication wanted to hold out such executions.
In 2020, the primary Trump administration expanded how federal execution might be carried out to incorporate ghoulish strategies corresponding to hanging, the electrical chair, fuel chamber and, certainly, the firing squad.
However revisiting all strategies reveals a checkered historical past. Every has, at one time or different, been touted as humane solely to be sidelined as a result of its use was discovered to be grotesque and offensive. Provided that historical past, there are questions over whether or not the resumption of loss of life by firing squad can serve any goal apart from persevering with a loss of life penalty system deemed to be a merciless outlier amongst fashionable societies.
The noose and the chair
Let’s begin with hanging.
Hanging was the execution technique of selection all through most of American historical past, and it was utilized in America’s final public execution in 1936, when Rainey Bethea was put to loss of life in Owensboro, Kentucky. When performed accurately, the noose killed by severing the spinal column, inflicting close to instantaneous loss of life.
A big crowd watches as attendants regulate a black hood over Rainey Bethea in 1936.
AP File Picture
However, all too typically, hanging resulted in a gradual loss of life by strangulation and typically even a beheading. Given this grotesque report and hanging’s affiliation with the lynching of primarily Black males, by the top of the nineteenth century the seek for different execution strategies started in earnest.
The primary of these alternate options was the electrical chair. On the time it was adopted, it was thought to be a really fashionable instrument of loss of life, a technological marvel within the enterprise of state killing. Hailed by penal reformers as a humane different to hanging, the electrical chair was first licensed in 1888 by New York state following the report of a fee that concluded: “The most potent agent known for the destruction of human life is electricity. … The velocity of the electric current is so great that the brain is paralyzed; it is indeed dead before the nerves can communicate a sense of shock.”
Despite the Kemmler debacle, the electrical chair shortly turned fashionable, being seen as extra environment friendly and fewer brutal than hanging. From the beginning of the twentieth century till the Nineteen Eighties, the variety of loss of life sentences carried out by this technique far outstripped these of another technique.
However electrocutions continued to go flawed, and finally a number of dramatic botched executions in Florida helped flip the tide. Included had been two executions – one in 1990, the opposite in 1997 – wherein the condemned inmates caught fireplace.
The fuel chamber
By the beginning of the twenty first century, states all around the nation had been abandoning the electrical chair. As Justice Carol W. Hunstein of the Supreme Court docket of Georgia defined, “Death by electrocution, with its specter of excruciating pain and its certainty of cooked brains and blistered bodies,” was now not suitable with up to date requirements of decency.
A fuel chamber at San Quentin jail from 1959.
AP Picture/Clarence Hamm
One different to electrocution was the fuel chamber, however it too has its personal historical past of issues. First adopted in Nevada in 1922, executions utilizing deadly fuel had been to happen whereas the condemned slept. Loss of life row inmates had been alleged to be housed in hermetic, leak-proof jail cells, separate from different prisoners. On the day of the execution, valves can be opened that may fill the chamber with fuel, killing the prisoner painlessly.
This plan was quickly deserted as a result of officers determined it will be impractical to implement it, and states constructed particular fuel chambers fitted with pipes, exhaust followers and glass home windows on the back and front partitions for witness viewing. However deaths by deadly fuel had been by no means fairly or simple to look at.
Inmates often fought towards respiratory the fuel because it entered the chamber. They convulsed, jerked, coughed, twisted and turned blue for a number of minutes earlier than they died.
Removed from fixing the issues related to hangings or electrocutions, deadly fuel launched its personal set of horrors to the establishment of capital punishment. In actual fact, by the top of the twentieth century, 5% of executions by deadly fuel had been botched.
Because of this, states used fuel as the only real technique of execution solely from 1924 to 1977, and it was final utilized in 1999. By then, the fuel chamber had turn out to be a relic of the previous due to its lack of ability to ship on its promise to be “swift and painless” and its affiliation with the Nazi use of fuel to kill thousands and thousands through the Holocaust.
Deadly injection
Deadly injection was first thought-about by the state of New York within the late Eighteen Eighties when it convened a blue ribbon fee to check alternate options to hanging. Throughout deliberations, Dr. Julius Mount Bleyer invited the fee to ascertain a future wherein an individual condemned to loss of life “could be executed on his bed in his cell with a 6-gram injection of sulfate of morphine.”
Nevertheless it wasn’t till 1977 that Oklahoma turned the primary state to introduce the tactic.
Proper from the beginning, administering deadly injections proved to be a fancy process that was troublesome to get proper. In actual fact, through the first use of deadly injection by Texas in 1982, the workforce accountable repeatedly didn’t insert an IV right into a vein within the condemned man’s arm, splattering blood onto the sheet overlaying his physique.
A part of the issue is that medical ethics don’t enable medical doctors to participate in selecting the medication or administering them. Within the place of medical doctors, jail officers are answerable for the deadly injection process. As well as, dosages of the medication used are standardized moderately than tailor-made to the wants of explicit inmates as they’d be in a medical process.
Regardless of the trouble to medicalize executions, the historical past of deadly injection has been something however easy, sterile and predictable. In actual fact, my analysis reveals that of the 1,054 executions carried out from 1982 to 2010 utilizing the usual three-drug deadly injection protocol, greater than 7% had been botched.
And as states, confronted with a shortage of the medication wanted, have experimented to find new elements, my analysis exhibits that botched executions have occurred as a lot as 20% of the time.
The firing squad
Lastly, the firing squad. Of all of America’s strategies of execution, it has been least typically used. From 1900 to 2010, solely 35 of America’s 8,776 executions had been carried out utilizing this technique, and since 1976 simply three individuals have confronted a firing squad, with the final one carried out in Utah in 2010.
The execution chamber at Utah State Jail utilized in america’ final firing squad execution.
AP Picture/Trent Nelson
Critics level out that as a result of loss of life by weapons evokes photographs of uncooked, frontier justice in a society awash in gun violence, this technique mimicked one thing that the regulation wished to discourage. Nonetheless, Utah revived the firing squad in 2015 as a consequence of challenges to the state’s deadly injection protocol.
Whereas it has some up to date proponents who declare it’s the least merciless of all execution strategies, the historical past of the firing squad is marked by grotesque errors when marksmen missed their goal. Within the 1951 execution of Eliseo Mares, for instance, 4 executioners all shot into the flawed aspect of his chest, and he died slowly from blood loss.
A merciless historical past, revived
Whereas authorities in South Carolina enable for loss of life by firing squad, it can not erase the cruelty that marks the tactic’s historical past – nor that of different technique of execution.
That historical past stands as a reminder of America’s failed quest to discover a technique of execution that’s secure, dependable and humane.
This text accommodates sections earlier printed in The Dialog articles from Dec. 4, 2020 and Nov. 30, 2022.