The last time a firing squad was used in the United States was in 2010, when convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner asked the state of Utah to execute him that way instead of by electric chair because there was “no chance of a mistake.” There are only a few states that give death row inmates this option, which critics say is inhumane and unnecessarily traumatizing for the law enforcement officers involved. But the state of South Carolina, which this month became the fourth state in the country to legalize the use of firing squads, believes firing squads could become necessary.
For the past decade, executions in South Carolina have been put on hold — not because state lawmakers were reconsidering the death penalty, but because there was a massive shortage of the lethal injection drugs needed to kill the condemned men. A new law signed by Gov. Henry McMaster will keep lethal injection as the state’s primary method of execution, and it will also require officials to use the electric chair or a firing squad if the drug shortage continues.
Three out of the 37 prisoners on death row in South Carolina could be immediately affected by this law. They are out of appeals, and legislators rejected an amendment to exempt current inmates from the new capital punishment rules.
But prosecutors say this is the only way the courts’ sentences can be carried out. The three inmates who exhausted all of their normal appeals would have continued to sit in prison under the previous law because they chose lethal injection over the state’s 109-year-old electric chair, knowing that a lethal injection could not be completed until the state’s drug supply was replenished, they argued.
Lawyers for the three prisoners said they might sue over the new law, calling it a major step backward for South Carolina and the “pro-life” values the state claims to represent. Several South Carolina Republicans also opposed the law, urging their colleagues to consider the morality of sending a person into a dark room to be shot in front of their friends and family members.
Eventually, the debate arrives at an awkward question: Are some forms of human execution really humane? Proponents of lethal injection like to think they’ve found the most civilized way of putting someone to death. There’s no revelry or gore — just a needle in the prisoner’s arm that quietly puts the person to sleep.
But that’s just not true. Take, for example, Joseph Rudolph Wood III, a prisoner in Arizona who suffered one of the longest executions in U.S. history in 2014. The lethal drugs were pumped into his veins at 1:57 p.m., and his death was not pronounced until nearly two hours later at 3:49 p.m. A reporter who witnessed the execution said Wood gasped for air 660 times before he died. Another reporter said he looked “like a fish on shore gulping for air.”
At least, as Ronnie Lee Gardner put it, a firing squad is instant.
