We're Really Doing Execution by Firing Squad Again?

Yahoo

11-03-2025

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On Friday, South Carolina put Brad Sigmon to death for the 2001 murder of his ex-girlfriend's parents. The crime was quite gruesome; Sigmon struck each of his victims nine times in the head with a baseball bat.
Even so, his execution would not have been particularly noteworthy except for the fact that it was carried out by firing squad. Before Sigmon, no one had been put to death that way in the past 15 years. And he is just the fourth person executed by firing squad in the past 50 years.
In 2010 Utah used the firing squad to kill Ronnie Gardner, the third time since 1977 that it had done so.
That year, the state also used a firing squad to execute Gary Gilmore, who waived his appeals and volunteered for execution. He became the first person executed after the Supreme Court revived capital punishment in 1976.
C.M. Frankie reported in 2021 that, offered the choice of hanging or the firing squad, Gilmore said, 'I'd rather be shot.' Gilmore preferred the firing squad because 'he considered it a more 'dignified' way to die than hanging.'
Like Gilmore and Gardner, Sigmon also chose to be shot. He preferred it to execution by lethal injection or the electric chair, the other methods authorized by law in the Palmetto State.
But his choice doesn't make execution by firing squads any less ghoulish. It serves to highlight the horror of dying by the other methods. As the AP reports, Sigmon well understood those horrors. He didn't want to be executed by the electric chair because he thought it would 'burn and cook him alive' and because he figured lethal injection would be 'just as monstrous.' Sigmon feared he would suffer like the three men South Carolina has executed by lethal injection since September. Each of them 'remained alive, strapped to a gurney, for more than twenty minutes.'
Sometimes, what looks like a choice is hardly meaningful. Selecting the method the state will use to kill you may be one of those times.
Today four states—Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah—list the firing squad in their menu of execution methods. The Idaho Legislature just passed a law making the firing squad its primary death-penalty method.
However, the firing squad has been part of the American story for a long time. As ABC News observes, it 'was a punishment for mutiny in colonial times, a way to discourage desertion during the Civil War and a dose of frontier justice in the Old West.'
ABC continues: 'Since 1608, at least 144 civilian prisoners have been executed by shooting in America, nearly all in Utah.' In 1878 the Supreme Court approved its use to express the 'humanity of the nation.'
A year later, the execution of Wallace Wilkerson, the man who lost that case, was anything but humane. James Acker and Ryan Champagne describe it this way: 'Shots from the marksmen's rifles missed his heart. Not strapped into the chair where he had been seated, Wilkerson lurched onto the ground and exclaimed, 'My God! … They missed it!' He groaned, continued breathing, and was pronounced dead some 27 min later.'
In 1913 Nevada became the next state to employ the firing squad. To do so, it 'built a contraption that fired three guns by pulling strings because it had trouble finding volunteers to serve on a firing squad.'
As I have previously argued: 'The history of the firing squad is marked by gruesome mistakes when marksmen missed their target. In the 1951 execution of Eliseo Mares, for example, four executioners all shot into the wrong side of his chest, and he died slowly from blood loss.'
In addition, firing squads 'did not gain much use,' law professor Deborah Denno explains, because even when they went as planned, people 'viewed them as barbaric' and were offended by their 'bloody reality.'
Moreover, as the AP's Michael Tarm puts it, 'The image of gunmen in a row firing in unison at a condemned prisoner may conjure up a bygone, less enlightened era.' That less enlightened era was certainly on display in Sigmon's execution.
To prepare for it, South Carolina renovated its death chamber. It installed 'bullet-resistant glass between the death chamber and witnesses, as well as a metal chair' where the condemned would be seated.
The state 'also cut into the brick wall of the chamber to make an aperture through which the three shooters—all volunteer employees from the Corrections Department— …thread their weapons, all loaded with live ammunition.'
Before they killed Sigmon, corrections officials put a hood over his head and placed a 'small aim point' over the inmate's heart. The warden read the execution order, and the volunteers fired from a distance of 15 feet.
Witnesses could see what happened to Sigmon, but they could not see the people who shot him.
One of those witnesses, Jeffrey Collins, a reporter who has witnessed many executions, said, 'The firing squad is certainly faster—and more violent—than lethal injection. … My heart started pounding a little after Sigmon's lawyer read his final statement.
'About two minutes later,' Collins continued, 'they fired. There was no warning or countdown. … The white target with the red bullseye that had been on his chest, standing out against his black prison jumpsuit, disappeared instantly as Sigmon's whole body flinched. … A jagged red spot about the size of a small fist appeared where Sigmon was shot. His chest moved two or three times.'
The executioners 'fired at the same time. … Sigmon's arms briefly tensed when he was shot, and the target was blasted off his chest. He appeared to give … a breath or two with a red stain on his chest'; Collins added that 'small amounts of tissue could be seen from the wound.'
Sigmon's lawyer was more concise, calling Sigmon's death 'horrifying and violent.' However, neither of those accounts can tell us what Sigmon experienced either in the minutes before the shots rang out or as the bullets hit him.
Borrowing from what Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested in 2017, we can't know whether his death was 'comparatively painless' or whether, as Denno says, South Carolina's firing squad delivered a 'swift and certain death.'
Anesthesiologist Joseph Antognini, an expert on execution methods, offers a different possibility. In his view, someone shot like Sigmon 'could remain conscious for up to 10 seconds after being shot depending on where bullets strike … and those seconds could be 'severely painful, especially related to shattering of bone and damage to the spinal cord.' '
Randy Gardner, the brother of Ronnie Gardner, who was executed by firing squad in 2010, agrees with Antognini. He says that the autopsy photos show that his brother's execution was 'gory' and 'very barbaric.'
Whether Sotomayor, Denno, Antognini, or Gardner is correct seems to me a bit beside the point. Although the suffering of the condemned is crucial to determine the cruelty of an execution, how we punish is also about those who impose it.
Punishment reflects who we are and who we want to be. That is why I hope that someday soon, this country will not want to be associated with capital punishment.
In the meantime, let's not fool ourselves: Killing Sigmon or anyone else by firing squad only exacerbates the shame of that deed.