Why is the U.S. going back to death by firing squad?...
Full disclosure: I oppose the death penalty.
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The last time the U.S. executed a death row inmate by firing squad was only 12 years ago. At the time, Ronnie Lee Gardner was given a choice as punishment for shooting and killing an attorney and wounding a bailiff as he attempted to escape from a Salt Lake City courthouse: die by lethal injection or firing squad. He chose the latter. “I like the firing squad,” he told a local paper, according to the New York Times. “It’s so much easier ... and there’s no mistakes.” That’s not entirely true. Initially, almost no details were reported about Eliseo Mares’ 1951 firing squad execution in Utah for murdering a traveling soldier. Almost 25 years later, however, an eyewitness spoke up to say that Mares died “silently and horribly” when the shooters, positioned just 15 feet away, missed his heart and hit him in the hip and abdomen instead. Several minutes passed before Mares bled to death.
Since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976, only three executions by firing squad have taken place, none of them as gruesome as Mares’. But the method is experiencing the beginnings of a resurgence, largely because lethal injection is no longer as reliable, for a variety of reasons. Though Utah remains the only state to have used a firing squad in the past century, Oklahoma and Mississippi also formally adopted the method of execution in 2010.
Now, South Carolina plans to carry out its first execution by firing squad: Three prison-volunteers, all armed with live bullets, will shoot at a target over Richard Moore’s heart from 15 feet away—the same distance as the gunmen who missed the target on Mares.
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https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vy...y-firing-squad