ET --:--:--CT --:--:--MT --:--:--PT --:--:--

Execution by rifle · a public record

Full text

FS-2026-ID-0001

The entire book,
published in full.

Every sentence of "The Lie of the Clean Kill" by Jeff Hood — 32 sections, roughly 89,386 words, including all endnotes. Nothing is excerpted.

← Home All reference sections Citations database

The Lie of the Clean Kill

Idaho, the Firing Squad,
and the Allure of the Bullet

Jeff Hood · 32 sections · roughly 89,386 words · published in full

Buy the book on Amazon Buy the eBook

Nobody does this work alone. Nobody survives it alone either. What follows is my attempt to name the people who kept me standing while I wrote, and the people who keep me standing the rest of the time.

02492 words

A Note from the Author

I have stood in more execution chambers in more states than any spiritual advisor in the history of the United States. Thirteen times I have watched the state kill a person I came to love. Twice I have watched nitrogen gas do it. I have heard last breaths, last words, last heartbeats through a stethoscope held up to a microphone. I do not write this book from a library. I write it from the witness room.

03532 words

Prologue: No Clean Kill

There is no clean way to take a human life. For centuries, we’ve tried to prove otherwise, refining the rope, the chair, the chamber, the needle —each new method sold as swifter and more humane than the last. Each time, the promise breaks the same way: killing doesn’t get cleaner. It only gets better disguised.

043,797 words

Introduction: The Target Over the Heart

Somewhere south of Boise, in a renovated block of a maximum-security prison, there is a chair. It has straps for the ankles, the waist, the arms. Facing the chair, through a wall with gun ports cut into it, there is a spot marked out with sandbags. A rectangle of white cloth hangs there. A small target is sewn or pinned to it, over where the heart of a human being should be.¹

PART I: THE RETURN OF THE GUN

053,082 words

Chapter 1: July 1, 2026

The Idaho Maximum Security Institution sits south of Boise, past the airport, out where the valley gives way to scrubland and the Snake River Canyon starts to make its long cut toward Twin Falls.¹ It is not a building anyone would notice from the highway. Prisons in this country are designed to be unnoticed, which is itself a kind of statement about what the public is willing to fund and unwilling to watch. Inside, in a unit called F-Block, the state of Idaho spent more than 1.2 million dollars over roughly fourteen months building something it had not needed to build in nearly fifty years: a room designed, from the studs out, for three armed men to shoot a fourth who cannot move.²

064,467 words

Chapter 2: Eight Needles, No Vein

Idaho’s room full of gun ports began with the inability to find a man’s veins during a lethal injection procedure.

073,447 words

Chapter 3: The Legislature Reaches for the Trigger

Laws do not arrive fully formed. Idaho’s turn to the firing squad was never a single decision made in a single session, but the last step in a multi-year escalation, each step justified by the step before it, each one making the next easier to vote for.

086,804 words

Chapter 4: A Short History of Shooting Prisoners

Every method of execution the modern state has invented was designed to help us look away. The gallows gave way to the electric chair. The chair gave way to the gas chamber. The chamber gave way to the needle. Each new machine arrived with the same promise — that this death would be cleaner than the last. Quieter. Faster. More medical. More humane. Each was, in its own way, a technology of concealment. Each was built to put distance between the citizen and the killing done in the citizen’s name.

0911,161 words

Chapter 5: The Six

Since the Supreme Court cleared the way for executions to resume in 1976, six men have been shot to death by American states. Three died in Utah across thirty-three years. Three died in South Carolina across eight months. That is the whole modern record, small enough to set down in full and, so far as I have been able to determine, never before set down in full in one place.

PART II: THE FOUR BROKEN PROMISES

104,404 words

Chapter 6: The First Promise — Certainty

Every argument for the firing squad, from Representative Skaug’s floor speech to the op-eds that ran in Idaho papers in the weeks before July 1, 2026, begins in the same place: a bullet cannot fail to be found the way a vein can. You do not need a trained phlebotomist to locate a man’s chest. You do not need a compounding pharmacy to manufacture a bullet. The rifle either fires or it does not, and if it fires, the argument goes, the outcome is not in question.

112,755 words

Chapter 7: The Second Promise — Humanity

Representative Skaug’s argument on the floor of the Idaho House rested on a chain of three words treated as though they were interchangeable: sudden, quick, and certain.¹ The last chapter dealt with certainty. This one deals with the other two, and with the deeper claim underneath all three, that speed alone is sufficient to make an act humane. It is not, and the record already built supplies the evidence.

122,974 words

Chapter 8: The Third Promise — Honesty

Of the four promises under examination here, honesty is the one made most often by the firing squad’s more sophisticated defenders rather than by its legislative sponsors, and it deserves to be taken more seriously than the other three, because it contains a real insight before it collapses into its own contradiction.

132,312 words

Chapter 9: The Fourth Promise — Free Choice

Brad Sigmon chose the firing squad. So did Mikal Mahdi. So did Stephen Corey Bryant. Each man, given a menu of three methods by South Carolina law — lethal injection, electrocution, or the firing squad —selected the bullet, and each selection has been reported, understandably, as a meaningful fact about that man’s agency in the final weeks of his life.

PART III: IDAHO

144,111 words

Chapter 10: The Men of F-Block, and the One Woman in Pocatello

Every argument made so far — about certainty, about humanity, about honesty, about choice — is ultimately an argument about what will happen to eight specific human beings, seven held at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution and one held roughly two hundred and fifty miles away at the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center. They should be named here, with what is publicly known about the crimes that brought each of them to death row, because a state’s paperwork tends to reduce a person to a case number and an offense category, and I do not want to do the same thing while claiming to argue against the state’s dehumanizing machinery.

153,128 words

Chapter 11: The Shooters

Somebody has to pull the trigger. Every preceding chapter has circled that fact without confronting it directly, and it deserves a chapter of its own, because the moral weight of an execution does not disappear when it is distributed across six human beings — three primary shooters, two alternates, and a team leader who loads the rifles — instead of concentrated in a single executioner. It is redistributed, and understanding where it lands, and what it does to the people it lands on, is part of taking this method seriously.

162,848 words

Chapter 12: The Witnesses

I have stood in the witness role for thirteen executions in five states now, more than any other spiritual advisor in the United States. I have watched the state kill people by lethal injection and I have watched it kill people with nitrogen gas, including Kenneth Smith in Alabama in January 2024, the first person in the nation executed by that method, and Anthony Boyd in October 2025, whose execution became the longest by nitrogen gas on record.¹ I have not yet stood in a firing squad chamber, because no state has asked a spiritual advisor to occupy that role in the configuration Idaho has now built. What follows is, in part, an attempt to think through what that role will require, using what I have learned in the rooms I have already stood in.

175,090 words

Chapter 13: The Cost of the Bullet

Idaho has executed three people since 1977. It has now spent well over a million dollars building a room to make executing more people easier, faster, and less dependent on a pharmaceutical supply chain the state cannot control. What follows is that arithmetic, and the litigation the state has already generated trying to defend it.

PART IV: BEYOND IDAHO

183,852 words

Chapter 14: The Federal Question

I have written almost entirely about a single state, because Idaho’s decision is the most complete and most legally consequential expression of everything argued against here. But Idaho did not make its decision in isolation, and it does not remain isolated. In the months before Idaho’s law took effect, the federal government moved to adopt the same method, and understanding that move is essential to understanding where the argument is headed. A state-level policy is one thing. A federal policy, applied to prisoners sentenced under federal law in federal facilities across the country, is a different order of magnitude.

193,964 words

Chapter 15: Contagion — Utah, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Florida, and the Shape of What Comes Next

Idaho is one of five states that, as of this writing, explicitly authorize the firing squad by name. Chapter 4 told South Carolina’s story. What follows takes up the remaining three — Utah, Oklahoma, and Mississippi — along with Florida, which has opened the door to shooting-based executions by an entirely different legislative route, and Indiana, which came within three votes of walking through it.

PART V: THE VERDICT

203,245 words

Chapter 16: What the Gun Reveals

I said in the introduction that the firing squad strips away more of the euphemism surrounding execution than any other method in use, and that this starkness is both the method’s one virtue and its final indictment. That argument can be made in full now, with fifteen chapters of specific evidence standing behind it.

214,090 words

Chapter 17: The Lie of the Clean Kill

I have spent this book taking apart a lie. I want to spend this last chapter on something harder, which is why the lie works.

22700 words

Epilogue: The Warrant That Has Not Come

Idaho’s law took effect on July 1, 2026. This book is being finished in the weeks after. It would be easy to believe the state is loaded and waiting. It is not.

APPENDICES

231,285 words

Appendix A: Timeline of the Firing Squad in the Modern Era

before the temporary nationwide suspension of capital punishment that followed

24517 words

Appendix B: The Legislative Record in Idaho

Idaho’s legislature authorized the firing squad as an alternative execution method, to be used only when lethal injection was unavailable. Governor Little signed the bill on March 24, 2023, and it took effect July 1 of that year. The measure was framed publicly as a contingency addressing the state’s documented difficulty acquiring lethal injection drugs, rather than as an endorsement of the firing squad on independent merit.

25378 words

Appendix C: Idaho’s Firing Squad Protocol — A Summary

The following summarizes publicly reported elements of Idaho’s firing squad protocol as finalized ahead of the July 1, 2026 effective date. Some operational details remain shielded from public disclosure under Idaho’s execution secrecy statutes, a pattern described in Chapter 8 and substantially widened by House Bill 803, discussed in Chapter 13.

264,185 words

Appendix D: The Jurisdictions

Five states authorize the firing squad by name. Three more — Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee — authorize it by implication, through open-ended statutes providing that if their named methods are held unconstitutional or become unavailable, executions proceed by any method not deemed unconstitutional. The federal government added it by policy in 2026. Six firing squad executions have been carried out in the United States since 1977, three of them in a single state in a single year. What follows is a file on each jurisdiction: how the method reached the books, what the statute actually requires, and what would have to happen for a rifle to be used.

27484 words

Appendix E: Glossary of Terms

Blood atonement. A nineteenth-century doctrine taught by some early leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, holding that certain sins were grave enough to require the shedding of the sinner’s own blood in addition to Christ’s atonement. Long repudiated by the modern LDS church, but historically linked to Utah’s cultural preference for the firing squad over methods that do not spill blood.

28802 words

Appendix F: The International Context

Idaho’s turn to the firing squad, and the American firing squad’s spread to other states and to federal policy, is easy to read as a purely domestic story. It is worth placing briefly against the global picture, because the international context sharpens rather than softens the argument.

29890 words

Appendix G: In Their Own Words

The following statements are collected here for ease of reference. Most are quoted and sourced in the body at the chapters indicated; where a statement appears only here, its source is given with the quotation.

301,962 words

Appendix H: Religious Liberty and the Firing Squad

There is a hand reaching toward a dying man. There is a red circle painted over his heart. The Constitution protects the ﬁrst. The state requires the second. The two cannot occupy the same space.

ABOUT

31121 words

About the Author

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a Catholic Priest (Old Catholic), nationally recognized theologian, and founder of the Execution Intervention Project — the nation’s leading nonprofit combining activism against death sentences, spiritual accompaniment, abolitionist thought development, theological education and consistent public engagement to serve people on death row. As a spiritual advisor to death row inmates nationwide, he has accompanied thirteen men to their executions, including the first and eighth nitrogen hypoxia executions. Widely regarded as the leading spiritual voice on the death penalty, his work has been profiled in outlets ranging from The New York Times to a Rolling Stone documentary, The Spiritual Advisor. For his work to end nitrogen executions, he was nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.

32153 words

About the Execution Intervention Project

The Execution Intervention Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that stands with the people this country has condemned. It accompanies the condemned through their final days and, where the law permits, into the execution chamber itself. It connects people on death row with correspondents on the outside, because a letter is often the last thread someone has. It intervenes directly in active cases, supports the families of the condemned and the families of victims, and presses the argument publicly through writing, teaching, film, and testimony. Everything in this book has grown out of such work: the countless hours spent sitting with men in their last days, the autopsy records pried loose from unwilling states, the accounts carried out of rooms the public is not allowed to enter. The Project is sustained entirely by ordinary people giving what they can, and it takes on the cases, situations and people that no one else will.