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Execution by rifle · a public record

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The entire book,
published in full.

Every sentence of "The Lie of the Clean Kill" by Jeff Hood — 29 sections, roughly 87,620 words, including all endnotes. Nothing is excerpted.

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FRONT MATTER

01428 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. Twelve 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.

02533 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.

033,838 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

043,115 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

054,531 words

Chapter 2: Eight Needles, No Vein

To understand why Idaho built a room full of gun ports, you have to understand one man’s veins, and you have to understand that his veins were never really the point.

063,538 words

Chapter 3: The Legislature Reaches for the Trigger

Laws do not arrive fully formed. House Bill 37 had a lineage, and understanding that lineage tells you something House Bill 37’s floor debate alone does not: that 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.

075,695 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.

0811,353 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. It is small enough to set down in full and it has never, so far as I have been able to determine, been set down in full in one place.

PART II: THE FOUR BROKEN PROMISES

094,143 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. This chapter exists because that argument is false, and it is false in a way that is now documented, autopsied and a matter of public record. Idaho did not choose the firing squad in ignorance of this record. It chose the firing squad with the record already sitting in front of it.

102,971 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 Chapter six dealt with certain. This chapter 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 gives us the exact evidence needed to show why.

113,169 words

Chapter 8: The Third Promise — Honesty

Of the four promises this book examines, honesty is the one made most often by the firing squad’s more sophisticated defenders rather than its legislative sponsors, and it deserves to be taken more seriously than the other three precisely because it contains a real insight before it collapses into its own contradiction. The argument runs like this: lethal injection dresses killing up as medicine, with a gurney that looks like a hospital bed, an IV line, a curtain that opens onto something staged to resemble a clinical procedure. The firing squad, by contrast, does not pretend. It is a gun, aimed at a person, fired by other people and everyone in the room knows exactly what is happening. There is a version of this argument I find persuasive, and it deserves its strongest form before I show why, in practice, Idaho and South Carolina’s actual protocols do not earn the honesty they claim.

122,607 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 own agency in the final weeks of his life. Sigmon’s lawyers said he chose the firing squad because he feared a repeat of the documented lethal injection complications other South Carolina prisoners had suffered, and because the state’s electric chair, more than a century old, carried its own well-documented history of malfunction.1 Mahdi’s attorneys said he feared dying “burned and mutilated” in the chair, or enduring a prolonged death strapped to a gurney and so selected what he judged, of three bad options, to be the least terrible.2 I do not doubt that these were genuine choices, in the narrow sense that each man weighed real information about three real methods and arrived at a preference. The question this chapter interrogates is whether “choice,” used in that narrow sense, can bear the moral weight the method’s defenders ask it to carry, the weight of making an execution more legitimate, more consensual, more acceptable because the person being killed selected the instrument of his own death from a list the state compiled.

PART III: IDAHO

134,652 words

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

Every argument in this book, about certainty, about humanity, about honesty, about choice, is ultimately an argument about what will happen to eight specific human beings, seven of them 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, plainly, 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 this book to do the same thing while claiming to argue against the state’s dehumanizing machinery.

143,115 words

Chapter 11: The Shooters

Somebody has to pull the trigger. This is the fact every other chapter of this book has circled without confronting 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 instead of concentrated in a single executioner (There are three primary shooters, two alternates and one team leader, who loads the rifles). It is simply redistributed, and understanding where it lands, and what it does to the people it lands on, is part of taking this method seriously.

153,137 words

Chapter 12: The Witnesses

I have stood in the witness role for twelve executions in five different 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 ever 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. No state has yet asked a spiritual advisor to occupy that role in exactly the configuration Idaho has now built, though South Carolina came closest: Brad Sigmon spent his last two hours with the Reverend Hilary Taylor, executive director of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, who then sat as a witness while three volunteers shot him from fifteen feet. This chapter is, in part, an attempt to think through what that role will require, using everything I have learned in the rooms I have already stood in.

165,238 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. This chapter is about that arithmetic, and about the litigation the state has already generated trying to defend it.

PART IV: BEYOND IDAHO

173,950 words

Chapter 14: The Federal Question

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

184,065 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 four told South Carolina’s story. This chapter takes up the remaining three — Utah, Oklahoma and Mississippi — along with Florida, which has opened the door to shooting-based executions through an entirely different legislative route, and Indiana, which came within three votes of walking through it, because the pattern of adoption across these jurisdictions tells you something Idaho’s case alone cannot: that the firing squad’s spread is not a series of isolated, unrelated legislative accidents. It is a single, traceable contagion, moving state to state along the same structural fault line, the collapse of lethal injection, and picking up speed as each new adoption makes the next one look less like a radical departure and more like an inevitability. This chapter also documents a case where the contagion was stopped, by three votes, in a state almost nobody expected to stop it.

PART V: THE VERDICT

193,317 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 currently in use, and that this starkness represents both the method’s one virtue and its final indictment. That argument can be made in full now, with fourteen chapters of specific evidence standing behind it.

204,124 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.

21732 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, having read this far, to close it believing the state is loaded and waiting. It is not, and the reason is worth setting down plainly, because it is the difference between a book that ends on a date and one that ends on the truth.

APPENDICES

221,395 words

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

1960. James W. Rodgers is executed by firing squad in Utah, the last such execution before the temporary nationwide suspension of capital punishment that followed Furman v. Georgia (1972).

23517 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.

24373 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.

254,402 words

Appendix D: The Jurisdictions

Status: narrow statutory exception

26486 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.

27786 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 this book’s argument.

281,292 words

Appendix G: In Their Own Words

Gary Mark Gilmore, before the Utah Board of Pardons, November 1976: He said the people of Utah seemed to want the death penalty but not executions, and that when they sentenced him he took them literally and seriously. Of those trying to save him: “This is my life and this is my death.” (Chapter 5)

29118 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 twelve 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 Rolling Stone. documentary, The Spiritual Advisor. For his service and scholarship, he was nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.

The entire book,published in full.