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.
In 2022, the Supreme Court held that a condemned man has the right to feel his pastor’s hand as he dies. In Ramirez v. Collier, the Court ruled eight to one that Texas could not bar a spiritual advisor from laying hands on the prisoner and praying aloud in the execution chamber. The ruling did not tell Texas how to kill John Henry Ramirez. It told Texas that however he was killed, the hand and the prayer had to be there at the end. What the Court protected was older than the Republic...the accompaniment of the dying by the ordained, the sacrament of presence at the threshold of death.
A method of execution can be built to make that sacrament impossible. Strap a man to a chair. Fix a target over his heart. Set three rifles fifteen feet away. No hand can rest where the bullets are aimed, because the hand and the target cannot share the chest. The act the Court protected and the method the state has chosen are not merely in tension. They are structurally incompatible. One requires touch at the moment of death. The other forbids it.
That conflict has never reached the Supreme Court because no state had ever made the firing squad its primary means of execution. Idaho has now done so.
This is not another argument that the firing squad is cruel. It is an argument that the firing squad, as designed, makes it impossible for the state to honor a religious practice the Supreme Court has already protected.
Where the Hand Cannot Reach
Consider what the Court blessed, and then what the firing squad does. Under the Texas protocol, the advisor stood three feet from the gurney. The accommodation Ramirez required was small...step closer, extend an arm, touch the body away from the intravenous line. The sacrament survived because the method left room for it.
The firing squad leaves no room. When South Carolina shot Brad Sigmon in March 2025, the first firing-squad execution in the nation in fifteen years, the protocol strapped him to a chair by the head, chest, arms and ankles. It hooded him. It fixed a white target with a red bullseye over his heart. Three shooters fired through a slot in a wall fifteen feet away. His spiritual advisor could not stand beside him. The advisor was outside the chamber, unable to cross to him, unable to lay a hand on him. At the moment of death, Sigmon was untouched and alone. The state had designed a method of execution that structurally excludes the sacrament of accompaniment.
Imagine the final seconds. The pastor who has prayed with this man for months cannot take the last step toward him. The rifles require distance. The chamber requires separation. The sacrament the Court protected does not disappear because the minister refuses to come. It disappears because the architecture of the execution forbids him.
That is not a restriction on the sacrament. It is its elimination. The distinction is everything. Ramirez answered restriction. Volume can be lowered. Prayer can pause while a warrant is read. Proximity can shift by inches. The firing squad offers no such dial. It does not quiet the prayer or move the hand. It removes the hand entirely, at the one instant the hand means everything.
Not Cruelty
The instinct is to call this cruelty and reach for the Eighth Amendment. Resist it...not because method challenges fail but because of how the last one succeeded. In June 2026, a federal court held for the first time in the modern era that a method of execution is unconstitutionally cruel, enjoining Alabama’s nitrogen protocol after a full trial. Lee did what no modern method-of-execution case had done. It won. But in winning, it elevated the firing squad into the constitutional benchmark against which every other method is measured. To strike nitrogen the court had to find a gentler alternative. The alternative the prisoner named was the firing squad, which the court found feasible and all but painless.
So the firing squad now sits at the humane end of the Eighth Amendment’s spectrum. Attack it there and you must name something gentler still...nitrogen, just condemned as cruel, or lethal injection, whose failures are the reason these men were shot instead. The alternative-method rule that freed Jeffery Lee closes like a trap on anyone who turns the rifles around. On the question of pain, the firing squad is now the method courts trust. One axis, however, exposes a vulnerability the Eighth Amendment does not. It is not cruelty. It is that the sacrament cannot coexist with the method.
What the Law Requires
Once the argument leaves the Eighth Amendment, the governing law changes as well. For prisoners, the vehicle is the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. Its command is plain. RLUIPA forbids a government from imposing a “substantial burden” on an inmate’s religious exercise unless it proves that the burden is “the least restrictive means” of furthering a “compelling governmental interest.” The Court calls that standard exceptionally demanding. The burden sits on the state.
Here the burden is not close. Accompaniment at the moment of death is a protected exercise...Ramirez settled that. The firing squad does not merely burden it. The state has designed a method of execution that structurally excludes the sacrament. The state’s easy escape is already shut. It will say the pastor prayed with the condemned for hours beforehand. The law forecloses the answer. The question is whether the specific exercise is burdened, not whether the prisoner had some other outlet for his faith. Accompaniment at the threshold of death is the exercise. Accompaniment an hour earlier in a holding cell is a different one.
Everything then turns on how the state’s interest is named. The compelling interest is carrying out the lawful sentence of death. It is not carrying out that sentence by firing squad. Let the state define its interest as killing this man by this method and strict scrutiny collapses into a circle. Named honestly, the interest is the death of the condemned pursuant to judgment...the method is only a means. Ramirez granted the state’s real concerns: security in the chamber, the prevention of suffering, the victim family’s peace. None requires a firing squad. Each is served as well by a method that lets the pastor remain.
The least-restrictive-means test does the rest. The state must prove no gentler method of carrying out the sentence exists. It cannot, wherever another lawful method lets the advisor touch the condemned as he dies. Lethal injection, accompanied as in Ramirez, does precisely that. Where injection is available and preserves the sacrament, the firing squad, which destroys it, is not the least restrictive means. The argument never asks a court to call the firing squad cruel. It asks one thing only. When the state holds two lawful ways to the same end and one destroys a protected sacrament while the other preserves it, the law requires the one that preserves it.
The statutory argument does not stand alone. It rests upon a constitutional tradition even older than RLUIPA itself. The presence of clergy at the scaffold predates the founding. A state that keeps a gentler method in reserve while refusing to use it is not acting under a neutral rule of general application.
Before the Chamber
Every one of these moves is available wherever the firing squad is used. In most places the state has a ready answer: the condemned chose the method and cannot complain that it burdens his faith. Idaho has taken that answer away. Its 2025 law made the firing squad the primary method as of July 2026...the first in the nation...and kept lethal injection only as the fallback when the firing squad is not possible. The state imposes the rifles, not the prisoner. It cannot say he chose what it forced on him. And the gentler alternative is neither speculative nor contested. It is written into the same statute. The two defenses that would shield the firing squad elsewhere are pulled down by Idaho’s own law.
Idaho is the cleanest case. It is not the only one. Wherever the state shoots a man to death, this claim reaches the one weakness the method cannot cure. It should be raised as a matter of course...a baseline of capital appeals, not an afterthought sprung too late.
South Carolina shows the cost of leaving it unraised. When the state shot Brad Sigmon, his lawyers fought valiantly. But the religious liberty argument was never brought.
Whether that argument would ultimately have prevailed, it was never presented. The one constitutional theory aimed directly at the firing squad’s unique weakness was left unexplored. Sigmon’s case shows the loss most plainly. He was a professed convert who carried his faith to his last words. His spiritual advisor was present to the end and still could not be in the chamber, could not reach him, could not lay a hand on him as he died. The sacrament the Court had protected was his to claim. The claim was never made.
The argument has real vulnerabilities, and candor about them is part of its strength. A court may say Ramirez ordered an accommodation, not a change of method...that it protects exercise around an execution, not a veto over how the state kills. The answer is to seek an accommodation, not an abolition. The prisoner does not demand the end of the firing squad. He asks only that the state use one of its own lawful methods, one that permits the protected exercise. When the state itself keeps such a method available, strict scrutiny requires an explanation for choosing the one that destroys the sacrament. The state may also offer to let the pastor touch the condemned until the last second, then withdraw behind the barrier. But Ramirez’s carve-outs interrupted an exercise that continued through death. Here the withdrawal is total and permanent at the instant that matters. A silence while a warrant is read is a modulation. Emptying the room of the pastor’s hands so the body can be fired upon is elimination. An accommodation that leaves a man dying untouched has not cured the burden. It has renamed it.
So the argument ends where the next execution begins. There is a chamber in Idaho with a chair, a wall and a slot for rifles. Eight men wait on its death row. One of them, Thomas Creech, the state strapped down already and could not kill him. No warrant has yet issued under the new law. That silence is the whole of the opportunity.
Soon enough a man will be moved to that chair and a target fixed over his heart. Whether a hand rests on him at the end will not be settled by the Constitution, which already prefers the hand. It will be settled by whether his lawyers ask the courts, while there is still time, the question the firing squad cannot survive: How does the state carry out an execution designed to exclude the sacrament of the dying?
There is a hand reaching toward a dying man. There is a red circle over his heart. The Constitution already chose the hand. Idaho chose the target. A government may claim the authority to take a life. It has no authority to design death so that the last constitutionally protected act of faith becomes physically impossible.
This essay first appeared on the Execution Intervention Project’s Substack under the title “Idaho: Don’t Repeat South Carolina’s Legal Oversight of Religious Liberty on Firing Squads.” It is reprinted here without change.