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.
From Open Volunteers to a Professional Class
When Idaho first authorized the firing squad as a backup method in 2023, the statute framed participation in explicitly voluntary terms, open in principle to a broad pool of willing participants. By the time the Department of Correction finalized its protocol ahead of the July 1, 2026 effective date, that framework had narrowed considerably.
Idaho’s shooting team is now drawn specifically from trained, POST-certified law enforcement officers rather than from an open call for civilian volunteers, a decision the department has framed as a matter of competence and reliability rather than a change in the voluntary character of the role. Officers who wish to serve must hold a minimum of three years of Peace Officer Standards and Training certification, must have no disciplinary action in the preceding twelve months relating to firearms use or use of force, and must pass a marksmanship qualification requiring one hundred percent accuracy from a minimum of seven yards against a target built to the exact specifications of the one that will eventually be pinned over a living person’s chest.¹ A volunteer who cannot hit that target with every round from every assigned firearm fails outright and is barred from serving.
What the restructuring accomplishes is not primarily about marksmanship. Any state that wanted only for its shooters to hit a stationary target from seven yards could achieve that with considerably less institutional apparatus than a three-year certification requirement and a clean disciplinary record. What the restructuring achieves is legal and reputational insulation.
By drawing exclusively from an already-vetted professional class —sworn officers who have passed background checks, use-of-force training, and departmental oversight — the state can point to its shooting team’s credentials as evidence of institutional seriousness, while ensuring that any individual officer’s participation is legally framed as an extension of ordinary law enforcement duty rather than a novel and extraordinary act the state is asking a private citizen to perform. That framing changes who bears responsibility if something goes wrong. A civilian volunteer who missed a heart shot might plausibly sue the state for inadequate training or support. A sworn officer operating within a certified, department-sanctioned protocol has, in most jurisdictions, a much narrower path to hold the state accountable for the psychological consequences of participation, because that participation is legally categorized as duty rather than as an exceptional favor performed for the state.
One further thing belongs here about how Idaho arrived at a squad of human beings at all, because for a while it was not obvious that it would. While House Bill 37 was moving through the legislature, Representative Skaug told lawmakers that Idaho’s firing squad would be mechanized, and a Department of Correction spokesperson said in February 2025 that the agency was weighing a remote-operated weapons system alongside traditional firing squad methods.² In the same period, an IDOC spokesperson told the Idaho Statesman by email that a remote-operated system was preferred, because it would allow executions by firing squad to be carried out with minimal involvement from department staff, and that the agency was actively exploring available options.
Nothing in the protocol the department finally published in June 2026 describes such a system, and the qualification standards it did publish assume officers holding rifles. But the fact that it was considered belongs here, because it shows the direction the engineering instinct runs when a state sets out to solve this problem. Every other concealment documented so far puts distance between the shooter and the act. A remote-operated weapon is that impulse carried to its end point: nobody in the room, nobody’s finger on anything, a killing performed by a machine that cannot be asked afterward what it was like.
Idaho did not go there. It is worth noticing how close it came, and worth noticing that the reason to reject such a system is not that it would be less reliable. It is that it would complete the disappearance of the human being who is supposed to be accountable for the shot.
THE VANISHING BLANK ROUND
A detail buried in the mechanics of Idaho’s protocol deserves more attention than press coverage has given it, because it marks a real departure from the method’s own historical practice.
In Utah’s modern firing squad executions, including Gary Gilmore’s in 1977 and, by most historical accounts, the executions that followed, the standard practice involved five shooters, only four of whom were given rifles loaded with live ammunition. The fifth rifle was loaded with a blank, or in some documented cases a wax bullet,³ and the assignment of rifles to shooters was arranged so that no individual shooter could be certain, afterward, whether he had fired one of the lethal rounds.
That was not an incidental detail. It was a deliberately engineered mechanism of psychological diffusion, built into the protocol so that the men performing the execution could tell themselves, with genuine and legally supported uncertainty, that they might not have been the one who killed.
Idaho’s protocol, as reported and confirmed by the Department of Correction ahead of the effective date, does not include this mechanism.⁴ The team leader loads one live round into a magazine for each of the three weapons. There is no blank, no wax bullet, no engineered ambiguity. Every officer who pulls the trigger on Idaho’s team will know, with total certainty, that his round was a live one, discharged at a living person, at the moment the command was given.
I do not know why Idaho’s designers chose to abandon this historical practice, and the department has not, to my knowledge, publicly explained it. But the change removes the last piece of engineered psychological cover the method has ever offered the people asked to perform it. Every other concealment documented so far — the hood over the condemned person’s face, the shield law protecting the shooters’ identities, the black pull-shade covering the gun ports until the last possible moment — exists to protect the shooters from the full weight of what they are doing. The blank round was, historically, the most direct version of that protection, built to let a man walk away from an execution able to tell himself, truthfully, that he does not know for certain he killed anyone.
Idaho has taken that mechanism away. Whatever else can be said about the candor or concealment of the method’s other design choices, this one, at least, is more honest than its historical predecessor. It is also, I would argue, considerably crueler to the officers required to serve.
WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS PARTICIPATION DOES
The psychological literature on execution team participation is not extensive, because access to execution personnel for research purposes is understandably restricted, but what exists deserves attention.
A study published in Law and Human Behavior by the psychologists Michael Osofsky, Albert Bandura, and Philip Zimbardo examined the mechanisms by which corrections personnel involved in executions psychologically manage their participation,⁵ drawing on Bandura’s broader theory of moral disengagement: the set of cognitive strategies people use to distance themselves from the moral weight of harmful acts they nonetheless perform.
Comparing three groups of prison personnel across three Southern states, the study found that members of the execution team, those closest to the killing, exhibited the highest levels of moral disengagement, including moral, social, and economic justification, disavowal of personal responsibility, and dehumanization of the condemned. Personnel who provided support to the families of victims and of the condemned disavowed such disengagement, and guards with no involvement in the execution process did so as well, though to a lesser degree than the support teams. Diffusion of responsibility across a group is one of the eight mechanisms Bandura identified, and it is the one Idaho has engineered out of its protocol by eliminating the blank round.
Beyond the academic literature, journalists and death penalty researchers have documented, across decades of reporting on execution teams in states using lethal injection, the electric chair, and the firing squad alike, a recurring pattern of psychological aftermath among corrections officers who have participated: difficulty sleeping, intrusive memories of the execution, strained relationships with family members who do not know or cannot fully process what the officer’s job has required of him, and, in a meaningful number of documented cases, officers who have left corrections work entirely after one or more executions, citing the toll directly.
That pattern is consistent enough, across enough states and enough methods, to be treated as a predictable cost of the job rather than an occasional and unfortunate outlier. States that build execution teams are not merely solving a logistical problem of who will perform a legally mandated task. They are creating a small, specific population of public employees whom the state is knowingly exposing to a documented risk of lasting psychological harm, in service of an institutional goal, and offering that population, in return, primarily anonymity and a paycheck.
WHAT STATES OFFER IN RETURN
Idaho’s public materials do not disclose whether officers serving on its firing squad receive additional compensation beyond their ordinary salary, and the shield laws already described make this difficult to establish from outside the department. Other jurisdictions that have used execution teams have, in some documented instances, offered modest additional stipends: Utah paid the volunteers who shot John Albert Taylor three hundred dollars each. Set against the psychological risk the research describes, sums like that are difficult to characterize as adequate compensation.
Money is, in any case, an odd currency to try to exchange for the harm at issue. No hourly rate meaningfully prices in the risk of the insomnia, the intrusive memory, or the eventual quiet departure from law enforcement work that the research associates with this role.
What states more consistently offer instead is status. Selection for the shooting team is treated, in the departmental culture surrounding these roles in Utah and South Carolina alike, as a mark of trust and elite standing, reserved for officers who have already distinguished themselves through years of clean service and demonstrated proficiency. This is not a criticism of the individual officers who accept that distinction; there is nothing dishonorable about wanting to be recognized as exceptionally capable at one’s job.
But the state’s primary tool for securing willing participants in an act with documented psychological costs is not compensation calibrated to those costs. It is status, the same currency states have always used to recruit people into their most demanding and most morally freighted forms of service, from military special forces to hostage negotiation teams. Status is a powerful motivator. It is also free to the state to offer, which may explain why it has become the currency of choice for a role whose actual costs remain largely uncompensated in any currency at all.
THE ASYMMETRY IN WHAT GETS NAMED
Idaho’s legislature, in its floor debate over House Bill 37, spent considerable energy weighing the risk that a bullet might miss its target. With the notable exception of Senator Foreman, a combat veteran and retired police officer who told his colleagues that the claim of instantaneity did not survive contact with what he had actually seen, the debate said almost nothing on the public record about the human cost of the method, and it said nothing at all about the specific risk the method poses to the officers asked to fire it.
That asymmetry reveals something about how institutions decide which costs are visible and which are not.
A missed shot produces a documented, autopsied, medically legible outcome: an entry wound in the wrong location, a pathologist’s estimate of thirty to sixty seconds of conscious suffering, a matter of public record precisely because an autopsy is, by law, a matter of public record, however incompletely South Carolina’s shield laws have allowed that record to be shared.
The psychological injury done to the officer who fired that shot, or one of the shots alongside it, produces no comparable public document. There is no autopsy for moral injury. There is no legally mandated disclosure requirement for an officer’s subsequent insomnia, his strained marriage, or his decision three years later to leave law enforcement and decline to say exactly why. The harm is real, and the research suggests it is common, but it is structurally invisible in exactly the way a bullet wound is not, and that invisibility is why a legislature capable of debating autopsy-level detail about a missed heart shot said almost nothing about what firing the gun does to the person holding it.
TRAINING AS ITS OWN WARNING SIGN
Idaho’s marksmanship qualification standard deserves one more look, because a detail in its design inadvertently concedes the argument already made about certainty.
The requirement that volunteers achieve one hundred percent accuracy, with every round, from every assigned firearm, against a target built to exact specifications, is not the kind of standard a department sets when it is confident the underlying task is easy. It is the kind of standard a department sets when it knows, from whatever internal knowledge or consultation informed the protocol’s design, that the task is difficult enough to require rigorous screening, and that a meaningful number of otherwise qualified officers might fail to meet it.
Idaho’s Department of Correction, in the act of writing a demanding qualification standard, has effectively acknowledged what the evidence independently establishes: that hitting a heart-sized target on a living, restrained person, under the psychological conditions of an execution, is a genuinely difficult marksmanship task rather than a trivial one any competent shooter could perform without special preparation. A state confident that any reasonably proficient officer could reliably strike the target would have no need for a standard this exacting. The standard’s existence is a tacit admission that the task carries real risk of failure, an admission the department has never made explicitly in its public communications but one that is visible to anyone who reads its own training requirements closely.⁶
WHO VOLUNTEERS, AND WHY
One question remains that I cannot fully answer, because the shield laws prevent outside researchers, journalists, and authors from interviewing the individuals who serve on these teams. It is worth asking anyway. What leads a trained, POST-certified law enforcement officer, already exposed daily to violence and its aftermath in the ordinary course of policing, to volunteer for a role the department itself frames, through its qualification standards, as requiring the highest level of proficiency and discipline it can demand?
Some plausible answers are unflattering: a belief that the condemned deserve exactly this, a desire for the institutional respect that comes with selection for an elite assignment, or, where a state offers it, additional pay. Other plausible answers are more sympathetic: a conviction, genuinely held, that if the state is going to carry out these sentences regardless of any individual officer’s participation, better that the person pulling the trigger be someone rigorously trained and psychologically prepared than an unpracticed conscript.
I do not think these motivations can be adjudicated from the outside, and I do not think I should try. What is established is that whatever moves an officer to volunteer, the state has built a system that asks a great deal of that person and offers comparatively little institutional support for what he will carry afterward.
The next chapter turns to the people on the other side of the glass: the witnesses required by law to observe what has been described here, and the role I have spent much of my adult life occupying inside that witness room, accompanying someone through the last minutes the state will allow him.
Notes
011. “Firing squad set to become primary method of execution in Idaho,” IdahoNews.com, June 2026; “Idaho to rely on law enforcement volunteers for firing squad executions,” Police1 (Idaho Statesman/Tribune Content Agency), June 12, 2026 (six POST-certified volunteers, three-year minimum certification, clean twelve-month disciplinary record); Idaho Department of Correction, Standard Operating Procedure for execution by firing squad; Snopes, “Idaho will use firing squad as main execution method beginning July 2026,” June 25, 2026.
022. Kyle Pfannenstiel, “Idaho could be only state with firing squad as main execution method, after Legislature passes bill,” Idaho Capital Sun, March 5, 2025 (Rep. Bruce Skaug telling lawmakers the method would be “mechanized,” and IDOC spokesperson Sanda Kuzeta-Cerimagic stating in February 2025 that the agency was considering “a remote-operated weapons system alongside traditional firing squad methods”); Kevin Fixler, “Idaho plans for firing squad executions aim to keep prison staff from rifles,” Idaho Statesman, 2025 (IDOC spokesperson Blake Lopez on the department’s preference for a remote-operated system). No such system appears in the qualification standards or procedures the department published in June 2026.
033. This account of the historical Utah firing squad protocol, including the use of a blank or wax round among the rifles issued, reflects general historical accounts of Gary Gilmore’s 1977 execution and subsequent Utah practice. See also Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart (Doubleday, 1994), 390, and Chapter 5.
044. “Idaho to rely on law enforcement volunteers for firing squad executions,” Police1, June 12, 2026; “IDOC outlines firing squad procedures as new policy nears implementation,” rexburgstandardjournal.com, June 2026 (the team leader loads one live round into a magazine for each of the three weapons); IdahoNews.com, June 2026.
055. Michael J. Osofsky, Albert Bandura, and Philip G. Zimbardo, “The Role of Moral Disengagement in the Execution Process,” Law and Human Behavior 29, no. 4 (2005): 371–393. The study compared execution-team members, support-team members, and uninvolved guards in penitentiaries in three Southern states, and found that execution-team members exhibited the highest levels of moral disengagement, including moral, social, and economic justification, disavowal of personal responsibility, and dehumanization.
066. On Utah’s qualification standard and blank-round provisions, see “How Utah’s execution by firing squad works,” Standard-Examiner, April 10, 2017, describing the Utah Department of Corrections execution manual, including the twentyone-foot minimum qualification distance, the requirement that the qualification target match the dimensions of the target placed over the condemned person’s heart, and the manual’s references to blank and wax rounds. On Idaho’s qualification standard, see Idaho Department of Correction, Standard Operating Procedure for execution by firing squad; “Idaho will soon turn to firing squad executions, with police pulling the triggers,” Idaho Statesman/Tribune Content Agency, June 11, 2026. On the three hundred dollars paid to Utah’s shooters in 1996, see Chapter 5.