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.
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 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 on the team 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 the qualification outright and is barred from serving.
What this restructuring actually accomplishes is not primarily about marksmanship. Any state that wanted purely 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 actually achieves is legal and reputational insulation. By drawing exclusively from an already-vetted professional class, sworn officers who have already 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 simultaneously 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. This matters because it 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.
There is one further thing worth knowing 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 Nothing in the protocol the department finally published in June 2026 describes such a system, and the qualification standards it did publish plainly assume officers holding rifles. But the fact that it was considered belongs in this chapter, because it shows the direction the engineering instinct runs when a state sets out to solve this problem. Every other concealment described in this book 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
There is a detail buried in the mechanics of Idaho’s protocol that deserves more attention than it has received in press coverage, because it marks a real and significant 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. This was not an incidental detail. It was a deliberately engineered mechanism of psychological diffusion, built directly into the protocol, specifically 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 July 1, 2026 effective date, does not include this mechanism.4 Each member of the shooting team receives one live round. 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 it is worth naming plainly what the change does. It removes the last piece of engineered psychological cover the method has ever offered the people asked to perform it. Every other concealment this book has documented, 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 specifically 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, a mechanism built to let a man walk away from an execution able to tell himself, honestly, that he does not know for certain he killed anyone. Idaho has taken that mechanism away. Whatever else this book has to say about the honesty or dishonesty of the firing squad’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 is worth taking seriously. A study published in the journal 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, the study found that members of the execution team — those closest to the actual killing — relied most heavily on mechanisms of moral disengagement, among them the diffusion of personal responsibility across a larger team, in order to carry out their role. Personnel whose duties were more procedural, or who provided support to families rather than performing the killing, showed markedly less of this disengagement. Which is to say: the diffusion of responsibility Idaho has just engineered out of its protocol is the very mechanism the research identifies as load-bearing.
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 itself, strained relationships with family members who do not know or cannot fully process what the officer’s job has required of them, and in a meaningful number of documented cases, officers who have left corrections work entirely after one or more executions, citing the psychological toll directly. This pattern is consistent enough, across enough different states and different execution methods, that it should 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 and substantial 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 this chapter has already discussed make it difficult to establish this with certainty from outside the department. Other jurisdictions that have used execution teams historically have, in some documented instances, offered modest additional stipends for participation, sums that, set against the psychological risk this chapter’s cited research describes, are difficult to characterize as adequate compensation for the specific harm being asked of the people who accept them. Money is, in any case, an odd currency to try to exchange for the kind of harm at issue here. 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 cited earlier in this chapter associates with this role.
What states more consistently offer, instead of money, 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 it is worth naming plainly that 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, notably, free to the state to offer, which may explain why it has become the currency of choice for a role whose actual costs, this chapter has argued, 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 naming and 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 deserves a second look with the fuller picture this chapter has now supplied, because it reveals something important 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, his decision three years later to leave law enforcement entirely and decline to say exactly why. The harm is real, and the research this chapter has cited suggests it is common, but it is structurally invisible in exactly the way a bullet wound is not, and that invisibility is precisely why a legislature capable of debating autopsy-level detail about a missed heart shot said almost nothing, on the record, 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 own 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.6
This matters because it means Idaho’s own Department of Correction, in the very 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 actual execution, is a genuinely difficult marksmanship task, not 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 qualification standard this exacting. The standard’s very 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 nonetheless visible to anyone who reads its own training requirements closely.6
Who Volunteers, and Why
This chapter closes with a question I cannot fully answer, because the shield laws described above prevent outside researchers, journalists, and authors like myself from interviewing the specific individuals who serve on these teams. But the question 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 the department can demand? Some plausible answers are unflattering: a belief that the condemned deserve exactly this, a desire for the specific kind of institutional respect that comes with being selected for an elite, demanding 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 this book can adjudicate between these motivations from the outside, and I do not think it should try. What this chapter has established is that whatever motivates 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 this and the preceding chapters have described, and to the particular role I have spent much of my adult life occupying inside that witness room: the spiritual advisor, 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”). 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.
044. “Idaho to rely on law enforcement volunteers for firing squad executions,” Police1, June 12, 2026; 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 found that execution-team members exhibited the highest levels of moral disengagement — including moral, social, and economic justification, disavowal of personal responsibility, and dehumanization — compared with support-team members and uninvolved guards.
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 twenty-one-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.