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.
WHAT A WITNESS IS LEGALLY ALLOWED TO SEE
Every method of execution in America is built around a curated visual experience for its witnesses, and the firing squad curates more tightly than most.
In South Carolina’s documented protocol, witnesses sit in a room separated from the execution chamber by bulletproof glass. A curtain opens onto a person already hooded, already restrained in the chair, already reduced, visually, to a torso with a target on it. The witnesses do not see the shooters. They do not see the moment the target is placed, though they may see the doctor who places it withdraw. What they see, per the documented accounts of Sigmon’s and Mahdi’s executions, is a curtain opening, a period of stillness, an unannounced volley of gunfire, a visible reaction in the condemned person’s body, and then, some minutes later, a physician emerging to pronounce death.
That is a narrower visual experience than lethal injection typically offers, where witnesses can usually see the condemned person’s face throughout, from the moment the curtain opens until death is declared. The firing squad’s hood removes that continuity. A witness to a firing squad execution watches, in the most literal sense, less of the actual person and more of the apparatus built around him: the chair, the straps, the target, the concealment. That bears on the candor argument, and it bears on what a spiritual advisor is able to offer someone in that chamber.
RAMIREZ AND THE ARCHITECTURE IT ASSUMED
Ramirez v. Collier, discussed in Chapter 9, established that a condemned person has a substantial legal right, under federal religious liberty law, to have a spiritual advisor present, praying audibly and, where requested, laying hands on him, during his execution.
The case that produced the ruling, John Henry Ramirez’s execution in Texas, took place in the context of lethal injection, where the condemned person lies on a gurney with arms extended: an architecture that permits a spiritual advisor to stand beside the gurney, within arm’s reach, without posing any plausible interference with the mechanics of the execution. The gurney was never going anywhere. The IV line administered its drugs regardless of whether a hand rested on the condemned person’s leg or arm.
The firing squad’s architecture is fundamentally different, and I do not think that difference has been adequately reckoned with by any court, any state corrections department, or, as far as I am aware, any published legal scholarship.
A person restrained in a firing squad chair is positioned so that a clear line of fire exists between the gun ports and his chest. Any other person standing near enough to touch him, in the way Ramirez protects, would be standing in or immediately adjacent to that line of fire, or close enough to it that the state’s security concerns — the same concerns Ramirez required Texas to justify with specificity rather than blanket assertion — would carry far more actual force than they carried in Ramirez’s own case. A prison official objecting to a spiritual advisor’s touch during a lethal injection has to explain what plausible harm that touch could cause. A prison official objecting to a spiritual advisor’s presence within a few feet of a firing squad’s line of fire has a considerably easier case to make, because the physical safety risk to the advisor himself, rather than a security abstraction, is genuine and immediate.
A right Ramirez established as a matter of religious liberty may therefore become close to impossible to exercise in its fullest form inside Idaho’s chamber. A spiritual advisor may be permitted to pray audibly. He may be permitted to stand in the room, or in a designated position within it. But the laying on of hands the Supreme Court protected, the specific, physical, embodied form of accompaniment that distinguishes a spiritual advisor’s presence from a chaplain’s remote blessing read over an intercom, may not be geometrically available in a room built the way Idaho’s F-Block chamber has been built.
I do not know, as of this writing, how Idaho intends to resolve this, because no execution has occurred under the new protocol. I raise it because it will become a live legal and pastoral question the first time Idaho schedules an execution, and because the answer may be that the firing squad, uniquely among methods currently in use, was designed in a way that structurally narrows the accompaniment Ramirez was decided to protect.
THE ADVISOR’S OWN UNCERTAINTY
I do not want to close this section without acknowledging something I have not said elsewhere. I do not know, with certainty, what my presence in these rooms accomplishes for the person I am there to accompany. I believe it does something. I have organized my life around that belief, at real cost. But I should resist describing my own role in language more certain than the evidence supports, given how much of this argument has been devoted to criticizing the state for exactly that kind of overconfident, under-supported certainty.
What I can say, with the same evidentiary caution I have applied to Idaho’s claims, is this. Every person I have accompanied who was able to communicate afterward — in the brief window between a stay of execution and a return to ordinary confinement, or through family members who spoke with them before a completed execution — has told me that having someone present mattered to them, in the specific and limited sense of reducing the isolation of the experience. I have no controlled study establishing that spiritual accompaniment improves outcomes by any measurable standard, because no such study could ethically be constructed, and I would rather acknowledge that absence than paper over it with confident language borrowed from a register I have spent this book criticizing the state for using without support. What I offer is presence, not proof. I believe presence matters enormously. I do not claim to have measured it.
WHAT I HAVE LEARNED FROM NITROGEN
I cannot yet say what standing in a firing squad chamber will require of a spiritual advisor, because I have not done it. I can say what standing beside Kenneth Smith taught me, because that experience is the closest analog available to me, and because it illustrates a pattern I expect to recur no matter what method a state chooses.
Nitrogen hypoxia was marketed, in the months before Alabama first used it in January 2024, in almost exactly the language Idaho’s legislators would later use for the firing squad: sudden, painless, quick, a humane alternative to a method that had repeatedly failed. I stood beside Kenneth Smith’s gurney as his mask was fitted, and I can tell you directly, as someone close enough to see it rather than reading about it afterward, that what I witnessed did not match that marketing. Smith convulsed and heaved against his restraints for several minutes. His breathing was audible, labored, unmistakably a struggle rather than a peaceful transition into unconsciousness.² Witnesses in the room, including members of the press who had covered executions before, described what they saw in terms that echoed my account rather than the state’s advance description of the method.
I recount this not to relitigate nitrogen hypoxia, which is not the subject here, but because the pattern it illustrates is the one already documented for the firing squad, and I expect it to hold for whatever method comes after the firing squad, whenever states decide the bullet, too, has generated too much bad press to remain politically comfortable.
Every method arrives with a promise of certainty and humaneness. Every method, once enough executions have been performed and enough witnesses have been in the room, generates a documented record of failure to meet that promise. The firing squad is not an exception to this pattern. It is the current entry in a very old list, and I have now watched enough entries on that list, in person, close enough to touch the person dying, to say with some confidence that the pattern will not break on its own. It breaks only when the public, and the legislatures the public elects, stop accepting the next method’s promises at face value.
WHOSE JOB IS IT TO CONFIRM DEATH
One detail recurs across nearly every execution account cited so far, regardless of method or state. A physician, in every documented case, is the person who ultimately confirms that death has occurred, stepping forward after the drugs have been administered, the gas has flowed, or the shots have been fired, to perform an examination and pronounce the condemned person dead.
That role sits at an odd intersection of the honesty argument and the witness argument, because the doctor is simultaneously the most medically credentialed person in the room and the person whose presence most directly implicates the medical profession’s own ethical strictures against participation in executions.
Major American medical associations, including the American Medical Association, have long held that physician participation in executions violates core medical ethics, on the theory that a doctor’s professional identity is constituted by healing rather than killing, and that any participation, however minimal, compromises that identity and the public’s trust in it.³ The physicians who nonetheless appear in every account cited here — certifying targets with stethoscopes in South Carolina, pronouncing death after nitrogen hypoxia in Alabama, confirming Thomas Creech’s veins were inaccessible in Idaho —occupy a strange professional position: present because their medical judgment is needed, while formally disavowed by the professional bodies that credentialed them.
I do not know how any individual physician in these rooms squares that tension, and I have no access to interview any of them, given the same anonymity protections already described. But the tension is one more example of the pattern traced throughout: an act the state wants dressed in enough procedural and professional credibility to feel legitimate, performed by people whose own professional and ethical commitments, examined closely, do not endorse what they have been asked to do.
THE REPORTER AS RELUCTANT WITNESS
I have written throughout as a spiritual advisor, because that is the role I occupy. But a significant share of the documented record these pages rely on — Jeffrey Collins’s account of Brad Sigmon’s execution, the Associated Press’s coverage of Mikal Mahdi’s, the reporters who described Kenneth Smith’s and Anthony Boyd’s final minutes — comes from a different kind of witness: the journalist, present in the chamber not by spiritual calling but by professional assignment, often on a rotating basis, often having covered an execution before and knowing, walking in, roughly what the state’s advance materials will claim and roughly how likely those claims are to hold up.
That role deserves its due, because it is easy for a book this critical of state power to overlook how much of its own evidentiary foundation depends on reporters doing an uncomfortable job carefully.
A journalist assigned to witness an execution is not there to advocate for or against the sentence being carried out. The obligation is narrower and, in its own way, harder: to watch closely, remember accurately, and report what they saw, regardless of whether it matches the state’s press materials, and regardless of whether their own outlet’s editorial position leans toward or against capital punishment. Collins’s account of Sigmon’s execution is exactly that kind of disciplined reporting: no editorializing, no argument, a description of a curtain opening, a hood, a crack of rifles, a red stain the size of a fist. That discipline is what makes his account usable as evidence, and it is also what makes state officials, in state after state, so reluctant to expand the number of people permitted to exercise it, a reluctance Chapter 13’s account of Idaho’s own witnessaccess lawsuit documents directly.
That lawsuit, over access to the room where Idaho’s execution team prepares its equipment, is not an isolated skirmish over journalistic convenience. It is a battle over exactly the kind of witnessing just described: an institution’s attempt to keep the number of trained, disciplined, professionally obligated observers as small as the law allows, because every additional witness is one more person capable of contradicting the state’s account afterward, in print, under their own byline, answerable to an editor rather than to the department whose conduct they are describing.
THE WITNESS AS MORAL RECORD
A last word on what witnessing itself is for, because it is easy, reading an argument built substantially on autopsy reports and floor debate transcripts, to lose sight of why firsthand testimony matters at all when the paper record seems to tell the same story.
The paper record tells you that Mikal Mahdi’s autopsy showed two wounds rather than three, and that a pathologist estimated thirty to sixty seconds of conscious suffering. It cannot tell you what it is to stand in a room and hear a man cry out after the shots are fired, then hear him groan while his chest continues to labor for breath his body is quickly running out of ways to draw.
Jeffrey Collins recorded exactly that sequence: a cry, two groans about forty-five seconds after the shots, then roughly eighty more seconds of breathing before what appeared to be a final gasp. David Weiss, Mahdi’s attorney, who called the execution barbaric, insisted afterward on the humanity of the person the autopsy report reduces to a diagram of entry wounds and organ damage.⁴ Testimony like theirs is not merely corroborating evidence for the autopsy’s clinical findings. It is a different kind of testimony entirely, the kind that refuses to let the paper record have the last word.
This is why I have organized my life’s work, imperfectly and at real personal cost, around being present in these rooms rather than writing about them from a distance. A state that kills in private, or in a room witnesses are permitted to see only through a narrow, curated aperture, is counting on the public never having to reckon with an account like Weiss’s or Collins’s: an account from inside the room rather than inside the file.
Every chapter here depends on testimony like that having been given, by witnesses willing to say what they saw rather than accept the state’s advance description of what was supposed to happen. If Idaho’s firing squad chamber is used in the coming years, on Thomas Creech or Gerald Pizzuto or Robin Row or any of the others named in the previous chapter, its record will depend on witnesses willing to do the same: to say, afterward, what they actually saw, whether or not it matches what Representative Skaug promised on the floor of the Idaho House in February 2025. I intend to be one of those witnesses, if I am permitted to be, and this is a statement of that intention, made in advance, on the record, before the first shot is ever fired.
The next chapter turns from witness to ledger: what Idaho’s wager on the firing squad has already cost, in dollars and in litigation, and what it stands to cost still.
Notes
011. On Smith as the first nitrogen execution and Boyd as the longest on record, see Death Penalty Information Center, “Alabama Execution Witnesses Report ‘Violent Thrashing’ of Prisoner and More Than 225 ‘Agonized Breaths’ in Nitrogen Gas Execution,” October 27, 2025; Equal Justice Initiative, “Prolonged Execution in Alabama Raises Alarms,” October 28, 2025; Nicholas Bogel- Burroughs, “Lengthy Execution by Nitrogen Gas in Alabama Renews Concerns Over Method,” New York Times, October 24, 2025; Lee Hedgepeth, “After justices warned of prolonged suffocation, Alabama subjected Anthony Boyd to the longest nitrogen execution in U.S. history,” Tread, October 23, 2025.
022. “Kenneth Eugene Smith executed by nitrogen gas for 1988 murder-for-hire scheme,” Alabama Reflector, January 25, 2024 (Smith convulsed for about two minutes, followed by roughly seven minutes of heavy breathing); “Alabama puts to death Kenneth Smith in first known execution using nitrogen gas,” CNN, January 26, 2024.
033. American Medical Association Code of Medical Ethics, Opinion 9.7.3, on physician participation in capital punishment.
044. The witness sequence — a cry, two groans about forty-five seconds after the shots, and continued breathing for roughly eighty seconds before a final gasp — is drawn from Jeffrey Collins’s Associated Press account of Mahdi’s April 11, 2025 execution. David Weiss, Mahdi’s attorney, described the execution as “barbaric”; see NBC News coverage of the execution.