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.
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, as we have seen, 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.
This is a narrower visual experience than lethal injection typically offers, where witnesses can usually see the condemned person’s face throughout the entire process, from the moment the curtain opens until death is declared. The firing squad’s hood removes that continuity entirely. 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. This matters for the honesty argument, and it matters for what a spiritual advisor is actually able to offer someone in that chamber, a question this chapter turns to directly.
Ramirez and the Architecture It Assumed
Ramirez v. Collier, discussed in chapter nine, 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 this ruling, John Henry Ramirez’s execution in Texas, took place in the context of lethal injection, where the condemned person lies on a gurney, 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 itself. 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 this 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 specifically so that a clear line of fire exists between the gun ports and his chest. Any other person standing near enough to that chair 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 in this context 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, not merely a security abstraction, is genuine and immediate.
This means that a right Ramirez established as a matter of religious liberty may, in practical terms, become close to impossible to exercise in its fullest form inside Idaho’s specific 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 simply 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 question, because no execution has yet occurred under the new protocol. I raise it here because I believe it will become a live legal and pastoral question the first time Idaho schedules an execution, and because I think the honest answer may be that the firing squad, uniquely among execution methods currently in use, was designed in a way that structurally narrows the very 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 plainly elsewhere in this book: I do not know, with certainty, what my own presence in these rooms actually accomplishes for the person I am there to accompany. I believe it matters. I have organized my life around that belief, at real cost. But I should resist the temptation to describe my own role in language more certain than the evidence available to me actually supports, given how much of this book has been devoted to criticizing the state for exactly that kind of overconfident, undersupported certainty.
What I can say, with the same evidentiary caution this book has applied to Idaho’s own 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 do not have a controlled study establishing that spiritual accompaniment improves outcomes by any measurable standard, because no such study could ethically be constructed, and I would rather be honest about that absence than paper over it with confident language borrowed from a register I have spent this entire 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 tell you what standing in a firing squad chamber will require of a spiritual advisor, because I have not done it. I can tell you what standing beside Kenneth Smith taught me, because that experience is the closest analog available to me, and because it illustrates a pattern I believe will 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 same 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 who was 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 own account rather than the state’s advance description of the method.
I recount this not to relitigate nitrogen hypoxia specifically, which is not this book’s subject, but because the pattern it illustrates is the same one already documented for the firing squad, and I expect the same pattern 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 actually been performed and enough witnesses have actually 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 simply 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, decide to stop accepting the next method’s promises at face value, which is the entire purpose of this book.
Whose Job Is It to Confirm Death
One detail recurs across nearly every execution account this book has cited, regardless of method or state, and it deserves its own examination here: 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. This 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 taken the position 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 execution account this book has cited, 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 specifically 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 for themselves, and this book does not have access to interview any of them, given the same anonymity protections already described. But the tension itself is worth naming as one more example of the pattern this book has 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 actually endorse what they have been asked to do.
The Reporter as Reluctant Witness
I have written throughout this book as a spiritual advisor, because that is the role I occupy. But a significant share of the documented record this book relies 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 entirely: 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.
Doug Fabrizio was one of nine journalists Utah admitted to Ronnie Lee Gardner’s execution in 2010. Fourteen years later he was still working out what he had taken part in by watching. He said he remained conflicted, that he believed journalists should be present at these events, and that he kept asking himself whether he was accomplishing anything beyond looking. That is the most honest account of this role anyone has given in the modern firing squad record, and it comes from a man who was in the room by professional assignment and has never been able to file it away.
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. Their obligation is narrower and, in its own way, harder: to watch closely, remember accurately, and report plainly 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 generally. Jeffrey Collins’s account of Sigmon’s execution is exactly this kind of plain, disciplined reporting: no editorializing, no argument, simply 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 in a book like this one, 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 the next chapter’s account of Idaho’s own witness-access lawsuit documents directly.
The media lawsuit chapter thirteen describes, 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 this section has just described, an institution’s attempt to keep the number of trained, disciplined, professionally obligated observers as small as the law allows, precisely 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
This chapter closes on what witnessing itself is for, because it is easy, reading a book built substantially on documented autopsy reports and floor debate transcripts, to lose sight of why firsthand witness 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, the Associated Press reporter who witnessed the execution, 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 kills 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 of this book depends on testimony like that having been given, by witnesses willing to say plainly 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 thing: to say, afterward, plainly, 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 book is, among other things, 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.