Idaho is one of five states that, as of this writing, explicitly authorize the firing squad by name. Chapter four told South Carolina’s story. This chapter takes up the remaining three — Utah, Oklahoma and Mississippi — along with Florida, which has opened the door to shooting-based executions through an entirely different legislative route, and Indiana, which came within three votes of walking through it, because the pattern of adoption across these jurisdictions tells you something Idaho’s case alone cannot: that the firing squad’s spread is not a series of isolated, unrelated legislative accidents. It is a single, traceable contagion, moving state to state along the same structural fault line, the collapse of lethal injection, and picking up speed as each new adoption makes the next one look less like a radical departure and more like an inevitability. This chapter also documents a case where the contagion was stopped, by three votes, in a state almost nobody expected to stop it.
Utah’s Head Start, Oklahoma’s Unused Statute
Utah, as chapter four detailed, never fully abandoned the firing squad. The state eliminated the condemned person’s open choice of method for anyone sentenced after May 3, 2004, but kept the firing squad on the books as a fallback in the event a court held lethal injection unconstitutional. What changed in 2015 was narrower and, for this book’s purposes, more revealing: House Bill 11, sponsored by Representative Paul Ray and signed by Governor Gary Herbert, added a second trigger, providing that if the substances required for lethal injection are not available on the date specified by the death warrant, the sentence shall be carried out by firing squad.1 Ray himself called it a small policy change to existing statute. It was, in substance, the first modern instance of the pattern this entire chapter traces: not a judgment that shooting a person is better, but a contingency written into law because the drugs had become hard to buy. The same statute directs that the squad consist of five peace officers, the configuration whose vanishing blank round chapter eleven takes up.2 Utah’s relationship to the method, rooted in the regional and religious history already traced, is the oldest and least legally contested of any state’s. All three of the firing squad executions carried out in the United States between 1977 and 2025 took place there.
There would have been a fourth. Ralph Leroy Menzies had been on Utah’s death row since 1988 for the murder of Maurine Hunsaker, and he was one of a small handful of men still holding a preserved election to be shot. A judge signed his death warrant in July 2025, setting the execution for September 5. It never happened. Menzies had vascular dementia, and on August 29 the Utah Supreme Court unanimously vacated the warrant, holding he had made a prima facie showing that his condition had deteriorated enough to require a fresh competency determination. In November the State’s own forensic psychologist — who had twice found Menzies competent — reversed himself and concluded that Menzies no longer understood why Utah intended to kill him, and that his dementia was progressive and untreatable. A hearing was set for December. Nine days after that evaluation, on November 26, 2025, Menzies died of presumed natural causes in a hospital, at sixty-seven, before the court could rule.
Hold that against everything this chapter is about to describe. The state with the deepest and oldest attachment to the firing squad, the one whose statute Idaho’s legislators kept invoking as proof the method is tested and traditional, spent thirty-seven years preparing to shoot a man and could not manage it. He died of ordinary illness in an ordinary hospital bed while the machinery was still arguing with itself. Utah’s row now holds three men. It has produced no new death sentence since 2008. The record, with sources, is set out in Appendix D; what matters here is that the contagion this chapter traces was, in its own point of origin, running down rather than up.
Oklahoma tells a more instructive story, because it is the state that has come closest to using the firing squad without ever actually doing so. Oklahoma’s statute places the firing squad fourth in a hierarchy: lethal injection first, nitrogen hypoxia second, added by the legislature in 2015 and never yet used in the state, electrocution third, and the firing squad last, available only if every method above it has been struck down or become unavailable.3 In January 2022, attorneys for two Oklahoma death row prisoners, Donald Grant and Gilbert Postelle, asked a federal court to let them be executed by firing squad rather than by the state’s three-drug lethal injection protocol, which had produced documented complications in earlier executions, including John Grant’s convulsions and vomiting on the gurney three months before. Their attorney told the court that while the firing squad might be gruesome to look at, everyone agreed it would be quicker.4
The request failed, and the reason it failed is worth stating precisely, because it is not the reason one might assume. U.S. District Judge Stephen Friot denied the men a stay, finding they were unlikely to succeed on the merits of their challenge to lethal injection, and further determined that they had designated the firing squad as their alternative method too late to be included in the separate lawsuit challenging Oklahoma’s protocol. A three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit denied their motion on January 24, 2022, and the Supreme Court denied a stay two days later.5 Donald Grant was executed by lethal injection on January 27, 2022, and Gilbert Postelle on February 17.
That outcome cuts against the simple narrative that states are rushing toward the firing squad out of newfound enthusiasm for the method’s supposed humaneness. Two condemned men, represented by counsel, affirmatively requested the firing squad specifically because they believed it would cause them less suffering than the method the state intended to use. The state opposed the request, the courts denied it on a procedural timing ground, and both men were killed by the method they had asked to avoid. Whatever else this episode demonstrates, it demonstrates that a state’s choice of method is not, in practice, driven primarily by a considered judgment about which method is less painful for the person being killed. Oklahoma’s corrections department confirmed at the time that it had never carried out a firing squad execution, and the method remains, in Oklahoma’s case, an option on paper the state has shown no operational interest in using, even when the men it was preparing to kill were the ones asking for it.
Mississippi’s Cost-Efficiency Clause
Mississippi’s statute is, in some respects, the most quietly troubling of the five states this chapter surveys, because of a single provision buried in its execution method framework. Mississippi law gives the Commissioner of Corrections, along with a small group of other officials, discretion to select among four authorized methods, lethal injection, nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, or the firing squad, and directs that cost efficiency factor into that selection.6 Be direct about what this means: Mississippi has written into law an instruction that the state’s choice of how to kill a person should be informed, in part, by which method costs the state less money.
I do not think it requires an elaborate argument to show why this is morally troubling independent of any question about the firing squad’s own reliability. A cost-efficiency standard applied to the selection of an execution method treats the manner of a person’s death as a line-item budgeting decision, on the same conceptual footing as choosing between two vendors for prison food service or fleet maintenance. Mississippi has never carried out a firing squad execution, and I do not know whether cost considerations have played any documented role in that non-use. But the statute’s language matters regardless of whether it has yet been invoked, because it establishes, as a matter of codified state policy, that the question of which method will cause less suffering is legally subordinate to the question of which method costs less, a hierarchy that should trouble anyone regardless of their broader position on capital punishment.
Indiana: The Contagion Stopped, By Three Votes
It is worth pausing on one state where this chapter’s pattern did not hold, because the exception is instructive and because it happened in a jurisdiction almost nobody would have predicted it. In January 2026, Indiana Representative Jim Lucas introduced House Bill 1119, which would have authorized execution by firing squad or nitrogen hypoxia whenever the commissioner of the Department of Correction determined those methods advisable in light of availability considerations and departmental resources, or upon the condemned person’s own request.7 The justification embedded in the bill’s operative language was the same drug-supply anxiety that has driven every adoption this book has documented. Lucas defended it on the floor in terms that could serve as this chapter’s epigraph: five states currently use both of these methods, he said, and these methods have passed court muster in other states and they have been validated. That is the contagion arguing for itself, out loud, in a legislature.
It did not work. The bill cleared the House Courts and Criminal Code Committee on January 21 by a vote of eight to five, party line except for Representative Jennifer Meltzer, a Republican who joined the Democrats in opposition, over testimony from the Indiana Public Defender Council, the ACLU, and the Indiana Catholic Conference.8 Then it began to come apart on the floor. Representative Alex Zimmerman, a Republican, moved to strike nitrogen hypoxia from the bill entirely, telling the chamber that nitrogen hypoxia is not an acceptable method of carrying out the penalty of death and describing it as putting a mask over someone’s face and pumping nitrogen into their body. His amendment passed fifty-eight to thirty-two with bipartisan support.9 On January 28, the bill itself failed on the House floor, forty-eight votes in favor and forty-seven against, three short of the constitutional majority required for passage, defeated by a bipartisan coalition of nineteen Republicans and twenty-eight Democrats. It could have been called for a second vote before February 2 and was not. A companion Senate measure stalled in committee and died with it.10
Two things about this outcome deserve naming. The first is that a Republican-controlled chamber, given the opportunity to add the firing squad to its statutes with the federal government’s own endorsement six weeks away, declined, and did so in part because Republican members raised precisely the objections this book has been making. Zimmerman’s description of nitrogen hypoxia is, almost word for word, what I witnessed standing beside Kenneth Smith. The evidentiary record this book has assembled is not politically unintelligible to legislators who encounter it; three more votes and Indiana would be the sixth state, but the votes went the other way, and they went that way after debate rather than in spite of it.
The second thing is more sobering, and it is why I have not titled this section a victory. Two of the amendments Indiana’s House adopted before killing the bill are the most humane provisions any legislature has attached to an execution statute in the course of this book’s research: one from Zimmerman requiring that at least one media witness be present at state executions, noting that Indiana and Wyoming are the only states that do not specifically allow journalists to attend, and one from Representative Victoria Garcia Wilburn expanding mental health services for execution team members, including education on resiliency and warning signs.11 That second amendment is a legislature doing exactly what chapter eleven argued no legislature does: recognizing, on the record, that the people asked to carry out an execution bear a documented psychological cost. Both provisions died with the bill that carried them. And reporting in June 2026 indicated that Indiana’s newly constructed prison had been built already equipped to accommodate firing squads, notwithstanding the legislature’s refusal to authorize the method — a reminder that the physical infrastructure of an execution method can precede, and quietly outlast, the democratic decision to permit it.
Florida’s Quieter, Broader Move
The most consequential development of 2025 outside Idaho received a fraction of the attention Idaho’s own transition did, and it happened in the state that has become, by a wide margin, the country’s most active executioner. On May 22, 2025, Governor Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 903, sponsored by Representative Berny Jacques, with a companion measure filed by Senator Jonathan Martin. The law took effect July 1, 2025, and applies to death warrants signed after that date.12
What the law does is best stated precisely, because its structure matters more than any single method it might enable. Florida authorizes lethal injection and electrocution. Under House Bill 903, if either of those methods is held unconstitutional, or if the drugs necessary for lethal injection become unavailable or their use becomes impractical, then all persons sentenced to death in Florida shall be executed by a method not deemed unconstitutional.13 The provision is conditional rather than immediate. But the category it opens is unbounded: it pre-authorizes any method that a court has not yet foreclosed, including methods that do not currently exist in any state’s statute and that no legislature has specifically debated. Contemporaneous coverage of the law understood it, correctly, as opening the door to firing squads, nitrogen gas, and hanging.14
Florida’s law belongs here because it illustrates how much further and how much faster this contagion can spread once a legislature stops naming specific methods and instead grants its corrections department open-ended authority to adopt whatever method a court has not yet struck down. Idaho’s House Bill 37 named the firing squad specifically, with a detailed protocol built around it, and it did so after a floor debate this book has documented at length — a debate that was lopsided and evasive about the evidence, but that at least occurred, on the record, with legislators accountable for their votes. Florida’s 2025 law does something categorically different: it pre-clears an entire category of methods before any specific one has been proposed, vetted, litigated, or even publicly named. This is, in effect, a legislature betting on the same dynamic already described in Glossip v. Gross, that the burden of proving a method unconstitutional falls on the condemned person rather than on the state to justify adopting it.
The stakes of that delegation are not hypothetical, because Florida is not a state where the death penalty sits dormant on the books. In 2025, Florida executed nineteen people, the most in a single year in the state’s modern history and more than double its previous record of eight, set in 1984 and matched in 2014. Nationally, forty-seven people were executed in the United States in 2025, the highest annual total since 2009, and Florida alone accounted for more than a third of them.15 A statute granting open-ended method authority means something different in a state carrying out nineteen executions a year than it would in a state carrying out one a decade. Whatever method Florida’s corrections department eventually reaches for, if lethal injection drugs become unavailable to it, will be applied to a death row the state is emptying faster than any other in the country.
The Shape of the Contagion
The pattern this chapter has traced across five states, one failed adoption, and the federal government deserves a name, because naming it clearly is more useful than treating each jurisdiction’s decision as a separate, unrelated news story. The pattern has three stages, and it recurs with remarkable consistency.
In the first stage, a state or the federal government authorizes the firing squad as a narrow contingency, invoked only if lethal injection becomes unavailable, framed explicitly in terms of drug supply rather than any affirmative judgment about the method’s own merits. Utah’s original statute, South Carolina’s 2021 law, Oklahoma’s and Mississippi’s frameworks, Idaho’s 2023 bill, Florida’s 2025 delegation, and Indiana’s failed 2026 proposal all began, or currently sit, at this stage.
In the second stage, some triggering event, a botched lethal injection like Thomas Creech’s, a court ruling striking down a state’s preferred method like Judge Marks’s injunction against Alabama’s nitrogen protocol, a documented drug shortage, converts the contingency from theoretical to practical, and the state either uses the firing squad for the first time, as South Carolina did in 2025, or elevates it from backup to primary status, as Idaho did in the same year.
In the third stage, the first jurisdiction’s adoption becomes precedent and political cover for the next. Idaho’s legislators could point to South Carolina’s 2025 executions as evidence the method worked, selectively citing Sigmon’s case while largely ignoring Mahdi’s autopsy. The federal Department of Justice could point to five states’ existing statutes as evidence that the method already enjoys broad legislative acceptance. Indiana’s sponsor could point to those same five states and tell his colleagues the methods had been validated. That the argument failed in Indiana by three votes does not mean it will fail elsewhere; it means the third stage is an argument rather than an inevitability, which is precisely the point at which public knowledge of the kind this book has tried to assemble can still make a difference.
Why This Matters More Than Any Single State’s Decision
I opened this book with Idaho because Idaho’s decision is the most legally complete expression of the argument this book makes: a state choosing the firing squad not as an emergency measure but as its considered, primary plan. But this chapter’s survey should make clear that Idaho’s significance lies less in its uniqueness and more in its function as the leading edge of a pattern replicating itself, state to state and now at the federal level, faster than the autopsy evidence in chapters six and seven can circulate widely enough to slow it down. Oklahoma’s unused statute, and the procedural technicality that sent Donald Grant and Gilbert Postelle to a death they had asked to avoid, shows that the method’s spread is not driven by any genuine institutional consensus that it is more humane. Mississippi’s cost-efficiency clause shows that it is not driven by a genuine institutional commitment to minimizing suffering at any cost. Florida’s open-ended delegation shows how little public debate the next expansion may require. And Indiana shows, encouragingly and narrowly, that the argument can still be lost by the people making it.
What Idaho actually represents, then, is not an aberration to be contained within its own borders. It is a demonstration project, watched closely by legislators in Indianapolis and Tallahassee and lawyers in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy alike, of how far a state can push this particular contingency before public attention catches up to what the autopsy reports already show. This chapter closes the documentary portion of this book. Part Five turns from evidence to argument, from what has happened to what it means: what the firing squad, having failed every promise made on its behalf, actually reveals about the nature of the act it was built to perform, and why the bullet keeps drawing people toward it anyway. But I did not want to leave the record behind without naming, plainly, that the target pinned over a heart in Idaho is no longer a uniquely Idahoan image. It is becoming, one legislative session and one court ruling at a time, the target the entire country is being asked to accept — and, in Indiana in January 2026, the target a narrow majority of one legislature declined.
Notes
011. House Bill 11, “Death Penalty Procedure Amendments,” Utah Legislature, 2015 General Session (chief sponsor Rep. Paul Ray; Senate sponsor Sen. David P. Hinkins), le.utah.gov, amending Utah Code §§ 76-2-404, 77-18-5.5, and 77-19-10, and providing “that if substances are not available to carry out the death penalty by lethal injection on the date specified by warrant, the death penalty shall be carried out by firing squad”; Utah Code § 77-18-5.5 (judgment of death — method is lethal injection — exceptions for use of firing squad; lethal injection applies to defendants sentenced on or after May 3, 2004). The bill passed the House 39–34 and the Senate 18–10, and was signed by Gov. Gary Herbert in March 2015. Ray’s characterization of the measure as a “small policy change” appears in “Utah votes to retain firing squad method for planned execution,” Deseret News/KSL, 2015.
022. Utah Code § 77-19-10 (providing that where the judgment of death is to be carried out by firing squad, the executive director or a designee “shall select a five-person firing squad of peace officers,” and that compensation for squad members shall be determined by the director of the Division of Finance).
033. Okla. Stat. tit. 22, § 1014 (manner of inflicting punishment of death, establishing the hierarchy of lethal injection, nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, and firing squad); Death Penalty Information Center, “Methods of Execution.”
044. “Oklahoma death row inmates ask for firing squad instead of lethal injection,” CNN, January 11, 2022; “2 Oklahoma Death Row Inmates Ask for Firing Squads Over Lethal Drugs,” Inside Edition, January 11, 2022 (quoting attorney Jim Stronski); “Oklahoma executes man for killing 2 hotel workers after his firing squad request is denied,” CBS News, January 27, 2022.
055. “Court Denies Oklahoma Death Row Inmates Firing Squad Request, Paves Way For Lethal Injection,” CBS/AP, January 25, 2022 (reporting Judge Friot’s findings, including that the alternative method was designated too late, and the Tenth Circuit’s January 24, 2022 denial); Grant v. Crow, No. 21A360 (U.S. Jan. 26, 2022) (application for stay denied; Gorsuch, J., took no part).
066. Miss. Code Ann. § 99-19-51 (manner of execution of death sentence, providing for selection among lethal injection, nitrogen hypoxia, electrocution, and firing squad, and directing that cost efficiency be considered).
077. House Bill 1119, Indiana General Assembly (2026), iga.in.gov (“Authorizes the death penalty to be carried out by firing squad or nitrogen hypoxia: (1) if the commissioner of the department of correction determines that use of a firing squad or nitrogen hypoxia is advisable in light of availability considerations and the resources of the department; or (2) upon request by the condemned person”); Casey Smith, “Firing squad, gas execution methods move out of House committee,” Indiana Capital Chronicle, January 21, 2026 (quoting Rep. Jim Lucas).
088. Indiana Office of Court Services, “Legislative Update: Execution methods,” January 23, 2026 (recording the 8–5 committee vote and opposition testimony from the Indiana Public Defender Council, the ACLU, and the Indiana Catholic Conference); Smith, Indiana Capital Chronicle, January 21, 2026 (identifying Rep. Jennifer Meltzer as the sole Republican voting no).
099. “Indiana lawmakers remove nitrogen hypoxia from execution bill,” Indiana Capital Chronicle, January 2026 (reporting the 58–32 vote on Rep. Alex Zimmerman’s amendment and quoting his floor remarks).
1010. Death Penalty Information Center, “Bipartisan Support Defeats Indiana House Bill to Add Firing Squad as Execution Method,” February 4, 2026 (48–47 floor vote on January 28, 2026, three short of passage, with nineteen Republicans and twenty-eight Democrats opposed; two not voting and three absent; companion Senate Bill 11 stalled in committee).
1111. “Indiana lawmakers remove nitrogen hypoxia from execution bill,” Indiana Capital Chronicle, January 2026 (media-witness amendment and Rep. Victoria Garcia Wilburn’s mental health amendment); Casey Smith, “Indiana’s new prison already equipped for firing squads as death penalty debate continues,” Indiana Capital Chronicle, June 26, 2026.
1212. House Bill 903 (2025), Florida Legislature; Senate Bill 1604 (2025), Florida Legislature (companion, filed by Sen. Jonathan Martin); “Will Florida use firing squads, hanging, nitrogen gas in executions? New law allows it,” USA Today Network–Florida, May 2025 (reporting the May 22, 2025 signing and July 1, 2025 effective date).
1313. House Bill 903 (2025), Florida Legislature (providing that if electrocution or lethal injection is held unconstitutional, or lethal injection drugs become unavailable or impractical to use, “all persons sentenced to death for a capital crime shall be executed by a method not deemed unconstitutional”).
1414. “Florida bill would open the door to firing squads, lethal gas for executions,” Tampa Bay Times, March 2025; “Death penalty expansion bills await Gov. DeSantis’ signature,” WFLA, May 2025 (quoting Rep. Berny Jacques).
1515. “Florida sets up a third execution in 2026 as state leads US death penalty surge,” Associated Press, January 2026 (nineteen Florida executions in 2025, exceeding the prior record of eight set in 1984 and matched in 2014; forty-seven executions nationally in 2025, the highest total since 2009).