I said in the introduction that the firing squad strips away more of the euphemism surrounding execution than any other method currently in use, and that this starkness represents both the method’s one virtue and its final indictment. That argument can be made in full now, with fourteen chapters of specific evidence standing behind it.
The Honest Number
First the record it rests on, fixed as exactly as I can fix it, because the number gets rounded in both directions by people with a stake in it. Six executions by firing squad have been carried out in the United States in the modern era. Three took place in Utah, in 1977, 1996 and 2010, and the public record does not describe any of them as having failed in the way South Carolina’s did, though neither does it contain documentation of the kind South Carolina has now produced. Three took place in South Carolina inside eight months in 2025. Of those three, Brad Sigmon’s autopsy showed three distinct wounds, all in the intended vicinity of the heart. Stephen Bryant made no sound; witnesses watched the bullseye fly forward off his chest, saw a few shallow breaths, and then a final spasm a little over a minute later. Mikal Mahdi’s execution produced two entrance wounds where three shooters had fired, a formal complaint to the South Carolina Supreme Court, and a retained pathologist’s estimate of thirty to sixty seconds of conscious life after the volley. The South Carolina Department of Corrections disputes that account, maintaining that all three rounds were fired, that two entered through a single wound along the same path, and that its protocol was followed.1
So the honest number is not a clean three and three. It is one execution the record clearly shows went as designed, one the record clearly shows did not, one that appears to have gone as designed, and three older cases with no comparable documentary record. Notice how little of that is actually knowable. Half the modern history of this method predates any serious post-execution pathology. Of the half that does not, a third produced a contested autopsy. This is not a body of evidence capable of supporting a promise of certainty. It is barely a body of evidence at all, and Idaho treated its thinness as though thinness were reassurance.
The Candor That Indicts Itself
Here is the argument, now that the case is built: the firing squad’s failure to deliver on these four promises is not a unique moral catastrophe, distinguishable from every other method of execution this country has used. Lethal injection has failed the same four promises, differently. Oklahoma pressed ahead with an experimental midazolam protocol over repeated defense warnings and botched Clayton Lockett’s execution in April 2014. Alabama spent roughly two and a half hours hunting for a vein in Doyle Hamm in February 2018, leaving him with ten to twelve puncture wounds, six of them in his groin, and puncturing his bladder and femoral artery before the attempt was abandoned; the state later settled a civil rights suit and agreed never to try again. Alabama spent at least ninety minutes on Alan Miller in September 2022, puncturing him roughly eighteen times before calling it off, and eventually agreed that any future attempt on his life would use nitrogen instead.2 The electric chair failed the same promises for a century before any of this. Nitrogen hypoxia, as I witnessed directly with Kenneth Smith, is failing them now, in real time, even as its own advocates market it with the identical vocabulary Idaho’s legislators used for the bullet.
None of this is aberrational. In 2022 alone, seven of nineteen American execution attempts went wrong by the Death Penalty Information Center’s accounting, a failure rate of roughly thirty-seven percent.3 And an NPR analysis of more than two hundred autopsies of prisoners executed by lethal injection found that eighty-four percent showed evidence of pulmonary edema, the lungs filling with fluid, a condition experts have compared to the sensation of drowning.4 The machinery has been failing for a long time. What has changed is only how visible the failure is.
What makes the firing squad worth a book of its own is not that its failure is somehow worse than these other methods’ failures, though the evidence suggests it may be at least as severe. What makes it worth a book of its own is that its failure is harder to hide, precisely because the method itself refuses the medical costume every other method has relied on to make its failures look, to an inattentive public, like something other than what they are. When lethal injection fails, the failure can be described, and often is described in official statements, in language borrowed from medicine: a difficulty establishing venous access, a phrase that sounds like a clinical complication rather than what it actually is, a state failing, repeatedly, to kill a man it has strapped to a gurney. Alabama’s corrections commissioner, asked about the aborted attempt on Doyle Hamm’s life, offered the purest specimen of this vocabulary I have found anywhere in the record: “I wouldn’t necessarily characterize what we had tonight as a problem.”5
When the firing squad fails, there is no equivalent vocabulary available. There is only an autopsy showing two entrance wounds instead of three, a witness account of a man crying out and groaning while his chest labored for breath, a target that visibly failed to land where it was supposed to land. The bullet cannot be described euphemistically in the way a needle can. This is why Idaho’s turn to the firing squad, whatever its architects intended, may end up doing something no state execution method has done in decades: forcing the public to look directly at what an execution actually is, because the method itself no longer offers anywhere comfortable to look instead.
A Note on What “Revealing” Does Not Accomplish
One possible misreading of this chapter’s central claim needs guarding against before its conclusion. To say that the firing squad reveals the true nature of execution more clearly than lethal injection did is not to say that this revelation, on its own, accomplishes anything. Clarity is not the same thing as consequence. The firing squad could, in principle, strip away every euphemism this book has catalogued, force the entire public to look directly at exactly what an execution is, and still fail to change a single vote in the Idaho legislature, a single line in the DOJ’s report, or a single policy in any of the states and jurisdictions surveyed in the previous chapter. Revelation creates the possibility of a different public reckoning. It does not guarantee one.
This is why this book has not rested its argument on the hope that clarity alone will produce abolition. The evidence is offered because it is true and because readers deserve to know it, not because I believe true information reliably produces the political outcomes that seem, to me, to follow from it. Legislatures have looked directly at documented suffering before, in the botched lethal injections and the autopsy reports this book has walked through in detail, and have proceeded regardless. The firing squad’s candor is real. Its capacity to change minds already committed to a different conclusion is not something this book can promise, only something this book can hope for. Chapter fifteen documented one legislature that did change course, in Indiana, by three votes. It also documented five states and a federal government that did not.
The Question the Euphemism Was Built to Avoid
Every method of execution this country has adopted, hanging, the electric chair, the gas chamber, lethal injection, nitrogen hypoxia, has been sold to the public using some version of the same rhetorical move: this method, unlike the one before it, will finally be humane. That rhetorical move only works because it assumes the actual question, whether a state should be in the business of killing restrained, unarmed people at all, has already been settled, and all that remains is a technical question of manner. The entire history this book has told, from Idaho’s failed attempts with Thomas Creech to South Carolina’s autopsied firing squad failures to nitrogen hypoxia’s own documented struggles, is a history of that technical question being asked, answered, found wanting, and re-asked with a new method, over and over, for half a century, without the underlying assumption ever being revisited.
It deserves revisiting directly, because the firing squad’s peculiar candor, its refusal to dress itself in medical language, makes this the right moment. Consider what Idaho’s own record actually consists of. The state has carried out three executions since capital punishment was reinstated, in 1994, 2011, and 2012, all by lethal injection. It has not executed anyone in fourteen years. Its one attempt in that period, on Thomas Creech in February 2024, ended after roughly an hour of failed venous access and was abandoned. Its response was not to reconsider whether the sentence could be carried out at all, but to spend more than 1.2 million dollars and fourteen months building a room for a different method.6 If a state cannot reliably kill a restrained person without a documented, non-trivial risk of thirty to sixty seconds of conscious suffering, using a method its own legislature examined with more scrutiny and more recent evidence than any previous method transition in American history, and if that same state has now cycled from one method to the next in search of one that will finally work, while the neighboring case of nitrogen hypoxia I witnessed directly shows the identical pattern unfolding on the identical timeline, then the honest conclusion is not that the state needs a better method. The honest conclusion is that no method exists that will deliver what every one of these methods has promised, because the promise itself, painless, instant, dignified death delivered to an unwilling, restrained human being by other human beings acting on the state’s behalf, may simply describe something that does not exist and cannot be engineered into existence, no matter how much money a legislature appropriates or how rigorous a marksmanship qualification it demands.
If the Public Can Watch and Still Consent
I said in the introduction that I do not expect every reader of this book to arrive at abolition, and that holds here, in the chapter where the book’s argument reaches its fullest statement. Some readers will finish this book, having read every autopsy detail and every account of Mikal Mahdi’s final minute, and will conclude that the state should simply try harder, engineer better, qualify its shooters more rigorously, restore the blank round Idaho abandoned, and continue. I think that conclusion is available to a careful reader, even if I do not share it.
But I want to name plainly what that conclusion actually requires a person to accept, because I do not think it can be accepted casually once the evidence in this book has been fully absorbed. It requires accepting that a society is willing to watch, in as much documented detail as this book has provided, exactly what happens when the state’s engineering fails, thirty to sixty seconds of a conscious man’s suffering, and conclude that the correct response is refinement rather than reconsideration. If the public can look at that record and still consent to the practice, dressed in whatever procedural improvements the next legislative session proposes, then the problem this book has been documenting was never really about the method at all. Method was always, at most, the vessel. The thing the public is actually consenting to, method notwithstanding, is the deliberate killing of a restrained person by the state, and no amount of marksmanship training changes what that act fundamentally is.
The Argument From the Other Side
I have made this book’s case as forcefully as the evidence supports, and this chapter closes by taking seriously the strongest form of the argument on the other side, because a case that cannot survive contact with its best opposition is not a case worth making.
That argument has a real empirical foundation, and readers deserve to see it stated at full strength rather than in caricature. In Gruesome Spectacles, his 2014 study of botched executions in America between 1890 and 2010, the Amherst political scientist Austin Sarat examined 8,776 executions and found that 276 of them went wrong in some way. Broken down by method, his data produced a striking result: lethal injection had the highest botch rate of any method in American history, roughly seven percent, while the firing squad had a botch rate of zero.7 Those figures have been cited in law review articles arguing for the firing squad over lethal injection, and they have been cited by the Supreme Court itself. Anyone who wants to defend Idaho’s choice has, in Sarat’s numbers, a serious argument to make, and it is not an argument this book can wave away.
Two things complicate it. The first is methodological, and it comes not from abolitionists but from a critic writing against Sarat: the law professor Michael Conklin has argued that the zero percent firing squad figure omits documented instances of firing squad executions that plainly went wrong, while the lethal injection figure relies on a definition of “botched” so expansive, encompassing difficulty inserting an IV, a prisoner who resists, or a death pronounced fourteen minutes after the drugs began, that the comparison between the two numbers cannot bear the weight placed on it.8 I cite Conklin not because his critique helps this book’s argument, since in some respects it cuts against it, but because a reader deciding what to believe about firing squad reliability deserves to know that the single most-cited statistic on the subject is contested in the scholarly literature.
The second complication is simply that Sarat’s data ends in 2010, and the firing squad’s zero percent rested on a sample of three modern executions, all in Utah. In 2025, South Carolina tripled that sample in eight months. Whatever one concludes about Sigmon’s execution, Mahdi’s produced a contested autopsy, a formal complaint to the South Carolina Supreme Court, and a retained pathologist’s estimate of thirty to sixty seconds of consciousness after the shots. A zero percent botch rate calculated before April 2025 is not a statement about the method. It is a statement about a sample too small to have encountered its own failure yet.
Even with those complications noted, the strongest version of the pro-firing-squad argument survives, and it deserves stating fairly. It does not rest on the claim that the method is painless; that claim cannot survive Mikal Mahdi’s autopsy. It rests instead on a narrower, more defensible claim: that some crimes are severe enough that the state’s interest in carrying out a death sentence outweighs a documented but statistically modest risk of a prolonged death, particularly when the alternative, continued reliance on lethal injection, carries a comparable or worse documented risk of its own, as the record of Lockett, Hamm, and Miller has shown.
This is not a frivolous argument, and I do not think this book has fully defeated it simply by cataloguing failures. A reader who believes retribution is a legitimate purpose of punishment, who believes Thomas Creech’s or Chad Daybell’s crimes warrant death regardless of the method’s imperfections, can accept all of it and still conclude that the firing squad, imperfect as it is, remains an acceptable tool for a legitimate state purpose, in the same way a surgeon might accept a small, documented risk of complications as the cost of performing a necessary operation. I do not share that conclusion, for the reasons the introduction and this book’s closing chapter lay out. But I want to name it honestly, because I think readers who hold it deserve better than to have their position caricatured as simple ignorance of the facts this book has presented. The disagreement that remains, after all the evidence is on the table, is not a disagreement about what the firing squad does. It is a disagreement about whether a state’s interest in retribution justifies accepting that documented risk at all, a question this book has tried to answer but cannot claim to have settled for every reader.
What the Target Reveals About the Target-Setters
This chapter ends with an image rather than an argument, because the image says what the argument has been building toward more efficiently than another paragraph of analysis could.
Idaho’s Department of Correction requires its shooters to qualify against a target built to the exact specifications of the one that will eventually be pinned to a living human being’s chest, and to hit it with every round, from every assigned firearm, at a qualification distance the protocol sets no farther out than seven yards — while the shot itself is taken from ten.9 Before any of Idaho’s eight condemned residents ever sits in that chair, the officers assigned to kill them will have fired, repeatedly, at an object built to simulate a heart, until hitting it becomes routine, becomes muscle memory, becomes something the body can do without the mind fully engaging with what it is rehearsing to do. This is not a minor operational detail. It is the entire method in miniature: a state that has decided the correct response to the difficulty of killing a person reliably is more practice, more precision, more engineering, applied to an act that the evidence of this book’s first fourteen chapters suggests cannot actually be made reliable, humane, honest, or freely chosen, no matter how much practice is applied to it.
Notes
011. On Sigmon: Jeffrey Collins, Associated Press, account of the March 7, 2025 execution, and the state-commissioned autopsy as reviewed by NPR. On Bryant: “South Carolina executes third person by firing squad this year,” South Carolina Public Radio, November 14, 2025. On Mahdi: Chiara Eisner, “A firing squad tried to shoot a prisoner in the heart. They missed, autopsy indicates,” NPR, May 8, 2025; Death Penalty Information Center, May 13, 2025. On the department’s response, see the filings described in chapter six.
022. Death Penalty Information Center, “Botched Executions” database entries for Clayton D. Lockett (Oklahoma, April 29, 2014), Doyle Lee Hamm (Alabama, February 22, 2018), and Alan Miller (Alabama, September 2022); “Botched Executions: Infamous Examples of Trouble on Death Row,” A&E, September 22, 2025 (on the Hamm settlement barring a second attempt).
033. Death Penalty Information Center, “As Lethal Injection Turns Forty, States Botch a Record Number of Executions” (seven of nineteen execution attempts in 2022, approximately thirty-seven percent), citing Austin Sarat in Slate, November 21, 2022 and The Conversation, November 29, 2022.
044. NPR analysis of more than two hundred autopsies of prisoners executed by lethal injection (2020), finding evidence of pulmonary edema in eighty-four percent, as cited by the Death Penalty Information Center.
055. Alabama Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn, quoted in Death Penalty Information Center, “Botched Executions,” regarding the aborted February 22, 2018 execution attempt on Doyle Lee Hamm.
066. On Idaho’s three post-Gregg executions (1994, 2011, 2012) and the fourteen-year gap since: IdahoNews.com, June 2026; Police1, June 12, 2026. On the Creech attempt and the cost and duration of the F-Block retrofit, see chapters two and thirteen.
077. Austin Sarat, Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty (Stanford University Press, 2014), examining 8,776 executions between 1890 and 2010 and identifying 276 as botched; Death Penalty Information Center, “BOOKS: ‘Gruesome Spectacles’ Reveals the History of Botched Executions.”
088. Michael Conklin, “Botched Statistics on Botched Executions: Refuting Austin Sarat’s Claims,” Mitchell Hamline Amicus Curiae (May 19, 2022), available at SSRN (arguing that the zero percent firing squad rate omits documented botched firing squad executions and that Sarat’s definition of a botched lethal injection is unworkably broad).
099. Idaho Department of Correction firing squad qualification standard, as described in chapters six and eleven; “Idaho to rely on law enforcement volunteers for firing squad executions,” Police1, June 12, 2026.