I have spent this book taking apart a lie. I want to spend this last chapter on something harder, which is why the lie works.
A lie that nobody believes is not dangerous. It sits in a legislative record, unexamined and inert, and it persuades no one. The lie of the clean kill is dangerous because it is attractive. It has persuaded legislators, and it has persuaded judges, and it has persuaded scholars who have spent their careers documenting the cruelty of American executions. It has persuaded men on death row who had every reason to distrust anything the state offered them. It has, at moments I am not proud of and will describe before this chapter ends, persuaded me.
That is the subject of this final chapter. Not whether the firing squad is clean, which the preceding fifteen chapters have answered, but why the bullet keeps drawing people toward it anyway, including people who want the killing stopped altogether.
Who the Bullet Has Persuaded
Begin with the strongest case, which does not come from Idaho’s legislature or from any advocate of capital punishment. It comes from the Supreme Court, in a dissent written by its most consistent critic of the death penalty.
In 2017, Thomas Arthur, a seventy-five-year-old man on Alabama’s death row, asked to be shot rather than injected. He argued that Alabama’s midazolam protocol would leave him conscious and paralyzed while his body failed, and he proposed the firing squad as the alternative Glossip v. Gross required him to name. The Eleventh Circuit rejected the claim on a single ground: Alabama law did not authorize the firing squad, so it could not be a known and available alternative. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Breyer, dissented, and what she wrote deserves to be quoted at length in a book like this one, because it is the most serious argument for the bullet ever made by anyone hostile to executions.1
Some might find the choice regressive, she wrote, but the available evidence suggested that a competently performed shooting may cause nearly instant death. In addition to being near instant, she continued, death by shooting may also be comparatively painless, and historically the firing squad has yielded significantly fewer botched executions. Condemned prisoners, she added, might find more dignity in an instantaneous death than in prolonged torture on a medical gurney. Of lethal injection itself she wrote that the prisoner is conscious but entirely paralyzed, unable to move or scream, suffering what may be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake. And she named the irony directly: that the method which appears most humane may turn out to be our most cruel experiment yet.2
I do not think that argument can be dismissed, and I have not tried to dismiss it anywhere in this book. It is made in good faith, by a justice who has spent two decades documenting exactly these failures, on the basis of evidence that was accurate when she wrote it. Deborah Denno, whose scholarship on execution methods is as thorough as anyone’s in the American academy, urged policymakers toward the same reconsideration in a 2016 law review article, observing that lethal injection has only gotten worse over the decades.3 A deputy director of Reprieve, an organization that exists to oppose the death penalty worldwide, put the point more bluntly after Brad Sigmon’s execution: it tells you what you need to know about lethal injection that prisoners would rather be shot.4
And then there are the men themselves. Thomas Arthur asked for the bullet. Ernest Johnson, a brain-damaged prisoner in Missouri, asked first for nitrogen gas.5 When the Court held that Missouri could refuse it, he asked for the bullet instead, and was told he had asked too late. The Supreme Court declined to hear him over the dissent of three justices.⁵ Donald Grant and Gilbert Postelle asked for it in Oklahoma and were told they had asked too late. Brad Sigmon chose it in South Carolina because he feared what the state was hiding about its drugs. Stephen Bryant chose it. Jeffery Lee proposed it in Alabama and won. Anthony Boyd asked Alabama for a different method than nitrogen, the firing squad among them, and Alabama refused him, and I stood beside him while the state took nineteen minutes to kill him instead.6
That is the allure, stated at full strength. Not a legislature’s talking point but a convergence: a liberal justice, a leading scholar, an international abolitionist organization, and a long line of condemned men, all arriving at the bullet from different directions and for different reasons. Any honest book about this method has to account for that convergence before it argues against it.
The Allure Was Manufactured
Here is what I think that convergence actually shows, and it is not what it appears to show.
Every person named in the preceding section was answering a question they did not choose. Glossip v. Gross requires a prisoner challenging an execution method to identify a known and available alternative that would significantly reduce the risk of severe pain. He cannot simply prove the state’s method is cruel. He must propose the manner of his own death and then persuade a court that his proposal is better. Justice Sotomayor called this what it is: a macabre challenge.7
Understand what that standard does. It does not ask whether the state should kill this man. It forecloses that question entirely and demands, as the price of admission to federal court, that the condemned become the designer of his own execution. Under that rule, the firing squad is not chosen. It is the only door left in the room. A man who believes the needle will torture him has exactly one way to say so in a way a judge is obliged to hear, and that way is to ask for the gun.
So the pattern of prisoners requesting the bullet, which reads at first like evidence of the method’s humanity, is better read as evidence of the standard’s cruelty. These are not free preferences. They are compelled proposals, extracted by a legal test, from men with no other means of being heard. Chapter nine argued that the choice among methods is not free because the state wrote the menu. This is the same argument one level up: the courts wrote the requirement that there be a menu at all. And notice how the Arthur case actually ended. He proposed the firing squad, and the Eleventh Circuit told him it was unavailable because Alabama had not enacted it. Sotomayor saw the trap and named it: a rule that lets states immunize their execution methods from judicial review, however cruel, simply by declining to authorize the alternative.⁸
Two years later the Court closed that particular trap. In Bucklew v. Precythe the Court held that a prisoner may look beyond the borders of the state that intends to kill him, and that the alternative he proposes need not be authorized under that state’s law. I do not want to understate what that fixed. It is the reason Jeffery Lee could propose the firing squad in Alabama in 2026 and win, as chapter fourteen described. What Bucklew left standing is the part that matters more. A condemned man must still design his own execution in order to be heard at all, and the menu he designs it from is still the state’s. 8
The state controls the menu, and then the state is protected by the shortness of the menu it controls.
That is not a system in which anyone chooses the bullet. It is a system that produces requests for the bullet and then denies most of them.
Missouri suggested the firing squad itself during oral argument in Bucklew. When Ernest Johnson proposed it, Missouri opposed him.
What I Have to Confess About My Own Argument
I have made an argument across this book that can be turned against me, and I would rather turn it myself than leave it lying where someone else can pick it up.
Chapter sixteen argued that the firing squad is more honest than the methods that preceded it. I meant that, and I still mean it. The bullet does not wear the medical costume. There is no gurney dressed as a hospital bed, no IV line borrowed from the language of care, no official statement describing a two-and-a-half-hour failure to find a vein as a difficulty establishing venous access. When the firing squad fails, it fails in the open, in a way that shows up on an autopsy and in a witness’s account of a man groaning while his chest labored.
But I have to be honest about where that argument leads if it is left unattended. If the firing squad is more honest, and if honesty is a virtue, then a reader can arrive at a conclusion I do not hold and have never held: that the bullet is therefore better, and that a state serious about doing this decently should reach for the gun. Justice Sotomayor got most of the way there in 2017 on evidence far thinner than what we now have. I can feel the pull of it myself. I want to describe the moment I felt it most, because it is the reason this chapter exists.
Anthony Boyd knew exactly what nitrogen had done to Kenneth Smith. He had asked Alabama for something else, the firing squad among the alternatives he raised, and Alabama had refused him. So he made a plan. He told me that if he was still conscious after the gas began, he would lift his legs off the gurney, so that the people on the other side of the glass would know. That was the entire instrument available to him. The state controlled the mask and the timing and the protocol and the language of the press release afterward. It did not control his legs.
The gas began at 5:57. He clenched his fist. He raised his head off the gurney. Then he lifted his legs, several inches, exactly as he had said he would.9 By my watch he was conscious and fighting for at least nineteen minutes. Afterward the commissioner told reporters that the shaking and the other movements were involuntary, and that while the execution had taken longer than the others it was only a few minutes past some of them.10
That exchange is this entire book compressed into a single evening. A man arranges, in advance, the only signal his body will still be able to send. He sends it. And the institution that built the room, wrote the protocol, chose the gas, and shielded the record explains to the press that the signal was a muscle spasm and means nothing. There is no autopsy for that. There is no measurement that settles it. There is a state’s account, and there is the account of the one person who was standing close enough to have been told in advance what to watch for.
So yes. Some part of me, the part that stood beside a man for nineteen minutes while he used his legs to say I am still here, understands exactly why Anthony Boyd asked to be shot instead. I would be lying to you if I pretended otherwise, and this book has been about lying.
So let me close that door as plainly as I know how. This book does not rank methods. It has refused to rank them from its first page, and it refuses now. Saying that the firing squad lies less is not saying that the firing squad is better. It is saying that it is worse at concealing what all of them are. Candor about an atrocity is not a mitigation of the atrocity. A state that kills you honestly has still killed you, and the honesty belongs to the observer rather than to the man in the chair, who does not experience the state’s truthfulness as any kind of mercy at all.
The evidence settles the rest. Sotomayor wrote in 2017 that the firing squad had historically yielded significantly fewer botched executions, and she was right about the record as it existed then — three modern American executions, all in Utah, none documented as having failed. That record no longer exists. South Carolina tripled the sample in eight months, and one of those three produced two entrance wounds where three shooters fired, a complaint to the state supreme court, and a pathologist’s estimate of thirty to sixty seconds of consciousness. The empirical foundation of the strongest argument for the bullet was dissolved by the bullet itself, in under a year, in a single state.
What the Word “Clean” Was Always Doing
I want to look directly at the word this book is named for, because I think it has been doing quiet work for a hundred and fifty years and almost nobody examines it.
A clean kill. Consider who that phrase is actually about. Not the person dying. A man shot through the heart does not experience his death as tidy, and a man shot through the liver experiences the difference as thirty to sixty seconds of drowning in his own chest. Cleanliness is not a category available to the person being killed. It is a category available only to the people watching, and to the institution that has to file the paperwork afterward.
Clean means no mess the witnesses have to carry home. Clean means a curtain that opens on a body already hooded and already still. Clean means an autopsy that matches the protocol, a press release that requires no revision, a commissioner who can say he would not necessarily characterize what happened as a problem. Clean means the state’s hands look the same afterward as they did before. Every method this country has adopted has promised cleanliness in exactly this sense, and every method has delivered it, at least most of the time, to everyone except the person on whom it was performed.
This is why the promise renews itself with each new technology. The promise was never falsified for the people it was made to, because it was never made to the condemned. It was made to us. Hanging was replaced when the public could no longer stand what it looked like. The electric chair was replaced for the same reason, and the gas chamber after it, and lethal injection is being replaced now, not because we learned it was agonizing — we learned that decades ago — but because it became agonizing to watch, and unreliable enough to embarrass the states performing it. The firing squad is the current answer to a question about our comfort. It was never a question about their pain.
The lie of the clean kill, then, is not primarily a lie the state tells the public. It is a lie the public accepts because the alternative is to look at something we would rather not see. The state supplies the vocabulary. We supply the appetite for it.
Idaho, Specifically
All of which brings this book back to where it started, which is a room.
On July 1, 2026, Idaho became the only state in the country where the default way of executing a person is to shoot him. It got there by the route this book has traced: eight failed attempts at Thomas Creech’s veins in February 2024, a legislature that passed House Bill 37 by fifty-eight to eleven, a senate that followed twenty-eight to seven, and a governor’s signature in March 2025. Then fourteen months and more than 1.2 million dollars to build the room, during which the state could not execute anyone at all. Then a second law, House Bill 803, exempting the whole apparatus from judicial review and extending anonymity to the shooters and to anyone providing what the statute calls technical assistance, without defining it.11
Eight people are waiting on the other end of that machinery. A man who has been on death row since before some of his prosecutors were born. A man who has been in hospice care inside a prison since 2019, outliving by six years the doctors’ estimate of his remaining life. A woman held alone, two hundred and fifty miles from the men, for whom no protocol was ever designed. A man sentenced at twenty who is approaching fifty. A man whose trial the whole country watched. A man about whom almost nothing was written until this book went looking. And the officers who will be asked to shoot them, drawn from a professional class, qualified at one hundred percent accuracy from seven yards, asked to fire from ten, and denied even the blank round that once let a man tell himself he might not have been the one.
Idaho did not choose the bullet because Idaho concluded the bullet was humane. Idaho chose the bullet because the drugs ran out and a man survived his own execution in front of the state’s own witnesses, and because the bullet was the thing available that looked like an answer. Every state that follows will follow for the same reason. The allure of the bullet is not the allure of mercy. It is the allure of a supply chain the state can actually control.
The Last Thing the Target Has to Say
I have watched twelve of these. I have stood close enough to touch men while states killed them by lethal injection and by nitrogen gas, and I have listened to both methods described in advance as sudden, painless, certain. I have not once watched a method perform the way its advocates promised it would.
So I want to end by saying what I think the phrase in this book’s title actually means, now that the whole argument stands behind it.
The lie of the clean kill is not the claim that this particular bullet will land in this particular heart. That claim is merely false, and this book proved it false with the state’s own autopsies. The lie is larger and older. The lie is that there exists somewhere, in some method not yet perfected, a way for a government to take a restrained and helpless person’s life that will leave everyone involved unmarked — the officers who fire, the witnesses who watch, the public that authorized it, the state that ordered it. That is the promise every method has made. That is the promise the firing squad is making now in Idaho, with a room and a chair and a target the size of a fist. And that is the promise no method has ever kept, because it is not a promise about engineering. It is a promise about escaping consequence, and there is no such thing.
The bullet is alluring because it is fast, and because fast looks like kind, and because a country exhausted by four decades of botched executions badly wants something that finally works. I understand the appeal. I have felt it. But speed is not mercy, and certainty is not innocence, and a method that fails less often than the one before it is still a method for killing people who are already in cages and cannot fight back.
There is a target waiting in F-Block, cut to the size of a human heart. It will be pinned to someone. Everything this book has documented says the state cannot promise where the bullet will land, cannot promise what the man will feel, cannot promise what the officers will carry, and cannot promise the public an execution it will not have to look away from. The state can promise only that it intends to fire.
The clean kill does not exist. It never existed. The bullet did not make it exist, and no method that comes after the bullet will make it exist either. The only clean thing available to Idaho is the thing it has not yet considered: an empty chair, a target unpinned, eight people alive in their cells tomorrow morning, and a rifle that was never loaded because no one was asked to load it.
That is not mercy withheld from the dead. It is honesty finally extended to the living. It is the one outcome that requires no hood, no shield law, no pull-shade, no autopsy, and no lie. And it remains available, every single day, right up until the moment somebody gives the order to shoot.
Notes
011. Arthur v. Dunn, 580 U.S. ___ (2017), No. 16-602 (Sotomayor, J., joined by Breyer, J., dissenting from the denial of certiorari), supremecourt.gov. Arthur proposed the firing squad as his alternative method under Glossip; the Eleventh Circuit held it was not “known and available” because Alabama law did not expressly authorize it.
022. Arthur v. Dunn (Sotomayor, J., dissenting). The phrases paraphrased and quoted here — that a competently performed shooting may cause nearly instant death, that death by shooting “may also be comparatively painless,” that the firing squad has “historically yielded significantly fewer botched executions,” and that lethal injection may prove “our most cruel experiment yet” — appear throughout the dissent. See also Mark Joseph Stern, “Justice Sotomayor Takes Aim at Lethal Injection, ‘Our Most Cruel Experiment Yet,’” Slate, February 21, 2017.
033. Deborah W. Denno, “The Firing Squad as a ‘Known and Available Alternative Method of Execution’ Post-Glossip,” 49 U. Mich. J.L. Reform 749 (2016); Denno, quoted in Associated Press coverage of the Sigmon execution, March 2025.
044. Matt Wells, deputy director of Reprieve US, statement to Newsweek, March 2025. On Sigmon’s stated reasons for selecting the firing squad, see Associated Press and Post and Courier coverage, March 7, 2025, and chapter nine.
055. Johnson v. Precythe, 593 U.S. ___ (2021), No. 20-287 (Sotomayor, J., joined by Breyer and Kagan, JJ., dissenting from the denial of certiorari). Johnson’s operative 2016 complaint proposed nitrogen gas, a method authorized under Missouri law; after Bucklew v. Precythe, 587 U.S. 119 (2019), held that a state could decline nitrogen for lack of a "track record of successful use," Johnson sought to propose the firing squad, and the Eighth Circuit held the proposal untimely. See also Nina Totenberg, "An Inmate Who Sought Execution By Firing Squad Loses Supreme Court Appeal," NPR, May 24, 2021.
066. On Boyd’s request for an alternative method, including the firing squad, and the timeline of his October 23, 2025 execution, see chapter eleven; Sarah Clifton, Montgomery Advertiser, October 23, 2025; 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. On Lee, see chapter fourteen; on Grant and Postelle, chapter fifteen; on Bryant, chapters nine and seventeen.
077. Arthur v. Dunn (Sotomayor, J., dissenting) (describing the Glossip alternative-method requirement as a “macabre challenge”); Glossip v. Gross, 576 U.S. 863 (2015).
088. Arthur v. Dunn (Sotomayor, J., dissenting) (arguing that the Eleventh Circuit’s rule permits States to immunize their execution methods from judicial review and allows state law to subvert the Federal Constitution); Bucklew v. Precythe, 587 U.S. 119 (2019) (holding that a prisoner’s proposed alternative method need not be authorized under the law of the executing state, and that he may identify a method used in other jurisdictions).
099. That Boyd intended to communicate through leg movements was reported at the time by the Associated Press, which noted that his spiritual adviser said Boyd planned to try to signal in that way; see Associated Press coverage of the October 23, 2025 execution, carried by ABC7 and other outlets. On the sequence itself — gas beginning at approximately 5:57 p.m., Boyd clenching his fist, raising his head slightly off the gurney, and then raising his legs several inches before the movements stopped and heaving breaths began — see Associated Press and CBS News accounts of the execution, and Sarah Clifton, Montgomery Advertiser, October 23, 2025.
1010. Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm, in remarks to reporters following the execution, characterized Boyd’s shaking and other movements as involuntary and described the execution as running only a few minutes past some of the others, while acknowledging it was the state’s longest nitrogen execution to that point. See Associated Press coverage, October 23–24, 2025; 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.
1111. On Idaho House Bill 37 (2025), the vote margins, and the March 12, 2025 signing, see chapter three. On the F-Block retrofit cost and timeline, chapter thirteen. On House Bill 803 (2026), chapter thirteen. On the qualification standard and the absence of a blank round, chapter eleven. On the eight people currently under sentence of death in Idaho, chapter ten.