Laws do not arrive fully formed. House Bill 37 had a lineage, and understanding that lineage tells you something House Bill 37’s floor debate alone does not: that Idaho’s turn to the firing squad was never a single decision made in a single session, but the last step in a multi-year escalation, each step justified by the step before it, each one making the next easier to vote for.
From Alternative to Primary
In 2023, the Idaho legislature passed a bill authorizing the firing squad as an alternative method of execution, available only if lethal injection proved unavailable.1 This is worth pausing on, because the framing at the time was explicitly modest. Lawmakers were not, in 2023, arguing that the firing squad was a superior method on its own merits. They were closing a gap: Idaho had a death penalty statute and eight people sentenced to die under it, and no reliable way, given the pharmaceutical supply problems described in the previous chapter, to actually carry out that sentence. The firing squad was pitched as a backstop, a method the state could fall back on if its primary tool broke, in the same way a hospital might keep a generator in case the power grid fails.
The 2024 failure with Thomas Creech changed the political math entirely. A backstop that has never been tested is easy to authorize with a light touch, framed as a hypothetical contingency. A backstop that the state has just needed and, notably, did not use, because it had not yet built a chamber capable of deploying it, becomes something else: evidence, wielded on the floor of the legislature, that the primary method has already failed and the fallback should become the plan. House Bill 37, introduced in January 2025 with sixteen Republican co-sponsors, did exactly that.2 It did not add the firing squad to Idaho’s menu of methods. It inverted the menu, making the firing squad Idaho’s default choice and lethal injection the fallback, the mirror image of where the law had stood eighteen months earlier.
The vote counts deserve to be stated precisely, because the near-unanimity matters. The House passed the bill 58 to 11 on February 6, 2025. The Senate passed it 28 to 7 on March 5.3 Only three Republican legislators across both chambers broke from their caucus to vote no, joining all fifteen Democratic legislators in the Senate and House who opposed it. Governor Little signed the bill on March 12, 2025, setting a July 1, 2026 effective date, more than fifteen months out, explicitly to give the Department of Correction time to build the chamber described in chapter one and to recruit and train a shooting team.
The Floor Debate
The floor debate deserves its due, because the language legislators used to defend the bill is the language this whole book exists to interrogate. Representative Bruce Skaug of Nampa, the bill’s chief sponsor, framed the choice in terms of failure rates: lethal injection, he argued, carried something like a six or seven percent failure rate, citing Creech’s case as exhibit one. “We needed something that was sure and humane,” Skaug said, “and firing squad is humane because it is sudden, it is quick, and it is certain.”4 Notice the structure of that sentence. Three adjectives, sudden, quick, certain, are offered as though they are synonyms, as though speed alone guarantees the other two qualities. Chapters six and seven exist because that equation does not hold.
Other legislators went further into the register of mercy. Senator Brian Lenney called death by firing squad “an act of mercy.”5 This is not a phrase I can let pass without comment, and I will not pretend to charity I do not feel: mercy is not a word that belongs anywhere near a plan to fire three rifle rounds into a restrained human being’s chest. But Lenney was not alone, and not every voice in that debate reached for comfortable language. Senator Doug Ricks of Rexburg, the bill’s Senate co-sponsor, carried it on the floor on practical grounds. And at least one senator broke from the celebratory tone entirely. Senator Dan Foreman, addressing his colleagues directly, pushed back on the claim of instantaneity: “The claims that it’s instantaneous. Well, yes, sometimes it is, sometimes it is not. And if you’ve ever seen that, I think you would change your mind on how you’re about to vote.”6 Foreman, a combat veteran and retired police officer, was the only Senate Republican to vote no. His colleagues voted 28 to 7 anyway.
Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow offered the debate’s clearest dissent. “It’s barbaric,” she said, “and it unfortunately puts the optics of Idaho in a place that I don’t think we care to be.” She called the bill “a move backward.”7 Wintrow’s objection and Foreman’s warning were not fringe positions shouted down by an unhearing chamber. They were made on the floor, in public, by legislators who had access to the same information every reader of this book now has access to. The vote happened anyway. That is not a failure of information. It is a choice, made with eyes open, about what kind of certainty a state is willing to settle for when the alternative is admitting that it might not be able to kill people reliably at all.
A Bishop’s Warning, and What the State Did With It
Not every objection came from the legislative floor. Idaho’s Catholic bishops spoke publicly against the bill as it moved through committee, warning, in comments to Catholic News Agency and elsewhere, against what one bishop called a “culture of death” that the state was choosing to entrench rather than abandon.8 Governor Little’s response, delivered in the same interview cycle, is worth quoting because of how little it engages the substance of the objection: “I have long made clear my support of capital punishment,” Little said. “My signing of this bill is consistent with my support of the Idaho Legislature’s actions in setting the policies around methods of execution in the state of Idaho.”9 That is not a rebuttal. It is a restatement of institutional momentum, a governor declining to argue the merits because the merits were never really the point. The point was that lethal injection had become logistically unreliable, the courts kept entertaining challenges to it, and the firing squad offered a method built from parts, rifles, bullets, trained shooters, that no pharmaceutical company could withhold and no drug shortage could interrupt.
A Parallel Expansion: Capital Punishment for Child Rape
House Bill 37 did not move through the legislature alone. In the same session, lawmakers advanced a second, related bill extending Idaho’s death penalty to a new category of offense: what the statute terms “aggravated lewd conduct with a minor” under the age of twelve. That bill passed the Idaho House unanimously in March 2025 and the Senate by a vote of 30 to 5 later that month. Governor Little signed it March 27, 2025, with a July 1, 2025 effective date, a full year ahead of the firing squad law.10
I raise this here, in a book primarily about execution method, because the two laws are not unrelated developments that happened to share a legislative session. They are companion pieces. One law expands who can be sentenced to death in Idaho. The other builds and designates the method that will be used to kill them. Read together, they represent a legislature simultaneously widening the funnel and re-engineering the machine at the funnel’s end.
The child-rape provision sits in direct tension with existing constitutional law. In Kennedy v. Louisiana, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008, the justices held 5 to 4 that the Eighth Amendment bars the death penalty for the rape of a child where the crime did not result, and was not intended to result, in the victim’s death.11 Idaho’s legislators were not unaware of this precedent. Some framed the new law explicitly as an invitation to the current Supreme Court to revisit Kennedy, wagering that a more conservative bench than the one that decided the case in 2008 might be willing to narrow or overturn it.12 Whether that wager succeeds is a live legal question well outside this book’s scope. What is squarely within this book’s scope is the fact that Idaho’s legislature, in expanding the pool of people who might eventually face execution, chose that same session to finalize the method it intends to use on them. If the child-rape statute survives constitutional challenge, or is used to secure guilty pleas and sentences under its shadow even before a court rules, the room described in chapter one is the room those sentences will ultimately be carried out in.
Sixteen Names on the Bill
House Bill 37’s sixteen co-sponsors are worth naming as a group, if not individually, because the number itself tells a story about how legislation like this actually moves through a state house. Sixteen co-sponsors on a bill’s introduction is a substantial bloc in a chamber the size of Idaho’s House, enough to signal to the rest of the caucus, before a single floor speech is given, that leadership considers the measure a priority worth whipping votes for rather than a fringe proposal to be quietly buried in committee. Bills with this level of co-sponsorship at introduction rarely fail in Idaho’s current political environment, and House Bill 37’s eventual 58 to 11 margin reflects, in that sense, less a persuasive floor debate changing minds and more a bill whose outcome was substantially locked in before the debate this chapter has described ever began.
I raise this because it bears on how readers should weigh the floor debate itself. This chapter has taken Representative Skaug’s, Senator Lenney’s, Senator Foreman’s, and Senator Wintrow’s floor statements seriously as genuine arguments rather than theater. I continue to believe that is the right way to read them. But it is also worth being clear-eyed about the structural context surrounding those statements: a bill introduced with sixteen co-sponsors, in a chamber where Republicans hold a commanding supermajority, was never going to be defeated by Senator Foreman’s warning or Senator Wintrow’s dissent, however substantively serious those statements were. The floor debate quoted above was a genuine airing of the issues. It was not, by the time it occurred, a genuinely open contest over the bill’s fate.
Reading the Floor Debate as Argument, Not Theater
It is tempting, watching a bill pass by a 58 to 11 and 28 to 7 margin, to conclude that the floor debate was theater, a formality preceding a foregone conclusion. That reading lets the legislature off too easily. The debate was substantive. Representative Skaug’s framing of the choice in terms of failure rates, discussed in chapter one, was a genuine argument, built on a real statistic, that a specific and identifiable audience found persuasive. Senator Lenney’s description of the bullet as “an act of mercy” was a genuine theological and moral claim, however wrong I believe it to be, not a throwaway line. And Senator Foreman’s warning, and Senator Wintrow’s dissent, were genuine counterarguments, made by legislators with access to exactly the same information advocates were using, and made in public, on the record, before the vote.
What the debate shows, read honestly, is not an uninformed legislature stumbling into a bad law. It shows an informed legislature weighing a known, documented risk, the possibility that the firing squad would fail to kill quickly and painlessly in some non-trivial share of cases, against a competing value, the state’s interest in being able to reliably carry out death sentences without depending on a pharmaceutical supply chain it cannot control. The legislature chose the latter value, by a lopsided margin, with the risk named clearly on the record beforehand. That is a more damning finding than incompetence would be. Incompetence can be corrected by better information. A considered choice, made with full information, to prioritize procedural reliability over the documented risk of a slow and conscious death, is a statement about what the state actually values, and no quantity of better information will change a value.
Who Spoke Against It, and Who Did Not
It is worth naming, more fully than the previous section allowed, exactly who stood publicly against House Bill 37, because opposition to a bill that passed by 58 to 11 and 28 to 7 can look, in retrospect, smaller and more marginal than it actually was. The bishops’ objection, quoted above, rested on the state’s obligation to protect life at every stage, a position consistent with longstanding Catholic teaching against capital punishment generally, articulated at the national level by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and reinforced by Pope Francis’s 2018 revision of the Catechism explicitly declaring the death penalty inadmissible in all circumstances.13 Idaho’s bishops were not a fringe voice within their own tradition; they were applying settled doctrine to a specific piece of state legislation, and Governor Little’s response, quoted above, did not engage that doctrine so much as restate his own settled political commitment to capital punishment, a commitment that predates and appears entirely unmoved by the specific method under discussion.
Democratic legislators in both chambers voted uniformly against the bill, a unanimity that is itself worth noting: in a state where Democrats hold a small enough minority that their votes rarely determine outcomes, a unified no vote functions less as a legislative strategy and more as a recorded moral position, a statement for the record regardless of the vote’s practical effect.14 Senator Wintrow’s floor remarks, quoted above, were the most extensive public articulation of that position, but she was not alone in casting it, and the historical record deserves to reflect that the bill’s near-unanimity among Republicans was matched by an equally uniform opposition among the chamber’s small Democratic caucus, a polarization along party lines that is itself a data point about how thoroughly capital punishment policy in Idaho, as in much of the country, has become a matter of partisan identity rather than case-by-case moral reasoning.
A State Out of Step With the National Trend, and Exactly in Step With Its Own Electorate
House Bill 37 passed against a national backdrop that makes its lopsided margin look, at first glance, harder to explain. Nationally, public support for the death penalty has been falling steadily since 1994, when Gallup recorded eighty percent of Americans in favor. By October 2025, that figure had fallen to fifty-two percent, the lowest level in over fifty years, with opposition, at forty-four percent, higher than at any point since 1966.15 The decline is sharpest among younger Americans: as of Gallup’s 2025 polling, only forty-one percent of adults eighteen to thirty-four favored capital punishment, compared to sixty-two percent of adults over fifty-five. The same polling shows the issue has become sharply partisan in a way it was not a generation ago: eighty-two percent of Republicans favored the death penalty in 2025, essentially unchanged from 2000, while support among Democrats fell from fifty-six percent to just thirty-two percent over the same period, and support among independents fell by twenty-one points.
Idaho’s legislature was not, however, voting against its own electorate’s wishes. State-level polling compiled by the Public Religion Research Institute found Idaho among the small handful of states with the highest support for capital punishment’s legality anywhere in the country, at seventy percent, trailing only Alaska and tied closely with Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming.16 Read alongside the national Gallup trend, this local data resolves what might otherwise look like a puzzle: House Bill 37 passed by a lopsided, near-unanimous Republican margin not because Idaho’s legislature was defying its constituents’ evolving views, but because Idaho’s constituents, unlike the national electorate as a whole, had not meaningfully moved away from supporting the death penalty at all. The bill’s sponsors were not taking a political risk. They were reflecting back to their own voters a preference those voters had already made clear, in a state where the erosion of support driving national polling numbers downward, concentrated heavily among younger voters and Democrats, describes a demographic that carries comparatively little electoral weight in Idaho’s own politics.
Who Objected, Beyond the Statehouse
The ACLU of Idaho offered one of the more pointed outside assessments of why the state moved when it did, attributing the shift to a combination of factors: the same declining national support for capital punishment just described, the well-documented difficulty in acquiring lethal injection drugs, and what the organization called the government’s concern about the “optics” of a botched execution attempt.17 The organization did not present the firing squad as a solution to any of these problems. “To be clear,” the ACLU of Idaho said in a statement, “we at the ACLU of Idaho oppose all executions; there is no method that does not impose an intolerably high risk of cruel and unusual punishment.” Notice how closely this assessment tracks the diagnosis this chapter has already offered: an organization with no formal role in the legislative process, examining the same public record available to any legislator, arrived independently at the same diagnosis this book has offered, that the firing squad was adopted to manage a reputational and logistical problem rather than to solve a genuine humaneness deficit in the state’s prior method.
The Cost Nobody Voted On Directly
One more thread from this legislative history deserves attention before this book moves into Part Two’s close analysis of the firing squad’s four broken promises. Nobody on the floor of the Idaho legislature cast a vote that said, explicitly, “I am voting to ask three trained law enforcement officers, whose names the state will legally shield, to fire rifles into a restrained human being at close range, and to accept whatever consequences that act has on their own psychological well-being.” But that is, functionally, exactly what the 58 to 11 and 28 to 7 votes did. Chapter eleven takes up the recruitment and training protocol for Idaho’s shooting team, and the moral injury data from the officers and volunteers who have performed this role in Utah and South Carolina. For now, it is enough to flag that this cost exists, that it was foreseeable, and that it went essentially unmentioned in the public floor debate this chapter has just walked through. A legislature capable of naming, out loud, the risk that a bullet might miss a man’s heart proved far less willing to name, out loud, what firing that bullet does to the person who pulls the trigger. That asymmetry, what gets named and what does not, will recur throughout this book, because it is one of the clearest signals available for identifying which costs a system has actually reckoned with and which costs it has simply chosen not to look at.
Notes
011. Death Penalty Information Center, “2025 Roundup of Death Penalty Related Legislation,” February 4, 2026; Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho,” state-by-state profile (accessed July 2026).
022. DPIC, “2025 Roundup,” February 4, 2026; “Idaho Governor Signs Legislation Authorizing Firing Squad as State’s Primary Execution Method,” DPIC, March 17, 2025.
033. Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho Governor Signs Legislation Authorizing Firing Squad as State’s Primary Execution Method,” March 17, 2025; Death Penalty Information Center, “The Death Penalty in 2025: Legislation” (year-end report, December 15, 2025).
044. “Firing squad set to become primary method of execution in Idaho,” CBS2 / IdahoNews.com, June 2026 (quoting Rep. Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa).
055. Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho Governor Signs Legislation Authorizing Firing Squad as State’s Primary Execution Method,” March 17, 2025 (quoting Sen. Brian Lenney).
066. DPIC, March 17, 2025 (quoting Sen. Dan Foreman).
077. DPIC, March 17, 2025 (quoting Senate Minority Leader Melissa Wintrow).
088. Tyler Arnold, “Catholic bishop warns against ‘culture of death’ as Idaho backs firing squad executions,” Catholic News Agency, March 13, 2025, as cited in Death Penalty Information Center, March 17, 2025.
099. DPIC, March 17, 2025 (quoting Gov. Brad Little’s statement to Catholic News Agency).
1010. “Idaho expands death penalty to child predators,” Deseret News, April 2, 2025; Death Penalty Information Center, “2025 Roundup of Death Penalty Related Legislation,” February 4, 2026 (House Bill 380 passed the House unanimously on March 17 and the Senate 30–5 on March 24; signed March 27; effective July 1, 2025).
1111. Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407 (2008).
1212. Death Penalty Information Center, “2025 Roundup of Death Penalty Related Legislation,” February 4, 2026 (discussing comparable statutes in Florida, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma, and their tension with Kennedy v. Louisiana).
1313. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, statements on capital punishment; Catechism of the Catholic Church §2267, as revised by Pope Francis, 2018.
1414. Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho Governor Signs Legislation Authorizing Firing Squad as State’s Primary Execution Method,” March 17, 2025; “UPDATE: Governor Little signs bill allowing death penalty for child sex abusers,” KMVT/KSVT, March 19, 2025 (uniform Democratic opposition).
1515. Death Penalty Information Center, “Facts About the Death Penalty: New Public Opinion Poll Confirms Growing Disapproval of Death Penalty,” November 2025, citing Gallup’s October 2025 Crime survey; Gallup, “Americans Prefer Tempered Crime-Fighting Methods,” November 2025.
1616. PRRI, “Americans’ Views on the Death Penalty,” August 29, 2025.
1717. “Firing squad set to become primary method of execution in Idaho,” CBS2 / IdahoNews.com, June 2026 (quoting a statement from the ACLU of Idaho).