Every method of execution the modern state has invented was designed to help us look away. The gallows gave way to the electric chair. The chair gave way to the gas chamber. The chamber gave way to the needle. Each new machine arrived with the same promise—that this death would be cleaner than the last. Quieter. Faster. More medical. More humane. Each was, in its own way, a technology of concealment. Each was built to put distance between the citizen and the killing done in the citizen’s name.
The firing squad hid nothing.
It is one of the oldest methods of execution still on the books in the United States, and it is the only one that has never pretended to be anything other than what it is. There is no current to obscure the moment of death. There is no gas to blame on chemistry. There is no drug to let us imagine the condemned drifting off to sleep. There is only a human being secured to a chair, a paper target pinned over the heart, and a line of other human beings ordered by the government to raise rifles and fire. The firing squad makes no argument that killing is gentle. It simply kills. That honesty—brutal, unadorned, impossible to misread—is the reason the method has endured for more than four centuries. It is also the reason the state has spent most of that time trying to escape it.
Idaho did not invent this method. It inherited a lineage running four centuries deep, almost entirely confined, until 2025, to a single state with a particular theological history, and only recently exported to a second state for reasons that had nothing to do with theology and everything to do with the collapse of lethal injection this book has already documented. Understanding that lineage matters, because Idaho’s legislature described the firing squad as though it were a fresh engineering solution to a modern supply-chain problem. It is not fresh. It is old, it carries a specific cultural memory, and the record it has produced across five decades is available for anyone willing to read it before voting.
This chapter tells that history—from the battlefields of early modern Europe, across the Atlantic with the armies that carried it, into a single American territory that made the method its own, and back out again, in the space of the fifteen months between Idaho’s vote and the day its own law took effect, into a second state whose modern record supplies the evidence this book’s later chapters will hold up against Idaho’s promises.
A Soldier’s Death
The firing squad was born with the gun itself. As firearms became standard military equipment across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European armies reached for a punishment that matched the new weapon and the old need for discipline.1
Hanging was the death of the common criminal. Shooting became the death of the soldier.
The distinction mattered. A man executed by rifle fire died in uniform, before his fellow soldiers, killed by the very weapon he had been trained to carry. The execution was a lesson delivered to the living as much as a sentence carried out on the condemned—a reminder that the discipline binding the ranks reached all the way to the firing line. To be shot rather than hanged was, in the strange arithmetic of military honor, a kind of recognition. The condemned remained a soldier to the end.
Across the Atlantic
By the eighteenth century the practice had spread across the continent. Revolutionary governments used firing squads to erase their political enemies. Napoleon’s armies used them to punish deserters and spies. Through the long century of European warfare that followed, the image of a condemned man standing before a row of leveled rifles became one of the most familiar pictures of state power on earth.2
No one fixed that image more permanently than Francisco Goya. His painting The Third of May 1808, completed in 1814, shows a cluster of Madrid citizens gunned down by Napoleon’s soldiers during the Peninsular War.3
Goya did not paint a victory. He painted the terror—the faceless mechanical line of the firing party on one side, the lit and outstretched arms of the doomed on the other. He turned the firing squad into what it has been ever since: a symbol of the naked authority of the state over the life of the individual. Everything the method’s later defenders would try to soften, Goya had already refused to hide.
The firing squad came to North America the way it had crossed most of Europe—inside an army. During the American Revolution and the War of 1812, execution by shooting belonged almost entirely to the military. Its purpose was discipline, not civilian punishment. Deserters and spies faced the rifles. Ordinary criminals faced the rope.4
The Civil War changed the scale of it. Both the Union and the Confederacy shot men convicted of desertion, espionage, and serious military crimes, and they often did so before assembled troops so that the lesson could not be missed. Thousands of soldiers watched comrades die against a wall of rifle fire. The condemned man standing before the detail became a fixed feature of American military life.5
Civilian America wanted nothing to do with it. As the country moved west and built out its criminal codes, the states kept hanging their prisoners. The firing squad stayed in the army, where it had always been.
Then it found Utah.
The Utah Exception
In 1850, Congress created Utah Territory. The following year the territorial legislature adopted a criminal code unlike anything else in the country. For a person convicted of a capital crime, Utah law offered a choice of deaths: shooting, hanging, or beheading.6
No other American jurisdiction had ever authorized execution by firing squad for civilians. None had put a rifle squad and a headsman on the same statutory menu. From its first years of self-government, Utah stood alone.
The third option is the one that reveals the theology beneath the law. In the nineteenth century, some early leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, most notably Brigham Young, preached a doctrine that scholars now generally call blood atonement: the belief that certain sins were so grave that Christ’s atonement alone could not cover them, and that the sinner’s own blood needed to be shed to make atonement possible.7
The statute itself did not name the doctrine. It did not have to. As taught in the 1850s, blood atonement carried real cultural weight in territorial Utah, and part of its legacy was a lasting regional preference for execution methods that spill blood, as the firing squad does, over methods like hanging that do not. Church leaders would later reject the idea that civil executions should be read through the lens of blood atonement at all, and the modern LDS church has long since repudiated the doctrine outright; no serious contemporary source treats it as official church teaching. But the cultural residue outlasted the theology. It shows up directly, decades later, in the words of the men Utah itself would put to death by firing squad.
No prisoner ever chose the axe. Beheading was dropped from the code in 1888, unused.8
The choice narrowed to two: the rope or the rifle.
For more than a century afterward, the firing squad and Utah were nearly synonymous. Elsewhere the country was busy modernizing its machinery of death. The electric chair spread through the East as the humane successor to the gallows. The gas chamber followed in the West. Both were sold as progress—cleaner, more scientific, more merciful than anything that had come before. Shooting a man began to look like a relic of the frontier, a piece of Old West justice the rest of America had outgrown.9
Utah kept it anyway.
The procedure settled into a form that changed little across the decades. The condemned was secured to a chair. A target was fixed over the heart. A team of marksmen fired together on command. And according to a tradition that clung to the method wherever it was practiced, one rifle was loaded with a blank—so that no member of the squad could ever be certain his was the hand that killed. Whether that mercy was real or merely a story the executioners told themselves, historians still debate. What is clear is why the tradition existed at all. Even the most honest method of killing needed some small fiction to let its participants live with what they had done.
What the Court Allowed
The firing squad also gave the United States Supreme Court its first occasion to rule on how a state may kill.
In 1877 a Utah man named Wallace Wilkerson was sentenced to be shot for murder. He argued that death by firing squad was cruel and unusual punishment, forbidden by the Constitution. In Wilkerson v. Utah, argued and decided in the Court’s 1878 term, the Court disagreed.10
It upheld the rifle squad and, in doing so, drew the line that has governed American execution law ever since. The Constitution, the Court reasoned, forbade only punishments of torture and lingering, deliberate cruelty—the drawing and quartering, the burning alive, the disemboweling of an earlier age. A clean shot to the heart was none of these. Shooting a condemned prisoner was, in the eyes of the law, an ordinary and permissible way for a state to take a life.
It was the first time the Supreme Court had ever told the country that a particular method of execution was acceptable. The method it blessed was the firing squad. Every later argument about the chair, the chamber, and the needle would be built on the foundation laid in a case about a man shot in Utah.
There is a detail in that case the later citations almost never carry with them, and it belongs at the front of this book rather than in a footnote. Wilkerson was executed on May 16, 1879, in the yard of the Provo jail, seated on a chair about thirty feet from a shed where the shooters were concealed. He declined to be blindfolded and refused restraints, telling the marshal he intended to die like a man, looking his executioners in the eye. A white three-inch paper target was pinned over his heart. When he heard the end of the count, he stiffened in the chair, and the movement shifted the target. The rounds struck his arm and his torso and missed his heart. He leapt from the chair and screamed: "Oh, my God! My God! They’ve missed it!" Four doctors rushed to him. He bled to death on the ground of the jail yard. He took roughly twenty-seven minutes to die, in the open, in front of the sheriff and the doctors and everyone else the territory had invited to watch.10
Hold those two facts against each other. The Supreme Court declared, as a matter of constitutional law, that a shot to the heart was not torture and not lingering cruelty. The man whose name is on that decision was shot through the arm and lay bleeding for nearly half an hour. The doctrine and the execution that produced it did not match on the very first day, and American law has been building on the doctrine and forgetting the execution ever since. Every promise this book examines was made afterward, on a foundation laid by a case in which the bullet missed.
The Method the Nation Forgot
By the middle of the twentieth century most Americans had stopped thinking about firing squads at all. The electric chair dominated. Lethal gas held much of the West. Shooting survived in Utah and almost nowhere else, an oddity preserved by a single state’s long memory. To the rest of the country it seemed a curiosity from the age of the pioneers—something that happened in old photographs, not in the modern republic.
The last man Utah shot before the whole system stopped was James W. Rodgers, executed in 1960. When capital punishment resumed sixteen years later, Utah would pick up almost exactly where it had left off.11
In 1972 the Supreme Court decided Furman v. Georgia and brought capital punishment in the United States to a halt.12
For four years no one was executed anywhere in the country while the states rewrote their death penalty laws to satisfy the Court. In 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Court approved the new statutes and cleared the way for executions to resume.13
The machinery of death, silent for most of a decade, began to turn again.
Since that moment, six people have been executed by firing squad in the United States before Idaho’s own law took effect: three in Utah, three in South Carolina.14
The next chapter tells all six stories, because each one adds something the Idaho legislature either did not have, or chose not to weigh, when it voted to make the rifle the state’s primary method of death.
The Confederacy’s Ledger
One further historical thread deserves mention before this chapter turns to South Carolina’s modern history, because South Carolina’s own relationship to the firing squad did not begin with a 2021 statute. The firing squad’s heaviest use in American history occurred not in any of the five states this book profiles but across the Civil War, when both Union and Confederate armies executed deserters and mutineers by firing squad in numbers that dwarf the modern era’s entire six-execution total many times over—hundreds of documented military executions on each side.15
South Carolina, as the state where the Confederacy’s secession began, carries a particular historical relationship to that military tradition, one this book does not have the space to explore in full but that is worth naming as part of the same cultural undercurrent this chapter has already traced through Utah’s territorial code.
I raise this not to draw a direct causal line between Civil War military discipline and a 2021 state statute, which would overstate what the historical record can support. I raise it because it underscores a point this chapter has made from a different angle: the firing squad is not a modern invention being tested for the first time. It is one of the oldest continuously available methods of state and military killing in American history, deployed across wildly different institutional contexts—military and civilian, wartime and peacetime—for purposes ranging from discipline to capital punishment. That long history has produced, across all those contexts, the same basic and recurring problem this book’s modern evidence documents: a method that looks certain on paper and, in the actual moment of execution, subject to human hands and human nerves, is not.
Utah’s Own Retreat, and Return
Utah’s relationship with the firing squad has not been a straight line, and the zigzag is worth tracing briefly, because it previews a pattern of legislative reversal this book will document again in Idaho. In 2004, Utah’s legislature eliminated the open choice of the firing squad for newly sentenced prisoners, allowing it to remain available only to the small number of men, including Ronnie Lee Gardner, who had already selected it under the older rule before the change took effect. The 2004 elimination was driven substantially by the same image-consciousness Gardner himself later complained about: lawmakers worried that a method widely perceived as uniquely brutal was drawing outsized, unflattering national attention to Utah, particularly with the 2002 Winter Olympics having recently placed the state under an unusually bright media spotlight.16
That reluctance did not last. By 2015, with lethal injection drug shortages beginning to bite across the country, the same Utah legislature that had voted eleven years earlier to phase the firing squad out voted to restore it as an available backup method, usable if lethal injection drugs could not be obtained within thirty days of a scheduled execution.17
The reversal is instructive precisely because it shows that Utah’s own lawmakers do not treat the firing squad’s supposed brutality as a fixed, settled judgment. It is a judgment that bends, in both directions, according to whichever practical problem the state is trying to solve at a given moment: image management in 2004, drug-supply anxiety in 2015. Idaho’s own escalation is not a new phenomenon in American capital punishment. It is the same pendulum that has been swinging in Utah for over twenty years, just swinging harder and faster now that more states are caught in the same drug-supply bind at the same time.
South Carolina’s Different Road to the Same Method
South Carolina’s path to the firing squad had nothing to do with nineteenth-century theology. It had everything to do with the same pharmaceutical supply collapse that pushed Idaho toward the method, arriving on a different, harsher timeline. South Carolina added the firing squad as an execution option in 2021, alongside a law making the electric chair, rather than lethal injection, the state’s default method if the condemned did not affirmatively choose otherwise.18
That framework—requiring a condemned person to actively select lethal injection, electrocution, or the firing squad—was challenged in court and eventually upheld: in July 2024, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that both the electric chair and the firing squad were constitutional, clearing the way for the state to resume executions after what had become a thirteen-year moratorium driven largely by the same lethal injection drug shortages afflicting Idaho.19
South Carolina’s death row, unlike Idaho’s, is large: roughly thirty prisoners at the time of the 2024 ruling, several of whom had already exhausted their appeals and were immediately eligible for execution dates.20
The state moved quickly. Freddie Eugene Owens was executed by lethal injection in September 2024, ending the moratorium. Richard Bernard Moore followed in November.21
Then, on March 7, 2025, Brad Sigmon became the first person executed by firing squad in the United States in fifteen years, choosing the method over lethal injection and the electric chair, his lawyers said, because of unresolved concerns about the state’s lethal injection protocol and a reluctance to die in a chair the state had used, with documented complications, for more than a century.22
Just over a month later, Mikal Mahdi followed him, on April 11, 2025, making the same choice for related reasons.23
Seven months after that, on November 14, 2025, Stephen Corey Bryant became the third South Carolina prisoner and the sixth person in the modern American era to die by firing squad.24
Three executions in a single state within a single calendar year is, by the standards of this method’s American history, an extraordinary acceleration. Utah produced three firing squad deaths across thirty-three years, from 1977 to 2010. South Carolina produced three in roughly eight months. That acceleration matters for the argument of this entire book, because of when it happened relative to Idaho’s own timeline. When the Idaho House passed House Bill 37 on February 6, 2025, and when the Idaho Senate passed it on March 5, not a single one of South Carolina’s modern firing squad executions had yet taken place. Brad Sigmon was shot on March 7, two days after the Senate vote and five days before Governor Little signed the bill into law. In that narrow sense, Idaho’s legislature did vote in an evidentiary vacuum, one inherited from Gilmore and Taylor and Gardner—cases old enough to feel like history.
But Idaho’s decision did not end at the vote. The statute did not take effect for another fifteen months, and across that window the entire modern evidentiary record this method has generated became public: Sigmon’s autopsy, then Mahdi’s execution and the autopsy findings that followed it, reported by NPR, the Guardian, and the Death Penalty Information Center in May 2025, and finally Bryant’s execution that November.25
Idaho enacted the firing squad before that evidence existed. It spent the next fifteen months building the chamber and training the shooters while that evidence accumulated in plain view, and it did not stop to reconsider. The autopsy findings were public, and undeniable, well before Idaho’s law took effect on July 1, 2026.
Five States, Five Different Reasons, One Method
It is worth pausing to note how differently each of the five states that currently authorize the firing squad arrived at that authorization, because the diversity of paths undercuts any suggestion that the method’s spread reflects a shared, considered judgment about its merits. Utah’s attachment is rooted in nineteenth-century theology and a regional cultural memory this chapter has described in detail. South Carolina’s arrived through the collapse of its lethal injection supply chain and a statutory structure that defaults, absent a choice, to electrocution rather than the firing squad. Oklahoma’s sits fourth in a hierarchy the state has shown no operational interest in actually using. Mississippi’s is governed by a cost-efficiency clause. Idaho’s, this book’s central case, arrived through the specific, documented failure of a single execution and a legislature eager to ensure that failure could not recur.
Five states, five distinct historical and institutional pathways, and yet all five have converged on the same method—a fact that should trouble anyone tempted to read the firing squad’s spread as evidence of some emerging, independently verified consensus about its humaneness. Convergent adoption by different routes is not the same thing as convergent validation by evidence. It is, more often, a sign that a single available option, the firing squad, sits at the intersection of several different states’ independent problems—drug supply for some, image management for others, cost for still others—without any of those states having actually solved the specific problem this book’s evidence shows the method still has: an unacceptably high rate of documented, autopsied failure to perform as promised.
Why This History Matters for What Follows
I have told this history in some detail, rather than simply gesturing at “past firing squad executions,” because the specifics change the moral weight of Idaho’s decision. If the only available data on the firing squad’s reliability came from Gilmore’s 1977 death or Gardner’s in 2010—cases separated from Idaho’s 2025 vote by decades of medical, forensic, and procedural change—a legislature could plausibly claim it was voting on old, superseded information, the same way a state might reasonably distrust decades-old crash-test data before certifying a modern car. And in the narrow moment of the vote itself, that is close to the situation Idaho’s legislature faced: when the House and Senate passed House Bill 37 in February and March of 2025, the modern South Carolina record did not yet exist. But Idaho’s decision was not confined to that moment. The statute did not take effect for another fifteen months, and in that window the most recent, most rigorously documented firing squad executions in American history unfolded in a neighboring jurisdiction, using essentially the same protocol structure—a target over the heart, a small team of shooters, a restrained chair—that Idaho itself would adopt. The state watched that record accumulate and readied its own chamber anyway.26
The Tradition That Waited
When Gary Gilmore chose to die before a line of rifles, he was not reviving a curiosity. He was stepping into a tradition more than four hundred years old—one that had traveled from the armies of early modern Europe to the battlefields of the American Civil War, taken root in a single western territory in 1851, and outlasted every cleaner machine the country built to replace it. Taylor and Gardner walked the same path he had cleared. So, in their own way, did Sigmon, Mahdi, and Bryant, two thousand miles from Utah, in a state whose reasons for reaching for the rifle had nothing to do with blood atonement and everything to do with a supply chain the rest of this book will trace in full.
That is the strangest fact about the firing squad. It did not survive because it was efficient. The chair was sold as more efficient. It did not survive because it was modern. The gas chamber and the needle were both sold as more modern. It survived because it was honest. When every other method promised to make killing look like something else—like electricity, like medicine, like sleep—the firing squad kept telling the truth. It admitted that an execution is a killing, done deliberately, by people, with a weapon, on the orders of the state.
For most of American history that honesty was an embarrassment. The country wanted its executions quiet. It wanted its hands clean. The rifle refused to grant either. So the states reached again and again for a cleaner-looking machine. One by one, they watched the machines fail. The needle was the last of them. It has been failing in plain view—veins that collapse, executions that stretch for hours, a team that gives up after eight attempts and sends the condemned back to his cell still breathing.
And so, the honest death is coming back.
On July 1, 2026, a law took effect in Idaho that no American legislature had ever passed.27
Not the firing squad as a relic. Not the firing squad as a curiosity a condemned man might choose from a menu. The firing squad as the primary way the state intends to kill—the first execution method in the nation’s history built on the gun by default. Idaho did not stumble into this. It reached back four hundred years—past the needle, past the gas, past the chair, past Gilmore, past Taylor and Gardner, past Sigmon and Mahdi and Bryant, past the pioneers—and picked up the oldest honest death on purpose. Its defenders called it humane. They called it clean.
They were making a promise. Part Two of this book takes South Carolina’s record and holds it up against the four promises Idaho’s legislators made on the floor: that the bullet is certain, that it is humane, that it is honest, and that where a condemned person chooses it, the choice is free. Utah’s history, the one this chapter has just told, supplies the cultural backdrop and the myth of the clean kill that made the firing squad feel, to Idaho’s lawmakers, like a return to something proven and traditional rather than an untested gamble. South Carolina’s history, produced in real time in the fifteen months between Idaho’s vote and the day its law took effect, supplies the evidence that the myth does not hold. The next four chapters take that evidence one promise at a time.
Notes
011. On the emergence of firearms as instruments of military punishment across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the origins of execution by shooting as a distinctly military death, see standard histories of capital punishment; the association of shooting with military discipline (as against hanging for civilian crime) is treated throughout the literature. See, e.g., the historical overview in the Death Penalty Information Center, “Methods of Execution,” https://deathpenaltyinfo.org.
022. On the spread of military firing squads through revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe, see general histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European warfare and military justice.
033. Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808 (El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid), completed 1814, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. The painting depicts the execution of Madrid citizens by French troops on May 3, 1808, during the Peninsular War.
044. On the near-exclusively military use of the firing squad during the American Revolution and the War of 1812, see histories of early American military justice.
055. On the expanded use of execution by shooting for desertion, espionage, and military crimes by both the Union and Confederate armies during the Civil War, and on public military executions as instruments of discipline, see Civil War military-justice scholarship.
066. Utah Territory was organized by act of Congress in 1850; its early criminal code (1851) authorized execution by shooting, hanging, or beheading, making Utah the first American jurisdiction to permit death by firing squad for civilian offenders. See “Capital Punishment,” Utah History Encyclopedia (L. Kay Gillespie), https://www.uen.org/anu_history_encyclopedia/c/CAPITAL_PUNISHMENT.shtml. The Supreme Court in Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 (1878), described the governing territorial statute (passed March 6, 1852) as permitting a person convicted of a capital offense to “suffer death by being shot, hanged, or beheaded,” at the condemned’s option among those modes.
077. This account of nineteenth-century blood atonement teaching within the early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including its association with Brigham Young, reflects general historical scholarship; see Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Is ‘blood atonement’ behind Utah firing squad request?,” Salt Lake Tribune/Scripps News, June 4, 2010; and “Capital Punishment in Utah,” which notes that the territory introduced beheading in 1851 “in accordance with the Mormon concept of blood atonement at the time.” The statute did not codify the doctrine by name, and later church leaders rejected the application of blood atonement to civil executions; the modern LDS church does not treat the doctrine as current teaching.
088. No prisoner ever selected beheading, and the option was removed from Utah law in 1888. See sources cited at notes 6–7.
099. On the twentieth-century spread of the electric chair and gas chamber as purportedly more modern and humane successors to hanging, and the resulting perception of the firing squad as a frontier relic, see general histories of American execution methods.
1010. Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 (1878). The Court upheld execution by firing squad against an Eighth Amendment challenge, holding that the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments reached only torture and comparable deliberate cruelty, not death by shooting. It was the first Supreme Court decision to pass on the constitutionality of a specific method of execution. Opinion available at Justia, https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/99/130/. The account of Wilkerson’s own execution on May 16, 1879, including his refusal of the blindfold and restraints, the rounds that struck his arm and torso rather than his heart, and the roughly twenty-seven minutes he took to die, is drawn from contemporaneous Utah newspaper reporting of the execution and from later histories of capital punishment in Utah; see L. Kay Gillespie, The Unforgiven: Utah’s Executed Men (Signature Books, 1997), pp. 47–49; and Hal Schindler, "Taylor’s Death Was Quick . . . But Some Weren’t So Lucky," Salt Lake Tribune, January 28, 1996. Some accounts give approximately fifteen minutes; the official record states twenty-seven. The opinion was handed down on March 17, 1879, but is conventionally cited to the 1878 term of the United States Reports.
1111. General historical record of executions in Utah; Death Penalty Information Center, “Utah,” state-by-state profile (James W. Rodgers, executed 1960, as the last pre-Furman firing squad execution).
1212. Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972). The decision effectively suspended capital punishment in the United States by finding then-existing death penalty statutes unconstitutional as applied.
1313. Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976). The Court upheld revised death penalty statutes with guided-discretion sentencing, permitting executions to resume.
1414. “Utah Firing Squad Executes Convicted Murderer,” CBS News, June 18, 2010; “US inmate set to die by firing squad, which states allow this?,” The Hill, March 7, 2025; Death Penalty Information Center, “Utah,” state-by-state profile.
1515. General historical scholarship on Civil War–era military executions by firing squad on both the Union and Confederate sides.
1616. “Utah Firing Squad Executes Convicted Murderer,” CBS News, June 18, 2010 (2004 Utah legislation eliminating the firing squad as an open option, subject to a grandfather clause for prisoners who had already selected it).
1717. Death Penalty Information Center, “Utah,” state-by-state profile; contemporaneous Associated Press reporting on Utah’s March 2015 restoration of the firing squad as a contingency method where lethal injection drugs cannot be obtained.
1818. Death Penalty Information Center, “South Carolina,” state-by-state profile; “US inmate set to die by firing squad, which states allow this?,” The Hill, March 7, 2025 (South Carolina’s 2021 statute adding the firing squad and making the electric chair the statutory default).
1919. “S.C. inmate’s firing squad execution was ‘botched,’ with bullets mostly missing his heart, lawyers say,” NBC News, May 9, 2025 (July 2024 South Carolina Supreme Court ruling upholding the firing squad); Death Penalty Information Center, “Lawyers Raise Concern as Autopsy Finds South Carolina’s Second Firing Squad Execution May Have Been Botched,” May 13, 2025.
2020. “SC firing squad ‘largely missed’ cop killer Mikal Mahdi’s heart, attorneys say autopsy shows,” The Post and Courier, May 2025 (the South Carolina Supreme Court settled the method challenges on July 31, 2024); Death Penalty Information Center, “South Carolina,” state-by-state profile.
2121. “South Carolina executes second man by firing squad in 5 weeks,” PBS NewsHour (Associated Press), April 11, 2025; Death Penalty Information Center, “South Carolina,” state-by-state profile (Freddie Owens, September 2024; Richard Moore, November 2024).
2222. “South Carolina is set to execute another inmate by firing squad, one month after first such execution in decades,” CBS News, April 9, 2025; “South Carolina executes second man by firing squad in 5 weeks,” PBS NewsHour (Associated Press), April 11, 2025.
2323. “South Carolina executes second man by firing squad in 5 weeks,” PBS NewsHour (Associated Press), April 11, 2025; “South Carolina death row inmate executed by firing squad,” Live5News/WCSC, April 11–12, 2025.
2424. “South Carolina executes third person by firing squad this year,” South Carolina Public Radio, November 14, 2025 (the execution of Stephen Corey Bryant).
2525. Chiara Eisner, “A firing squad tried to shoot a prisoner in the heart. They missed, autopsy indicates,” NPR, May 8, 2025; Sam Levin, “Revealed: Autopsy suggests South Carolina botched firing squad execution,” The Guardian, May 8, 2025; as cited in Death Penalty Information Center, “Lawyers Raise Concern as Autopsy Finds South Carolina’s Second Firing Squad Execution May Have Been Botched,” May 13, 2025.
2626. See notes 19 and 25.
2727. Idaho House Bill 37, signed by Governor Brad Little on March 12, 2025, made the firing squad Idaho’s primary method of execution effective July 1, 2026—making Idaho the first state in the nation to designate the firing squad as its primary method, with lethal injection retained only as a fallback where a firing squad is unavailable. See Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho Governor Signs Legislation Authorizing Firing Squad as State’s Primary Execution Method” (Mar. 17, 2025), https://deathpenaltyinfo.org; “These new laws are set to go into effect in Idaho on July 1,” Idaho Capital Sun (June 30, 2026), https://idahocapitalsun.com. On Idaho’s failed February 2024 lethal-injection attempt on Thomas Creech—called off after the execution team could not establish an intravenous line after roughly eight attempts—see contemporaneous reporting.