Since the Supreme Court cleared the way for executions to resume in 1976, six men have been shot to death by American states. Three died in Utah across thirty-three years. Three died in South Carolina across eight months. That is the whole modern record. It is small enough to set down in full and it has never, so far as I have been able to determine, been set down in full in one place.
I have given each man the same account in the same order. Who he was. Whether he chose and what the choosing cost him. What the room held. What happened when they fired. What the record showed afterward. And then, at the end of each, what we do not know — because the shape of our ignorance is itself evidence, and because a legislature that voted to make this the primary way Idaho kills its prisoners deserved to see how thin the file actually is.
The entries are uneven. That unevenness is not mine and it is worth naming before the reader meets it. We know more about Gary Gilmore than about John Albert Taylor and Ronnie Lee Gardner combined, because a novelist showed up for Gilmore. We know more about Mikal Mahdi than about Stephen Bryant because Mahdi’s lawyers went and got the paperwork and won some of the fight for it. The depth of the public record on the firing squad tracks fame. It tracks litigation. It does not track significance, and it does not track what a legislature would need in order to vote responsibly. Keep that in view through what follows. It is the same argument this book makes about honesty, turned back on the book’s own sources.
One more thing before the six. Three of these men waived their appeals or came close to it, and all three chose the rifle. Two of the three Utah cases were what the courts call volunteers. That pattern is not incidental to the method. It is the method’s oldest and most persistent feature, and Part Two takes it up as the fourth promise.
Gary Mark Gilmore
January 17, 1977 — Utah State Prison, Draper
Gilmore was thirty-six years old. He was born in Texas in December 1940, the second of four sons of Frank and Bessie Gilmore. His father was a drifter and a petty criminal who beat his children. The family moved constantly through the western states. By his mid-thirties Gilmore had spent the majority of his life in institutions of one kind or another and had been out of prison for a matter of months when he killed two men.1
In July 1976 he murdered Max Jensen, a gas station attendant, and Ben Bushnell, a motel manager, in back-to-back robberies in Utah County. Both men were young. Both had families. Neither resisted him.2
He was tried for Bushnell’s murder, convicted and sentenced to death in October 1976. The Jensen case never went to trial. Then he did the thing that made him famous. He refused to fight.
He waved off the appeals filed on his behalf. He told the Utah Board of Pardons that he took the state at its word, that the people of Utah seemed to want the death penalty but not executions, and that when the sentence came down he had taken it literally and seriously.3 He told the organizations trying to save him to leave him alone. This was his life, he said, and this was his death.4
Utah gave him a choice of two deaths. State law at the time offered hanging or shooting. He said he would rather be shot, because he believed a hanging could be botched.5
That sentence deserves to be read twice. The first man executed by firing squad in the modern era chose the rifle to avoid a botched death by another method. Idaho’s legislators, forty-nine years later, would describe the firing squad as the answer to botched executions. The firing squad has been sold as the cure for the last method’s failures from the first modern case forward. It has never been chosen on its own merits by anyone. It has always been the least feared item on a menu of feared things, which is the argument this book makes at length in Part Two, and which Gilmore made without meaning to in 1976.
The fight over his death. Because Gilmore would not appeal, others tried to appeal for him. The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sought to intervene, on the theory that the first execution after the moratorium would open the way for hundreds more.6 His mother, Bessie Gilmore, petitioned as his next friend — a legal device that lets one person sue on behalf of another who cannot act for himself.
The Supreme Court rejected her petition on December 13, 1976. It held that Gilmore had made a knowing and intelligent waiver of his federal rights and that next-friend standing was therefore unavailable, since he was competent and represented.7 The vote was five to four.
The final round came the night before. A federal district judge in Salt Lake City, Willis Ritter, granted a stay roughly seven hours before the scheduled time. The Utah attorney general’s office flew to Denver overnight. The Tenth Circuit set the stay aside in the early morning. The Supreme Court declined to intervene. By 7:30 a.m. the last obstacle was gone.8
The room. Gilmore spent his last night in the prison mess hall at his own request, with friends and family, awake. His last meal was steak, potatoes, milk and coffee. He drank the milk and the coffee and left the rest.9
He was taken to an abandoned cannery behind the prison that served as the institution’s death house. He was strapped to a chair. A wall of sandbags was stacked behind him to catch the rounds. A black hood was placed over his head and a paper target was pinned over his heart. Five volunteers — local police officers — stood concealed behind a screen with their rifles aimed through slots cut in the cloth. One of the five weapons, by the old tradition, held a blank.10
That last detail did not survive contact with the evidence. Gilmore’s younger brother Mikal, a journalist, later examined the clothing his brother had been wearing. He counted five holes in the shirt. Utah’s tradition called for four live rounds and one blank. Mikal Gilmore wrote that the state had apparently taken no chances on the morning it put his brother to death.11
Hold that against everything the blank round is supposed to accomplish. The mercy is four hundred years old and it is extended not to the condemned but to the men who shoot him, so that no one of them need ever be certain his was the hand that killed. In the first execution of the modern era, in the state that had kept the method alive longer than anyone, the record of the body suggests the mercy was not extended at all. South Carolina removed the blank openly. Idaho removed it openly. Utah, if Mikal Gilmore counted correctly, removed it quietly and told the shooters otherwise.12
The warden read the order of the court aloud and asked the condemned man if he had anything to say.
“Let’s do it,” Gilmore said.13
The killing. The volley struck him in the chest. Contemporaneous accounts report four rounds through the heart. Roughly twenty witnesses were present. The official time of death was recorded as 8:07 a.m., though contemporaneous wire accounts give 8:06.14 A prison official, standing among reporters in another part of the building, took a call from the warden and told them the order of the court had been carried out.
Gilmore had asked that his organs be donated. Within hours of his death two people received his corneas. His body was autopsied and cremated the same day and his ashes were scattered over Utah.15 That request is worth holding onto. Two of the six men in this chapter tried to give their bodies away as they were dying. It is the only thing Gary Gilmore and Mikal Mahdi have in common.
His uncle Vern Damico claimed the body and told reporters: “He got his wish. He did die, and he died with dignity.”16 The Utah attorney general said justice had been served and added that he was sorrier about the two victims’ families than about Gilmore’s death. The ACLU’s capital punishment director accused him publicly of complicity in a judicial homicide.17
Norman Mailer would spend more than a thousand pages on the case in The Executioner’s Song.18 The three flat words Gilmore offered the rifles have outlived nearly everyone who stood in that cannery. They have been printed on shirts. They were, for a period, an advertising slogan.
What this case adds. Gilmore establishes the template every later case repeats and the country has been misreading ever since. What fascinated America was not the rifles. It was his apparent eagerness to die. From that morning forward, a condemned man’s selection of the firing squad would be read by the public as agency — a final assertion of control over a total loss of it. How much of that agency was real, and how much was a man choosing between two feared deaths he had no hand in creating, is the question Part Two takes up as the fourth promise. Gilmore is where it begins, and Gilmore is also where the answer is already visible, because his stated reason for choosing the rifle was fear of a rope.
What we do not know. Almost everything a modern reader would want. No published pathology report of the kind South Carolina produced in 2025 entered the public record. The claim that four rounds passed through the heart comes from contemporaneous reporting rather than from a released autopsy, and where exactly they struck is not a matter of public documentation. How long Gilmore remained conscious after the volley is unknown. It was not, in 1977, a question anyone thought to ask, because the certainty of the method was assumed rather than tested. The most famous firing squad execution in American history is one of the least documented in the terms this book cares about, and it is one of only two data points Utah’s entire legislative memory rests on.
John Albert Taylor
January 26, 1996 — Utah State Prison, Draper
Nineteen years passed before Utah shot another man.
John Albert Taylor was thirty-six. He was born in Ogden in 1959. His parents separated in his infancy. He moved repeatedly as a child, including to Colorado at nine, when he was told his father was dead. He said he had been raised in Florida, that he was abused there as a boy and that he was using drugs by his teens. He had a Florida record for burglary and carrying a concealed weapon before he was twenty.19
In 1989 he raped eleven-year-old Charla Nicole King and strangled her with a telephone cord. He was convicted and sentenced to die.20
I am going to name that crime plainly and not soften it. The argument of this book does not require its subjects to be sympathetic. It requires only that the state tell the truth about what it does to them.
The choice. A month before his execution Taylor fired his lawyer and denounced lethal injection.21 His path was closer to Gilmore’s than to anyone else’s in this chapter. Utah’s second modern firing squad execution, like its first, was substantially a matter of a man declining to fight.
He gave three reasons for choosing the rifle and they shifted depending on who was asking. He said the method would be costly to the state and embarrassing to it. He said it would dramatize his claim that what Utah was about to do to him was murder. And he said he feared “flipping around like a fish out of water” if they used a needle.22
All three matter and the third matters most. The first two show a condemned man using his own death as political communication aimed past the walls of the chamber. The third shows a man choosing between two feared deaths and picking the one whose horror he found more legible — more familiar, easier to picture in advance. That is the dynamic Part Two returns to under the heading of free choice, and it is the second time in two cases that a man chose the rifle to escape something else.
His last day. Taylor was Catholic. A priest, the Reverend Reyes Rodriquez, had baptized him the week before. He spent the day writing his will, eating pizza with an uncle and discussing the afterlife with the priest. He complained that his stomach was turning over and drank antacid. A little more than an hour before he died he sang hymns with Rodriquez and two of his attorneys, then bowed his head and wept while the priest read scripture to him. Rodriquez walked with him to the chamber.23
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this sound like redemption and I do not know that it was. A man who raped and strangled a child was baptized eight days before the state shot him. What I know is that a priest sat with him, and that this is the work I do, and that the record of the second modern firing squad execution in America contains a Catholic priest reading scripture to a weeping man an hour before five rifles were leveled at his heart. Idaho’s legislature did not have that in front of it either.
One of the three witnesses Taylor invited was Beverly DeVoy, a freelance journalist who had corresponded with him for years. She believed his health had shaped his decision. He had an enlarged heart, bleeding ulcers, and swollen legs and feet.24
Set that beside the target. Utah pinned a white paper circle over an enlarged heart and treated the aiming point as sufficient. Nothing in any firing squad protocol I have read, including Idaho’s, accounts for the fact that hearts differ in size, in position and in the thickness of what surrounds them. The protocols specify the distance and the diameter of the target. They assume the organ underneath is standard issue.
The room. Roughly a hundred and fifty television crews came to Draper. Nine journalists were admitted as media witnesses.25
Taylor was already strapped into a black metal chair when the witnesses arrived just before midnight. His hands, his feet and his neck were secured. A white target was fixed over his heart. Floodlights were aimed at him, bright enough that he could not see the men who would shoot him. Five anonymous marksmen stood twenty-three feet away with .30-30 deer rifles, the same type used on Gilmore in the same prison nineteen years earlier. They were law enforcement volunteers, paid three hundred dollars each. They fired through rectangular openings cut in a wall. One rifle, by tradition, held a blank.26
The warden and a deputy director approached and asked whether he had any last words.
“Yes, I do,” Taylor answered, looking straight ahead into the lights that hid his executioners from him.27
The killing. Four bullets struck him. The shots came at approximately 12:04 a.m. He was pronounced dead at 12:07.28
Paul Murphy, a Salt Lake City television reporter in the witness room, described a very large man strapped to a chair whose eyes were moving rapidly around the room, with what Murphy read as a great deal of fear in them. After the volley Murphy watched the body. “His hands squeezed up, went down, and came up and squeezed again,” he said.29 The chest was covered with blood. A doctor came in, cut holes in the hood and checked the pupils.30 Murphy also described the whole thing as a very short morality play in a single act, which is as good a summary of the state’s intentions as any witness has produced.
Utah’s attorney general, Jan Graham, told reporters afterward that “the execution was carried out without any incident of any kind.”31
Those two accounts are the whole book in miniature. A witness saw a hand close, open and close again. The state saw no incident of any kind. Both are describing the same three minutes. Neither is lying. They are using different standards for what counts as something happening, and the state’s standard is the one that gets written into the press release, the protocol review and the legislative record.
Afterward. While Taylor was waiting to die, legislation was introduced in the Utah House of Representatives to eliminate the firing squad.32 The bill did not pass that session. Eight years later a version of it did, and Utah restricted the method to men already sentenced under the old rule. In 2015, with the drug supply collapsing, the same legislature brought it back. That reversal is traced in the previous chapter’s section on Utah’s own retreat and return.
What we do not know. What the hands meant. No published autopsy established where the four rounds landed relative to the heart, whether the enlarged heart altered the wound path, or how long Taylor remained conscious. Murphy’s account is the closest thing to a medical record that exists, and Murphy is a reporter describing movement he could see from behind glass at a distance in low light. Whether that movement was agonal reflex or a man still present in his body for some seconds after being shot, nobody has established, because nobody with the standing to establish it was asked to try. We also do not know what Taylor said after he answered that he did have last words. The contemporaneous accounts I have found record the answer and not what followed it. A man’s final sentence has fallen out of the record of an execution the state describes as having proceeded without incident of any kind.
Ronnie Lee Gardner
June 18, 2010 — Utah State Prison, Draper
Fourteen more years passed. Then Utah shot Ronnie Lee Gardner, and his is the case that reaches Idaho most directly, for reasons that have nothing to do with the shooting itself.
Gardner was forty-nine and had spent nearly his entire adult life in custody. His childhood is not in dispute. The Tenth Circuit, denying him relief, wrote that it was undisputed that his childhood had been troubled in many respects.33 His lawyers documented poverty, neglect, early drug addiction, physical and sexual abuse and a series of serious head injuries.34 He had committed two murders by the age of twenty-four.
In October 1984 he shot and killed Melvyn John Otterstrom, a bartender, during a robbery. In April 1985, while being moved through a Salt Lake City courthouse for a hearing in that case, someone passed him a gun. He shot Michael Burdell, an attorney who had taken cover behind a door. Burdell died in surgery forty-five minutes later. Gardner forced a prison officer to lead him out of the basement. Crossing the lobby he shot and seriously wounded Nicholas Kirk, a fifty-eight-year-old uniformed bailiff who was unarmed and had just stepped off an elevator. He took a vending machine serviceman hostage on the next floor. The man broke free. Gardner walked out of the building into a half-dozen drawn weapons.35 Kirk’s family said he died eleven years later as a result of the wound.
He was convicted and sentenced to death in October 1985. In 1991 a state court judge found that he had been denied adequate representation at the sentencing phase of that trial, including through his lawyer’s failure to investigate.36 Three of the jurors who sentenced him later provided statements indicating that the evidence they had not heard might have produced a different verdict.37 None of that saved him. The Tenth Circuit noted that reasonable minds could differ on how a jury would have weighed fuller mental health testimony, then applied the deference federal courts owe state court judgments and concluded that the Utah Supreme Court’s ruling had not been unreasonable.38
That is the sentence to sit with. Not that the sentencing was right. That the state court’s conclusion was not unreasonable enough to disturb.
Michael Burdell’s family asked Utah not to do it.
Burdell was a pacifist. He had opposed capital punishment in life. His girlfriend at the time of the murder, Donna Nu, told a reporter that “Michael didn’t believe in capital punishment,” that he did not believe in a life for a life, and that he would not have wanted to be the reason Ronnie Lee Gardner was killed.39 Burdell’s eighty-six-year-old father submitted a statement saying the same thing. A close friend of Burdell’s said it too. They asked to testify at the commutation hearing on Gardner’s behalf.40
The family of the murdered man did not want the state to shoot anybody on their behalf. Utah shot him anyway.
The other family took the other view, and it belongs here with equal weight. VelDean Kirk, the widow of the bailiff Gardner shot, witnessed the execution. She said afterward that she did not think the method was barbaric, and when Utah moved in 2015 to restore the firing squad she supported it.41
I raise this not because a victim’s family’s wishes should be dispositive — Part Three of this book takes some care to say that they should not be, in either direction, and that Meredith Barnett’s view of what Mikal Mahdi deserved is as legitimate as Donna Nu’s view of what Ronnie Lee Gardner deserved. I raise it because the certainty and closure this method is sold with are almost always sold in the name of victims’ families, and because in the modern record’s third case the victim’s family stood up in a hearing room and said the state was not acting for them.
The choice. Gardner could select the firing squad only because he had been sentenced before Utah’s 2004 change. Asked in open court by Judge Robin Reese to elect a method, he answered that he would like the firing squad, please. He said publicly that he preferred it because of his Mormon heritage, invoking the regional memory that had written beheading into Utah’s first territorial code a century and a half earlier. He also voiced a political grievance. He believed Utah lawmakers were trying to phase the method out against the actual preference of much of the Utah public, out of embarrassment over the state’s image heading into the 2002 Winter Olympics.42
His is the only case in the modern record in which a man chose the rifle affirmatively — for theological and cultural reasons of his own — rather than to escape something worse. One case in six.
The last month. His lawyers filed a clemency petition in early May 2010, asking the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole to commute his sentence to life without parole. The board agreed to hold a hearing, which it was not obliged to do, and convened for two days on June 10 and 11 at the prison.43 It heard nearly eight hours of testimony. The petition rested on his childhood, his conduct over twenty-five years in custody and his stated remorse. His attorney Andrew Parnes argued that the mitigating evidence had never been properly heard in state court and put three statements from Gardner’s own sentencing jurors before the board, indicating that the evidence they had not heard might have produced a different verdict.44
Gardner testified for about two hours. He told the board he wanted to live in order to help children in trouble, that he and his brother were trying to develop a hundred and sixty acres in northern Utah into an organic farm and a residential program, and that he intended to donate the thirteen hundred dollars he had earned selling artwork from prison. He said he thought he was the perfect example of what a person should not do.45
The families spoke on both sides. Jason Otterstrom described what his father’s murder had done to them. Tami Stewart, Nick Kirk’s daughter, made a statement. Donna Nu and Burdell’s friends asked the board to spare him.46
The five-member board denied commutation unanimously. Its chairman, Curt Garner, announced that the board had determined the jury’s verdict imposing a death sentence was not inappropriate and that no sufficient reason existed to grant clemency.47 Utah had not commuted a condemned man’s sentence since 1962.48 The Utah Supreme Court exhausted his state appeals on June 14. A federal stay was denied on June 17.49
One further thing happened in those days that belongs in a book about honesty. Parnes filed suit in federal court arguing that the commutation process was structurally conflicted, because the lawyers advising the Board of Pardons worked for the same attorney general’s office that had sought Gardner’s death warrant and would argue against commuting him. Chief Judge Tena Campbell denied relief, finding the office’s internal firewall sufficient and finding that Gardner had not shown he could not receive a fair and impartial hearing.50 I note it without claiming the ruling was wrong. The state asked for the warrant, argued against mercy and advised the body deciding whether to grant it. A system can be lawful and still be built so that no one inside it ever has to feel the weight of the decision alone.
He spent his final hours with a bishop.51
The room. Nine journalists were admitted. The state of Utah classifies what they came to watch as a homicide.52 The media witnesses were allowed to bring nothing in with them. They were issued a press badge, a notepad, a pen and earplugs.53
The earplugs are worth a sentence. Every other method this country has used is quiet enough that witnesses need no protection from it. The firing squad is the only American execution method that requires the state to hand its witnesses hearing protection at the door. That is the honesty the method is praised for, arriving as a piece of safety equipment.
When the curtain drew back at 12:15 a.m., Gardner was already strapped into a black straight-backed metal chair set on a low platform, like a stage. He wore a dark blue prison jumpsuit and no shoes. A prison official asked whether he wanted to say anything.
“I do not, no,” Gardner said.54
A black hood went over his bald head. A small target was fixed over his heart. Five anonymous marksmen with a matched set of .30-caliber rifles waited behind a curtain and a ported brick wall. One rifle held a blank. A countdown began that the witnesses could barely hear. Then two loud reports in quick succession.55
The killing. Four rounds entered his chest.
Doug Fabrizio, one of the witnesses, watched him clench a fist and then release it.56 Jennifer Dobner, the Associated Press reporter in the room, had braced herself to flinch and did not. It was over so fast that for a moment she wondered whether it had happened at all. She heard nothing from the condemned man. She never saw the guns. She did not hear the countdown. Blood seemed to pool at his waist inside the dark jumpsuit. “The silence was deafening,” she wrote.57
A medical examiner checked his pulse at both sides of the neck, then lifted the hood and checked his pupils with a flashlight, briefly showing the witnesses an ashen face. He was pronounced dead at 12:17 a.m. Two minutes had passed since the curtain opened. Some wire copy filed that night gave 12:20.58
An hour later the prison let the reporters into the chamber. There was a strong smell of bleach and no sign of blood. The only physical evidence that a man had been shot to death in that room was four holes in the black wood panels behind the chair.59
Hold those four holes next to Idaho’s ten yards. Utah’s shooters fired from a shorter distance than Idaho’s protocol prescribes and four rounds ended up in the wall behind the man. Whether they passed through him or missed him entirely, the public record does not say. Neither possibility is comfortable for a state that has just built a chamber and told its citizens the method is certain.
Afterward. Utah’s attorney general told reporters that Gardner would never kill again and would never assault anyone again.60 Fabrizio, years later, was still working out what he had participated in by watching. He described feeling conflicted throughout — that he believed journalists should be present at these events, and that he kept asking himself whether he was doing anything more than looking.61
Chapter eleven of this book is about witnesses. Doug Fabrizio’s fifteen-year discomfort is the most honest account of that role in the modern firing squad record, and it comes from a man who was there in a professional capacity and has never been able to file it away.
What this case adds. Three things. The victim’s family asking the state to stop. The two reports rather than one volley, which is the only direct evidence in the entire modern record bearing on whether these rifles actually fire simultaneously. And the four holes in the panel, which is the only direct evidence bearing on what these rounds do after they reach the man.
What we do not know. Begin with the sound. Two reports in quick succession is not one volley. Whether that means the rifles did not fire simultaneously, and whether simultaneity matters to the outcome the way Idaho’s protocol assumes it does, the record does not say and no state has been asked. No published pathology report established where the four rounds struck relative to the heart. Whether the holes in the panel represent rounds that passed through his body or rounds that missed it is not documented anywhere I have been able to find. Whether the clenched fist was reflex or a man still conscious inside his body, nobody knows. And Dobner’s account and Fabrizio’s do not entirely agree — one records a stillness and a silence, the other records a hand closing. Two trained observers, sitting feet apart, watching the same one hundred and twenty seconds.
Brad Sigmon
March 7, 2025 — Broad River Correctional Institution, Columbia
Fifteen years passed. Then South Carolina, for reasons that had nothing to do with Utah’s theology and everything to do with the collapse of the lethal injection supply chain traced in chapter two of this book.
Brad Sigmon was sixty-seven, the oldest person South Carolina had ever executed.62
In April 2001 he beat David and Gladys Larke to death with a baseball bat in their Greenville home. He then kidnapped their daughter, his ex-girlfriend, at gunpoint. She escaped as he fired at her. He was convicted in 2002 and sentenced to death twice over, with thirty years for the burglary.63
He admitted his guilt at trial. His appellate attorney, Gerald “Bo” King of the federal public defender’s office, argued in mitigation that Sigmon had an undiagnosed mental illness producing irrational and impulsive episodes, that he had organic brain damage and a violent childhood, and that he had suffered a psychotic break. King said Sigmon had expressed his grief for what he did to his jury and afterward to everyone who knew him.64
The Larkes’ daughter gave her first interview in the twenty-four years since her parents’ murders. She said what Sigmon did had torn her family apart. She also said she did not agree with executing him and that death belonged in God’s hands.65
That is the second time in six cases that someone the condemned man had grievously harmed asked the state not to kill him. It is worth counting, because the certainty argument is almost never made in the name of anyone else.
The choice. South Carolina law required Sigmon to select a method or accept electrocution by default. He chose the bullet.
His lawyers said he feared a repeat of the documented lethal injection complications other South Carolina prisoners had suffered, and that the state’s century-old electric chair carried its own history of malfunction. King said in advance of the execution that the choice itself was cruel, that everything about it was cruel, and that the public should be furious rather than merely horrified.66
The day before he died, Sigmon asked the South Carolina Supreme Court to pause his execution on the ground that the state’s shield law kept the details of its lethal injection protocol secret, which meant he was being made to choose among methods without being told what one of them would do to him. The court declined.67
Read that sequence in order. The state withholds the information. The prisoner asks a court to make the state disclose it. The court refuses. The prisoner then selects a method under the conditions the state created and the state’s supporters describe the selection as his free choice. Chapter eight takes that apart at length. Brad Sigmon is the cleanest example of it in the record.
Governor Henry McMaster denied clemency. No South Carolina governor has commuted a death sentence in at least half a century.68
His last morning. He spent two hours with a spiritual advisor. The Reverend Hilary Taylor, executive director of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, was with him. She was among the witnesses to his death.69
I want to mark that plainly, because I have written this book from inside that role and because chapter eleven turns on it. A minister sat with Brad Sigmon for two hours and then watched three men shoot him from fifteen feet. There is exactly one person in the United States who has done what Idaho’s chamber will ask a spiritual advisor to do, and she did it in South Carolina in March of 2025.
King’s statement after the execution said the state had ended the life of a man who had “devoted himself to his faith, and to ministry and service” to everyone around him.70 About two dozen protesters stood at the gates on Broad River Road with signs saying that all life is precious.71
The room. He was strapped into a metal chair set in the corner of the room that also holds the state’s electric chair. He wore a black prison jumpsuit. His ankles were held by leather restraints. A hood went over his head. A white target with a red bullseye was fixed over his heart. Three corrections employees who had volunteered stood fifteen feet away behind a wall, firing through an opening. All three had live ammunition. South Carolina uses no blank.72
That last detail matters more than it appears to. South Carolina uses no blank and neither does Idaho, whose protocol has the team leader load a single live round into a magazine for each of the three weapons. The oldest mercy in the method — a mercy extended not to the condemned but to the men who shoot him — was the first thing the modern states cut, and, if Gilmore’s shirt is any guide, the first thing Utah quietly cut before them. Chapter eleven is about the shooters. This is the sentence that chapter turns on.73
The killing. The curtain opened. Sigmon looked toward his attorney in the front row and the two of them exchanged something.74
His final statement was read aloud to the witnesses by King. He said he wanted his closing words to be a call of love to his fellow Christians, asking them to “help us end the death penalty.” He said an eye for an eye had been used to persuade his jury to kill him and that he had been at the time “too ignorant to know how wrong that was,” because we no longer live under the old law but under the new. He quoted the Sermon on the Mount, at Matthew 5:38-39, where the instruction not to resist an evil person replaces the instruction to take an eye for an eye.75 He ended: “We are now under God’s grace and mercy.”76
I am going to stop the chapter here for a paragraph, because I do not think I can be neutral about this and I do not think the reader is served by my pretending.
Of the six men American states have shot in the modern era, one used his last breath to ask the church to abolish the thing that was killing him. He did it by quoting Jesus back to a Christian state, in a room built by that state, in front of witnesses that state selected, seconds before three of its employees put rifle rounds through his chest. Idaho’s legislature debated this method across two sessions. It heard testimony about certainty and about cost and about what the families of victims deserve. Nothing in the record suggests that anyone read Brad Sigmon’s last words aloud on either floor of that building. They were available. They had been in the wire copy for fifteen months.
The shots came at 6:05 p.m. Witnesses described a jagged red mark, roughly the size of a small fist, appearing where the target had been, and Sigmon’s body flinching and moving several times before going still.77 A physician pronounced him dead at 6:08.78
Afterward. The state commissioned an autopsy. When it was later reviewed by NPR reporters and by attorneys for a subsequent prisoner, it documented three distinct bullet wounds, all near the heart, together with x-rays, internal organ photographs and clothing analysis — a relatively thorough documentation package by the standards South Carolina would go on to apply five weeks later.79
What this case adds. Sigmon’s execution is, by the available record, the closest thing this cohort produced to the outcome the certainty promise describes. Three shooters, three wounds, all in the intended vicinity, death declared within roughly three minutes. A book arguing that this method is unreliable is worth nothing if it counts only the failures, and this one counts.
He also supplies the two things the method’s defenders cannot absorb. The choice he made was made in the dark, by design, after a court declined to turn the lights on. And the man who made it spent his last sentence asking Christians to stop.
What we do not know. How long he was there for it. Three wounds near the heart is not the same finding as three wounds through the heart, and the difference is measured in seconds of consciousness that no document in the public record fixes. The witnesses saw a body move several times before going still. Whether Brad Sigmon was inside those movements, nobody has established. The most successful firing squad execution in the modern American record cannot tell us how long the man it succeeded on remained alive.
Mikal Mahdi
April 11, 2025 — Broad River Correctional Institution, Columbia
Thirty-five days later, in the same chair, under the same protocol, at the same fifteen feet.
Mikal Deen Mahdi was forty-two. He was born in Virginia in 1983, the second son of a woman married at sixteen in an arranged marriage.80
His lawyers never disputed what he did. They disputed whether any court had ever been shown the rest of him.
As a toddler he watched his father beat his mother. She fled when he was four and left the boys with the man who had been beating her. His father told them she did not love them and later told them she was dead. By eight he was suicidal. By nine he had been briefly committed to a psychiatric facility and released without follow-up treatment. His father pulled him out of school in the fifth grade after a school psychologist recommended help, homeschooled him and put him through paramilitary training. At fourteen he went into juvenile detention for property crimes. He came out and went back in.81
Between fourteen and twenty-one he spent roughly six thousand hours — about eight months of his life — in solitary confinement, often for minor infractions. Virginia did not stop using the form of juvenile solitary it used on him until 2021.82 One psychologist who examined him described trauma, depression and anger as severe as any he had seen.83 His maternal aunt told a reporter that if he had been born to any other couple “he could have flourished.”84
Two months after his release from that system, at twenty-one, he committed the crimes he died for. Over three days in July 2004 he shot and killed Christopher Boggs, a convenience store clerk in North Carolina, and then James Myers, a captain with the Orangeburg Department of Public Safety, whom he shot with Myers’s own rifle on Myers’s property and whose body he burned in a shed.85 He pleaded guilty.
The sentencing. At the sentencing hearing the state called twenty-eight witnesses to establish the crimes, the aggravating circumstances, his record and the impact on the victims’ families. The defense called two. Rather than putting on a single mitigation witness from the community who actually knew him, trial counsel relied on one expert, a clinical social worker, whose account of Mikal Mahdi’s entire life — excluding her credentials and methodology — occupied about fifteen pages of transcript. The only other defense witness was a prison adaptability expert.86
The judge sentenced him to death and said he lacked humanity.
Nineteen years of appellate litigation followed and no court ever heard the full record of his childhood. That is not a claim about his innocence. He was not innocent. It is a claim about whether the machine that decided he should be shot was given the facts the law says it must be given.
His prison record contains what one would expect. During his trial he smuggled a handmade handcuff key into the courthouse in his mouth in an attempt to escape. In 2009 he and another inmate assaulted a detention officer, who survived.87 The state cited these things. They are true. They are also what happens to a person who entered the system at fourteen and never got out.
The choice. He rejected the electric chair because he feared dying burned and mutilated. He rejected lethal injection because he feared a prolonged death strapped to a gurney. His attorney David Weiss said that faced with barbaric and inhumane options, Mahdi had chosen “the lesser of three evils.”88
Hold that against what happened to him, because the irony here is not literary. It is evidentiary. Mahdi rejected lethal injection specifically to avoid a slow death, and the firing squad gave him one. The choice South Carolina offered him was not a mechanism for securing a better outcome. It could not have been, because the information he needed in order to choose well did not exist yet and would be produced by his own body.
The Supreme Court declined his final appeal on the morning of the eleventh. McMaster declined clemency hours later.89
His last days. He asked to donate his organs and tissue. Weiss said that facing death, “Mikal advocated for life,” and that in his final days he sought a measure of peace and purpose in the hope of saving others.90
Two of the six men in this chapter tried to give their bodies away while the state was preparing to destroy them. Gary Gilmore in 1977 and Mikal Mahdi in 2025. In Gilmore’s case some organs were recovered. In Mahdi’s, the method made it impossible, which is a fact about the firing squad that no legislature has ever discussed.
His last meal was ribeye cooked medium, mushroom risotto, broccoli, collard greens, cheesecake and sweet tea.91 About twenty-five people stood outside the gates, among them a Catholic sister from the Diocese of Charleston and a first-year law student from Cornell.92
The room. Three media witnesses had volunteered for the assignment: Martha Rose Brown of the Orangeburg Times and Democrat, Jeffrey Collins of the Associated Press and Brian McConchie of WACH. Nine witnesses in total sat behind bulletproof glass and bars.93
The curtain opened seconds before six o’clock. Mahdi gave no final statement. He did not turn his head toward the witnesses. The hood went over his head at 6:01. In the forty-five seconds between the hood and the shots he took several deep breaths.94
The killing. Three rounds were fired. Everyone in the room flinched, because there is no audible warning.95
Mahdi cried out. Brown, who had never witnessed an execution before, described it as a yell — “he let out a yell, like a holler.”96 His arms flexed. The white target was driven into the wound in his chest. Collins recorded two groans about forty-five seconds after the shots, then roughly eighty more seconds of breathing. McConchie described the last of it as a deep heave, the chest expanding outward and then collapsing.97 A doctor entered and pronounced him dead at 6:05 p.m.
All three media witnesses said afterward that he had shown signs of pain.98
Afterward. The documentation South Carolina provided was markedly thinner than what it had produced five weeks earlier for Sigmon — a single photograph of the torso rather than the full set of x-rays, internal imagery and clothing analysis.99
What it showed was enough. The state’s own commissioned autopsy revealed two wounds on his chest where three shooters had fired. None of the rounds struck the heart directly, as the protocol requires. The wounds damaged his liver and other internal organs and left his heart beating. Pathologists who reviewed the findings concluded that the injuries likely caused pain and suffering while he remained conscious.100 His attorneys’ retained pathologist estimated thirty to sixty seconds or more of consciousness. The period of consciousness the method is designed to produce is on the order of ten to fifteen seconds.101
His lawyers filed a formal complaint with the South Carolina Supreme Court. The Department of Corrections disputes the account, maintaining that all three rounds were fired, that two entered through a single wound along the same path and that the protocol was followed.102 Weiss called the execution barbaric and said it belonged in the darkest chapters of history rather than in a civilized society.103
What this case adds. Mahdi is the one execution in the modern record where failure is documented rather than suspected. Everything this book argues about certainty rests on him. And it rests on him only because his lawyers went and got the paper, from a state that did not volunteer it, in a jurisdiction where the shield law is currently before the state’s highest court.
He also demonstrates the exact failure mode Idaho’s protocol does not address. Three trained shooters at fifteen feet with a target over the heart produced two wounds and a beating heart. Idaho will fire from ten yards.
What we do not know. What the third shooter did. Weiss put the question in the plainest available form and no one has answered it: whether a gun jammed, whether a man did not fire, whether a man missed. We do not know how long Mahdi was conscious — thirty to sixty seconds is a retained expert’s estimate, contested by the state, and the state’s own account cannot be checked against documentation the state chose not to produce. We do not know why the documentation package shrank between March 7 and April 11, or who decided that it should.
Stephen Corey Bryant
November 14, 2025 — Broad River Correctional Institution, Columbia
Seven months later, the sixth and last.
Stephen Corey Bryant was forty-four and had been on death row for seventeen years.
In October 2004 he committed a string of burglaries along the dirt roads of rural Sumter County, took a semiautomatic rifle and ammunition from one of the houses and used them over the following days to shoot four people, killing three. He stopped at Willard Tietjen’s secluded home claiming car trouble. Tietjen invited him in and the two of them began talking about religion. Bryant shot him nine times. He burned the man’s eyes with a lit cigarette, set his goatee on fire, lit candles around the body and used a potholder Tietjen’s daughter had made as a child, dipped in her father’s blood, to write taunting messages to the police on the wall. One of them dared them to catch him. Tietjen’s daughter called her father six times. On the last call a stranger answered and told her he had killed him.104
Bryant pleaded guilty in 2008 and was sentenced to death for Tietjen’s murder.105
In seventeen years on the row he received two disciplinary sanctions — fighting without a weapon in 2009 and possessing a weapon in 2023.106 I include that because it is in the record and because it is the kind of fact that does not fit anyone’s argument cleanly, which is usually a sign it should be printed.
The last appeal. His lawyers argued that the judge who sentenced him had never been told how badly his brain was damaged before he was born. They said his mother drank heavily and used drugs while pregnant with him, that he had never received a full brain scan before his 2008 trial, and that Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder had impaired his capacity to conform his conduct to the law. They submitted a 2024 interview with a clinical psychologist in which Bryant described being sexually abused as a child by male relatives. His original defense team had told the court he was unnerved in the months before the killings because he could not stop thinking about that abuse. What they had not done was connect it to the damage.107
The state answered that the burglaries and the shootings were methodical rather than impulsive.
The South Carolina Supreme Court rejected the appeal unanimously on November 10. It reasoned that further investigation into Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder would only have supplied a different explanation for his problems without changing the outcome, and wrote that by any stretch Bryant had demonstrated “a high level of planning, decision making, and calculation.”108 The United States Supreme Court had already declined to review his sentence in October.109
His attorneys did not appeal the state ruling to Washington. They did not file for clemency either. Governor McMaster issued a denial anyway.110
I want to note what that means without decorating it. In the last case in the modern record, the machinery ran to completion against a man whose lawyers had stopped asking it to stop, and the governor of South Carolina published a refusal of a request that nobody had made.
The choice. Under South Carolina law a condemned person has until two weeks before the date to select a method. Bryant chose the firing squad on October 31.111 Four of the seven men South Carolina had executed since resuming in September 2024 chose lethal injection. Three chose the rifle.112 With his death the state drew even with Utah for the most firing squad executions in the country.
The room. About twenty people gathered at the gates.113 Ten witnesses sat behind the glass, among them three members of Willard Tietjen’s family, representatives of the Third Circuit Solicitor’s Office and the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office, and Bryant’s attorney.114
His feet were shackled to the chair. His arms were strapped behind him and to the chair. His head was strapped down. Asked whether he wished to make a final statement, he declined. He glanced briefly at the witnesses. Then the hood went on, and about fifty-five seconds later three volunteers fired.115
The killing. He made no sound.
The bullseye — a target roughly the size of a sticky note — flew off his chest and halfway across the room. Blood pooled across the front of him. Collins, in the witness room for the third time that year, watched him breathe shallowly for about thirty seconds. Roughly forty seconds after that he seemed to spasm or cough once, then went completely still. Tietjen’s three family members watched holding hands. Their only visible reaction was a flinch when the shots came. A doctor checked him with a stethoscope. He was pronounced dead at 6:05 p.m.116
King, who by then had watched the state kill two of his clients this way, said afterward that Bryant was the seventh man South Carolina had executed in fourteen months, that each had been forced into a choice among “bloody, burning, or protracted deaths,” that each execution had been brutal and shameful and that none had made the state safer or more just.117
What this case adds. On the face of the witness record, Bryant’s execution did what Idaho’s legislators said the method would do. I include him for that reason. A book arguing this method is unreliable is worth nothing if it counts only the failures.
He adds one more thing, which is the clemency that was denied without being sought. Chapter thirteen takes up the federal question and the machinery of last resort. Stephen Bryant is what that machinery looks like when everyone involved has stopped pretending.
What we do not know. Nearly all of it. The state has not released an autopsy. What exists is an eyewitness account rather than a pathology report, and that distinction is the entire lesson of Mikal Mahdi.
The discrepancy in Mahdi’s case was completely invisible from the witness room. Witnesses saw a man who had been shot and who then died. It took a pathologist looking at the body to establish that only two wounds existed where three shooters had fired, and that neither had struck the heart as intended. Whatever the witness record shows about Stephen Bryant, it is the category of evidence that has already failed once, in the same chamber, seven months earlier, to detect a failure.
What the six add up to
Six men. Two states. Forty-nine years. One method that four centuries of use have never required to prove itself.
Of the six, two published autopsies exist, both from the last eighteen months, both from the same state, and one of the two thinner than the other by that state’s own choosing. Four of the six executions produced no released pathology at all. One of the two autopsies documented failure.
That is a documented failure rate of one in two among the executions this country has bothered to examine, and a documentation rate of one in three overall. No state would accept those numbers from a hospital, a laboratory, an airline or a firearms manufacturer. Idaho accepted them from itself.
Look at the men. Three of the six declined to say anything at the end or were not recorded as having said it. Two asked to donate their organs. Two had families of their victims ask the state, on the record, not to do this. At least four had documented histories of childhood abuse, brain injury, prenatal damage or untreated mental illness that no sentencing body ever heard in full. One was baptized eight days before he was shot. One spent his final sentence asking the church to abolish the death penalty.
And look at how they chose. Gilmore chose the rifle over a rope he thought might fail. Taylor chose it over a needle he thought would make him thrash. Sigmon chose it over drugs the state refused to describe to him and a chair he thought would burn him. Mahdi chose it over the same two things and got the death he was trying to avoid. Bryant chose it and left no account of why. That is five men out of six selecting the firing squad as an escape from something else, and exactly one — Ronnie Lee Gardner — choosing it for a reason of his own.
The firing squad has never once been chosen in the modern era because someone wanted it. It has been chosen because the alternatives were worse or were hidden. Idaho has now made it the default, which removes even that. Beginning July 1, 2026, no one in Idaho has to choose the bullet. The bullet is simply what happens unless the director of the Department of Correction files an affidavit saying otherwise.
That is the file Idaho voted on. Not because the file was hidden — most of it was a search away, in wire copy and court records and two autopsies — but because a legislature that wants a method badly enough does not have to read what it is buying.
The four promises Part Two takes up were made against this record. The record is six men deep and mostly empty.
Notes
011. On Gilmore’s family and early life, see Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song (Little, Brown, 1979); and contemporaneous Associated Press and Deseret News coverage, January 1977.
022. On the July 1976 murders of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell, see Mailer, The Executioner’s Song; and State v. Gilmore, 561 P.2d 1063 (Utah 1977).
033. Gilmore, testimony before the Utah Board of Pardons, November 1976, quoted in “The Justice Files: The execution of Gary Gilmore,” ABC4 Utah, https://www.abc4.com/news/justice-files/the-justice-files-the-execution-of-gary-gilmore-2/.
044. Gilmore, Board of Pardons hearing, November 1976, as reported in contemporaneous coverage.
055. On Gilmore’s selection of shooting over hanging, see contemporaneous Utah press coverage, November 1976.
066. ABC4 Utah, “The Justice Files”; on the ACLU’s position, statements of Shirley Pedler, ACLU of Utah, November 1976 – January 1977.
077. Gilmore v. Utah, 429 U.S. 1012 (1976) (per curiam), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/429/1012/.
088. Ibid.; Capital Punishment U.K.; and Gilmore v. Utah, 429 U.S. 1012.
099. On Gilmore’s last night and last meal, contemporaneous Associated Press coverage, January 17, 1977.
1010. Contemporaneous accounts of the execution, Associated Press and Deseret News, January 17, 1977.
1111. Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart (Doubleday, 1994), 390. Mikal Gilmore records Utah’s tradition of five shooters, four with live rounds and one with a blank, and his own count of five holes in the shirt his brother wore.
1212. On the absence of a blank round in South Carolina, see the media witness accounts of the March 7, 2025 execution, which describe three volunteers all firing live ammunition. On Idaho, see the Idaho Department of Correction standard operating procedure as reported in “Idaho to rely on law enforcement volunteers for firing squad executions,” Idaho Statesman, June 11, 2026, and “IDOC outlines firing squad procedures as new policy nears implementation,” Rexburg Standard Journal, June 2026.
1313. Ibid.; ABC4 Utah, “The Justice Files.”
1414. ABC4 Utah, “The Justice Files”; “Gilmore, Gary (1940-1977),” in Encyclopedia of Prisons and Correctional Facilities (SAGE, 2005), https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/prisons/chpt/gilmore-gary-1940-1977.
1515. Encyclopedia of Prisons and Correctional Facilities, “Gilmore, Gary.”
1616. Vern Damico, quoted in Capital Punishment U.K.
1717. Statements of Utah Attorney General Robert B. Hansen and of Henry Schwarzschild of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, January 17, 1977.
1818. Mailer, The Executioner’s Song.
1919. On Taylor’s early life, see contemporaneous Deseret News coverage, 1992-1996.
2020. “Child killer executed by Utah firing squad,” Deseret News, January 26, 1996, https://www.deseret.com/1996/1/26/19221528/online-document-child-killer-executed-by-utah-firing-squad/.
2121. “Utah killer executed by firing squad,” United Press International, January 26, 1996, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1996/01/26/Utah-killer-executed-by-firing-squad/8649822632400/.
2222. “Utah firing squad executes child killer,” Associated Press, published in The Spokesman-Review, January 26, 1996, https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1996/jan/26/utah-firing-squad-executes-child-killer/.
2323. “Child killer executed by Utah firing squad,” Deseret News, January 26, 1996.
2424. Ibid. (statement of Beverly DeVoy).
2525. United Press International, January 26, 1996; on the number of media witnesses, contemporaneous Salt Lake City broadcast accounts.
2626. Deseret News, January 26, 1996; Associated Press, January 26, 1996; on the twenty-three-foot distance, United Press International, January 26, 1996.
2727. “Firing squad carries out execution,” Deseret News, January 26, 1996, https://www.deseret.com/1996/1/26/19221501/firing-squad-carries-out-execution/.
2828. “Child killer executed by Utah firing squad,” Deseret News, January 26, 1996.
2929. United Press International, January 26, 1996 (quoting KTVX reporter Paul Murphy).
3030. Ibid.
3131. “Child killer executed by Utah firing squad,” Deseret News, January 26, 1996 (quoting Utah Attorney General Jan Graham).
3232. Deseret News, January 26, 1996.
3333. Gardner v. Galetka, 568 F.3d 862 (10th Cir. 2009), quoted in Amnesty International, “USA: Death penalty / Legal concern: Ronnie Lee Gardner,” AMR 51/039/2010, May 12, 2010, https://www.amnesty.org/es/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/amr510392010en.pdf.
3434. Ibid.; and “Inmate facing firing squad seeks clemency,” Associated Press, June 10, 2010, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna37625594.
3535. On the April 2, 1985 courthouse shooting, see State v. Gardner, 789 P.2d 273 (Utah 1989); and contemporaneous Deseret News and Salt Lake Tribune coverage.
3636. Amnesty International, AMR 51/039/2010.
3737. Associated Press, June 10, 2010.
3838. Gardner v. Galetka, 568 F.3d 862 (10th Cir. 2009), as summarized in Amnesty International, AMR 51/039/2010.
3939. Donna Nu, quoted in “Victim’s family asks to block execution of condemned killer Ronnie Gardner,” ABC News, May 5, 2010, https://abcnews.com/TheLaw/murder-victims-family-seeks-block-killers-execution/story?id=10563476.
4040. Ibid.; Amnesty International, AMR 51/046/2010, https://www.amnesty.org/es/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/amr510462010en.pdf.
4141. VelDean Kirk, widow of bailiff Nicholas Kirk, quoted in “Utah to use firing squads if lethal drugs are unavailable,” Associated Press, March 2015. Mrs. Kirk witnessed Gardner’s execution and supported the 2015 restoration of the method.
4242. On Gardner’s stated reasons, contemporaneous Associated Press and Salt Lake Tribune coverage, June 2010.
4343. Amnesty International, AMR 51/046/2010.
4444. Associated Press, June 10, 2010 (statements of Andrew Parnes).
4545. “Ronnie Lee Gardner, convicted Utah killer, pleads for life,” Associated Press, June 10, 2010. Gardner testified for approximately two hours before the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole.
4646. Ibid.
4747. “Clemency denied for Utah killer scheduled for firing squad execution,” Associated Press, June 14, 2010, quoting board chairman Curt Garner. Earlier drafts of this chapter attributed to the board a characterization of Gardner’s rehabilitation as coming too late. That phrasing appears only in secondary compilations and is not carried in the contemporaneous reporting; it has been removed.
4848. “Clemency denied for Utah killer scheduled for firing squad execution,” Associated Press, June 14, 2010. Utah last granted clemency to a condemned prisoner in 1962.
4949. “Ronnie Lee Gardner hopes for reprieve from Utah firing squad tonight,” Associated Press, June 17, 2010, https://www.csmonitor.com/From-the-news-wires/2010/0617/Ronnie-Lee-Gardner-hopes-for-reprieve-from-Utah-firing-squad-tonight.
5050. “Hearing on firing squad sentence will go on,” Associated Press, June 2010, reporting Chief Judge Tena Campbell’s denial of Gardner’s request for a temporary restraining order against the commutation hearing.
5151. Doug Fabrizio, interviewed in “What a witness remembers about Utah’s 2010 execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner,” KUER, August 6, 2024, https://www.kuer.org/politics-government/2024-08-06/what-a-witness-remembers-about-utahs-2010-execution-of-ronnie-lee-gardner.
5252. Jennifer Dobner, “AP reporter gives eyewitness account of state ‘homicide,‘” Associated Press, June 18, 2010, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ronnie-lee-gardner-execution-ap-reporter-gives-eyewitness-account-of-state-homicide/.
5353. Fabrizio, KUER, August 6, 2024.
5454. “Convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner executed in Utah,” ABC News, June 18, 2010, https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/convicted-killer-ronnie-lee-gardner-executed-utah-10949786.
5555. Ibid.; on the five marksmen, the matched .30-caliber rifles, the blank round and the ported brick wall, see “Ronnie Lee Gardner’s life ends with hardly a word,” Deseret News, June 18, 2010, https://www.deseret.com/2010/6/18/20122221/ronnie-lee-gardner-s-life-ends-with-hardly-a-word/.
5656. Fabrizio, KUER, August 6, 2024; ABC News, June 18, 2010.
5757. Dobner, Associated Press, June 18, 2010.
5858. Ibid.
5959. Ibid.
6060. Statement of Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, June 18, 2010, reported in ABC News, June 18, 2010.
6161. Fabrizio, KUER, August 6, 2024.
6262. “South Carolina inmate executed by firing squad for first time in US since 2010,” CNN, March 7, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/07/us/brad-sigmon-south-carolina-firing-squad-execution.
6363. Ibid.; “SC inmate executed by firing squad, a first nationwide since 2010,” SC Daily Gazette, March 7, 2025.
6464. “Firing squad executes Brad Keith Sigmon in South Carolina,” USA TODAY, March 8, 2025 (statements of Gerald “Bo” King).
6565. Ibid. (interview with the Larkes’ daughter).
6666. Associated Press (Jeffrey Collins), March 7, 2025; Post and Courier, March 7, 2025; USA TODAY, March 8, 2025. See also chapter eight.
6767. “Sigmon’s final words urge Christians and lawmakers to reconsider ‘eye for an eye’ justice,” WCIV, March 7, 2025, https://abcnews4.com/news/local/sigmons-final-words-urge-christians-and-lawmakers-to-reconsider-eye-for-an-eye-justice-death-penalty-wciv-abc-news-4-03-07-2025.
6868. CNN, March 7, 2025; on the absence of South Carolina commutations, SC Daily Gazette, November 14, 2025.
6969. “Brad Sigmon’s final conversation with his spiritual adviser,” NewsNation, March 8, 2025, https://www.newsnationnow.com/crime/brad-sigmon-final-conversation-spiritual-adviser/.
7070. SC Daily Gazette, March 7, 2025 (statement of Gerald “Bo” King, Federal Public Defender’s Office).
7171. CNN, March 7, 2025.
7272. Agence France-Presse, March 8, 2025; National Catholic Reporter, March 2025, https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/editorial/editorial-south-carolinas-firing-squad-execution-magnifies-cruelty-death-penalty; USA TODAY, March 8, 2025. On the absence of a blank round in the South Carolina and Idaho protocols, see chapter ten and appendix C.
7373. Idaho Department of Correction standard operating procedure, as reported in “IDOC outlines firing squad procedures as new policy nears implementation,” Rexburg Standard Journal, June 2026: the team leader loads one live round into three separate magazines, one for each weapon.
7474. “‘We are now under God’s grace and mercy’: Final words before SC man executed,” WSPA, March 8, 2025.
7575. WCIV, March 7, 2025; on the call to fellow Christians, CNN, March 7, 2025. Sigmon quoted Matthew 5:38-39.
7676. National Catholic Reporter, March 2025.
7777. Associated Press (Jeffrey Collins), March 7, 2025.
7878. Agence France-Presse, March 8, 2025.
7979. Chiara Eisner and reporting colleagues, National Public Radio, review of the South Carolina Department of Corrections autopsy, May 8, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/05/08/nx-s1-5389846/firing-squad-south-carolina-death-penalty-execution. See also chapter five.
8080. “Mikal Mahdi, on SC death row, asserts humanity before death,” Post and Courier, April 9, 2025, https://www.postandcourier.com/news/crime/mikal-mahdi-sc-execution-orangeburg-police/article_24b6ed40-3e7c-4bfa-8a5e-34f9ba97c2b6.html.
8181. ACLU of South Carolina, “Death row case exposes failures to protect childhood trauma survivors,” April 8, 2025, https://www.aclusc.org/news/death-row-case-exposes-failures-protect-childhood-trauma-survivors/; Post and Courier, April 9, 2025; petition for writ of certiorari, Mahdi v. Stirling, No. 22-5536 (U.S. 2022), https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-5536/237124/20220906144100657_King.Mahdi.ifp.petition.FINAL.pdf.
8282. Post and Courier, April 9, 2025. Mahdi’s petition to the United States Supreme Court estimates approximately eight thousand hours; the Post and Courier reports approximately six thousand. I have used the lower figure throughout.
8383. Habeas petition, Mahdi v. Stirling (D.S.C., filed March 18, 2025), https://ncw.fd.org/sites/ncw/files/clemency-resources/Habeas%20Petition,%203-18-2025.pdf.
8484. Post and Courier, April 9, 2025 (quoting Sophia Gee).
8585. Ibid.; “Mikal Mahdi, South Carolina inmate convicted in two separate 2004 murders, executed by firing squad,” Fox News, April 12, 2025.
8686. Petition for writ of certiorari, Mahdi v. Stirling, No. 22-5536 (U.S. 2022); “Lawyers fight to stop South Carolina man’s execution by firing squad,” The Guardian, April 2025.
8787. “SC executes second death row inmate by firing squad,” SC Daily Gazette, April 11, 2025, https://scdailygazette.com/2025/04/11/u-s-supreme-court-declines-to-halt-scs-second-firing-squad-execution/.
8888. “Second South Carolina inmate chooses execution by firing squad,” Fox News, March 28, 2025 (statement of David Weiss).
8989. SC Daily Gazette, April 11, 2025.
9090. Ibid. (statement of David Weiss on behalf of Mahdi’s attorneys).
9191. Ibid. (statement of SCDC spokeswoman Chrysti Shain).
9292. Ibid.
9393. “Witnesses recount harrowing final moments of Mikal Mahdi’s execution by firing squad in SC,” WACH, April 12, 2025, https://wach.com/news/local/witnesses-recount-harrowing-final-moments-of-mikal-mahdis-execution-by-firing-squad-in-sc.
9494. Ibid.; Jeffrey Collins, Associated Press, April 11, 2025.
9595. WACH, April 12, 2025 (statement of Jeffrey Collins).
9696. Ibid. (statement of Martha Rose Brown).
9797. Ibid. (statement of Brian McConchie); Collins, Associated Press, April 11, 2025.
9898. WACH, April 12, 2025.
9999. See chapter five.
100100. National Public Radio, May 8, 2025.
101101. The Guardian, May 2025; NBC News, May 9, 2025.
102102. South Carolina Public Radio, November 14, 2025, https://www.southcarolinapublicradio.org/sc-news/2025-11-14/south-carolina-executes-third-person-by-firing-squad-this-year; and see chapter five.
103103. SC Daily Gazette, April 11, 2025; NBC News, April 11, 2025.
104104. “Lawyers for Stephen Bryant make final appeal over brain damage to stop South Carolina execution,” Associated Press, November 2025; “South Carolina killer who taunted police with message written in victim’s blood chooses execution by firing squad,” CBS News, October 31, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/south-carolina-inmate-firing-squad-stephen-bryant-message-victim-blood/; “Death row inmate becomes 3rd in SC executed by firing squad,” SC Daily Gazette, November 14, 2025, https://scdailygazette.com/2025/11/14/death-row-inmate-set-to-become-3rd-in-sc-executed-by-firing-squad/.
105105. SC Daily Gazette, November 14, 2025.
106106. Ibid. (citing South Carolina Department of Corrections records).
107107. Associated Press, November 2025; “SC Supreme Court turns down inmate’s final appeal as execution nears,” SC Daily Gazette, November 11, 2025, https://scdailygazette.com/2025/11/11/sc-supreme-court-turns-down-inmates-final-appeal-as-execution-nears/.
108108. “South Carolina killer who wrote message in victim’s blood set to die by firing squad after final appeal rejected,” CBS News, November 11, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stephen-bryant-south-carolina-firing-squad-execution/ (quoting the unanimous decision of the South Carolina Supreme Court).
109109. Ibid.
110110. SC Daily Gazette, November 14, 2025.
111111. “3rd death row inmate in SC chooses execution by firing squad,” SC Daily Gazette, October 31, 2025, https://scdailygazette.com/2025/10/31/3rd-death-row-inmate-in-sc-chooses-execution-by-firing-squad/.
112112. Ibid.; SC Daily Gazette, November 14, 2025.
113113. SC Daily Gazette, November 14, 2025.
114114. South Carolina Public Radio, November 14, 2025.
115115. “Firing squad executes South Carolina serial killer who wrote message with victim’s blood,” USA TODAY, November 15, 2025.
116116. Ibid.; Jeffrey Collins, Associated Press, November 14, 2025; “South Carolina executes killer who left bloody message, marking third firing-squad execution this year,” CBS News, November 14, 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stephen-bryant-south-carolina-firing-squad-execution-death/.
117117. USA TODAY, November 15, 2025 (statement of Gerald “Bo” King).