Every argument for the firing squad, from Representative Skaug’s floor speech to the op-eds that ran in Idaho papers in the weeks before July 1, 2026, begins in the same place: a bullet cannot fail to be found the way a vein can. You do not need a trained phlebotomist to locate a man’s chest. You do not need a compounding pharmacy to manufacture a bullet. The rifle either fires or it does not, and if it fires, the argument goes, the outcome is not in question.
That argument is false, and it is false in a way that is now documented, autopsied, and a matter of public record. Idaho did not choose the firing squad in ignorance of that record. It chose the firing squad with the record already in front of it.
WHAT “CERTAIN” WOULD REQUIRE
Vague appeals to a bullet’s reliability trade on an ambiguity between two very different claims, so it helps to separate them before turning to the evidence.
The weak claim is that a rifle, mechanically, will discharge when triggered more reliably than an IV line will find a usable vein. That claim is almost certainly true and almost entirely beside the point.
The strong claim, the one legislators needed for their humaneness argument to work, is that a bullet fired from that rifle will strike the specific location necessary to cause rapid unconsciousness and death every time, regardless of the psychological state of the shooter, the movement of the condemned person in the chair, and the variability of three human beings independently aiming at a target roughly the size of a fist from five yards in South Carolina or ten in Idaho. These are not the same claim, and the gap between them is where South Carolina’s 2025 executions landed.
THE PROTOCOL, AS IDAHO DESIGNED IT
Idaho’s firing squad protocol, released by the Department of Correction ahead of the July 1, 2026 effective date, calls for the team leader to load one live round into a magazine for each of the three weapons. On the command to fire, the team discharges simultaneously: a design feature meant, as in other jurisdictions, to diffuse individual responsibility for the fatal shot, since no shooter can know with certainty that his own round struck a vital location, or struck at all.¹
The condemned person is offered a sedative the night before and again within four hours of the execution, then restrained in the execution chair, where a target is affixed over the heart. The execution team consists of three primary shooters, two alternates, and a team leader responsible for supervising the team and preparing the firearms.²
The department’s qualification standards are demanding on their face: a minimum of three years of Peace Officer Standards and Training certification, no firearms or use-of-force disciplinary action in the preceding twelve months, and a marksmanship test requiring one hundred percent accuracy from a minimum of seven yards against a target matching the size, shape, and height of the one that will be used in an actual execution.³ A volunteer who cannot hit that target with every round from every assigned firearm fails and is not permitted to serve.
The execution itself is carried out from approximately ten yards, twice the distance from which South Carolina’s three shooters fired at Brad Sigmon and Mikal Mahdi. South Carolina positions its shooters fifteen feet from the chair. Idaho has doubled that.⁴
The protocol requires a volunteer to prove himself at a minimum of seven yards, then asks him to fire from ten. The department may well qualify its officers at the full ten. Nothing in the standard requires it to, and nothing the department has published says whether it does. A state that has staked a humaneness argument on millimeter-level accuracy wrote a qualification floor three yards short of the shot it intends to take and published no data on whether accuracy holds across the difference.
Three yards is a small distance in the abstract. It is not small when the target is the size of a fist, when the standard the state set for itself was one hundred percent rather than something lower, and when the one documented failure of this method in the modern era involved rounds that struck below where they were aimed.
On paper, this looks like the engineered reliability the certainty argument requires: trained officers, a demonstrated marksmanship standard, a fixed and short distance, a stationary and restrained target. If the promise of certainty were going to hold anywhere, it should hold under conditions this controlled. It did not hold in South Carolina, under conditions that were, in every material respect, the conditions Idaho has now built.
BRAD SIGMON: THE VERSION THAT MOSTLY WORKED
On March 7, 2025, Brad Sigmon became the first person executed by firing squad in the United States in fifteen years. Three volunteers from the South Carolina Department of Corrections fired simultaneously.⁵ 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. A doctor came out within a minute, examined him, and pronounced him dead at 6:08 p.m., three minutes after the shots.⁶
When the state’s commissioned autopsy was later reviewed by NPR reporters and by attorneys for a subsequent prisoner, it documented three distinct bullet wounds, all near Sigmon’s heart, along with x-rays, internal organ photographs, and clothing analysis.⁷
The case should not be overstated. On the available record, Sigmon’s execution is 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. If this were the entire record, Idaho’s legislators would at least have a defensible, if still troubling, evidentiary basis for the claim that the method works as designed when the shooters do their part. It is not the entire record. It is one data point out of three, and the next one broke the pattern.
MIKAL MAHDI: THE VERSION THAT DID NOT
Mikal Mahdi was executed on April 11, 2025, thirty-five days after Sigmon, at the same facility, using the same three-shooter protocol, the same target, and the same fifteen-foot distance, under the same qualification standard for the officers involved.⁸ The outcome was different in ways the state’s own commissioned autopsy could not fully hide, even though the documentation provided to Mahdi’s attorneys was thinner than what had followed Sigmon’s death: one photograph of Mahdi’s torso, rather than the full set of x-rays, internal imagery, and clothing analysis produced in Sigmon’s case.⁹
That single photograph showed two bullet wounds in Mahdi’s lower chest. Not three. Two. Both sat just above the border with the abdomen, an area that does not largely overlie the heart. The state’s pathologist, Dr. Marcus Bradley, recorded a note that it was believed two bullets had entered through a single wound, an explanation the pathologist Mahdi’s lawyers commissioned did not accept.¹⁰
What both reviews agreed on is the part that decides the question. The wound tracks ran downward and to the right, through the left lobe of the liver, the pancreas, and the lower left lung. Fragments perforated the right ventricle, but no round struck the heart the way the protocol requires, and Mahdi’s heart went on beating after the volley.¹¹
David Weiss, one of Mahdi’s attorneys, was present as a witness. He described Mahdi sitting down and pushing against his restraints when the curtain opened, and recalled thinking, even before the shots, that the target on Mahdi’s chest looked positioned lower than it should have been. When the shots came, Mahdi cried out. He then began breathing heavily, groaning multiple times over roughly forty-five seconds to a minute, before his body went still.¹² Jeffrey Collins, the Associated Press reporter who witnessed the execution, corroborated the account: Mahdi cried out after the shots, groaned audibly on two more occasions, and continued visibly breathing for approximately eighty seconds afterward.¹³
Dr. Jonathan Arden, the forensic pathologist Mahdi’s attorneys retained, concluded that only two bullets had struck him and estimated that he experienced conscious pain and suffering for somewhere between thirty and sixty seconds, and potentially longer, given the injuries documented and the time required for that degree of internal damage to become fatal without a direct heart strike.¹⁴ Arden called the single-entrance explanation extraordinarily uncommon, noting that two bullets through one hole would leave a larger and more irregular wound than the photographs show.¹⁵
Weiss put the remaining uncertainty in its simplest form: “It’s not fully clear what happened. Did one of the gunmen not fire that one? Did their gun get jammed? Did they miss? We just have no idea at this point.”¹⁶ The South Carolina Department of Corrections did not respond to a request for comment on the discrepancy, and it maintains that all three rounds were fired and that the protocol was followed.¹⁷
STEPHEN BRYANT: THE VERSION THAT APPEARS TO HAVE WORKED
Seven months after Mahdi, on November 14, 2025, South Carolina carried out its third firing squad execution. Stephen Corey Bryant declined to make a final statement. He glanced at the witnesses, the hood went over his head, and the shots came roughly fifty-five seconds later. By every account from the witness room, he made no sound. Witnesses watched the red bullseye fly forward off his chest, saw a few shallow breaths, and then a final spasm a little over a minute later. A doctor checked him with a stethoscope, and he was pronounced dead at 6:05 p.m., three minutes after the volley.¹⁸
I include Bryant for the same reason I included Sigmon: an argument that this method is unreliable is worth nothing if it counts only the failures. On the face of the witness record, Bryant’s execution did what Idaho’s legislators said the method would do.
Two qualifications belong beside that. The first is that no autopsy in his case had been released publicly as of this writing, so what is available is an eyewitness account rather than a pathology report.¹⁹ The second follows from the first and carries more weight. The discrepancy in Mahdi’s case was 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 two wounds existed where three shooters had fired, and that no round had struck the heart as intended. Whatever the witness record shows about Bryant, it belongs to the category of evidence that has already failed once to detect a failure.
So the sample in South Carolina is three, and it reads like this. One execution the documentary record shows went as designed. One the documentary record shows did not. One that appears to have gone as designed, on evidence of a kind that has already proven unable to see a failure when there was one. That is the entire modern evidentiary basis for the promise of certainty, and it is the basis on which Idaho built a room.
WHAT ROBIN MAHER’S ASSESSMENT ACTUALLY MEANS
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, an organization that takes no institutional position for or against capital punishment but is widely regarded across the political spectrum as the most reliable clearinghouse of execution data in the country, summarized South Carolina’s 2025 cohort for Idaho reporters in the run-up to the changeover. Of the three firing squad executions the state carried out that year, she said, two went badly. In the same conversation, she noted that in at least one case only two of the intended bullets were found to have struck the prisoner, and that neither had hit the heart directly. “So it tells you,” she said, “that the firing squad is not a foolproof method.”²⁰
Maher has made the same point more broadly and in writing: every execution method in American history was introduced with an unfulfilled promise of being foolproof and more humane than whatever it replaced.
Her count and mine differ, and the difference should be stated rather than smoothed over. Only Mahdi’s execution produced a documentary record establishing failure. Bryant’s had produced no released autopsy at the time she spoke, and his attorneys had raised their own objections to how it was carried out; whether it belongs in the same column as Mahdi’s is a question the state’s slowness to release the pathology has left open. My accounting in the preceding section is the more conservative one, and I will stand on it rather than on hers. It does not need to be two out of three to be damning. One out of three, documented and autopsied, is already a rate no state would tolerate in any other procedure it performs on a restrained human being.²¹
The phrase “not a foolproof method” understates the stakes. This is not a product recall notice about a washing machine that occasionally leaves a load damp. This is an execution method that, in the most recent and most rigorously documented cohort of cases available anywhere in the country, failed to strike its intended target in one of the three executions where anyone was in a position to check. If a surgical procedure, a parachute rig, or a commercial aircraft’s landing gear failed in anywhere near that proportion of real-world uses, no legislature would describe it on the floor as certain.
A FAILURE RATE WITH MILITARY PRECEDENT
The certainty problem documented in South Carolina’s 2025 executions is not a novel discovery specific to modern American corrections departments. Military historians have documented the same failure mode for as long as organized armies have used firing squads to carry out battlefield executions, most extensively during the First World War, when thousands of soldiers on multiple sides were shot for desertion, cowardice, and mutiny.²²
The historical record of those executions includes a specific procedural feature: many military protocols placed a designated officer on standby, tasked with delivering a final shot if the volley failed to kill the condemned soldier outright, a procedure often called the coup de grâce. Documented British courts-martial executions describe exactly that sequence: a medical officer examining the condemned after the volley, finding him not yet dead, and a subaltern or lieutenant stepping forward to fire the finishing shot.²³
The existence of that officer, and that procedure, is the clearest historical acknowledgment available that a trained firing squad, even one composed of soldiers under military discipline, does not reliably produce an instant death on the first volley. Armies that used this method for over a century built a backup role into the protocol because they knew, from repeated direct experience, that the primary method would sometimes fail to finish the job.
Idaho’s protocol includes no equivalent role. There is no officer stationed with a sidearm, ready to deliver a follow-up shot if the volley from the gun ports fails to produce the certain, instant death the state has promised. The absence is not an oversight; it would be a strange and macabre thing for a modern corrections department to write into an execution protocol. But it also means that if Idaho’s shooting team produces the outcome South Carolina’s produced with Mikal Mahdi —wounds that do not reach the heart and a body that continues functioning for the better part of a minute — there is no institutionally sanctioned mechanism to finish what the volley did not. The condemned person would be left to die, or not, from the wounds the volley inflicted, monitored by the same doctor who placed the target, with no protocol-sanctioned recourse beyond waiting.
WHY THE FAILURE RATE IS NOT AN ANOMALY
It would be a mistake to treat Mahdi’s execution as a single bad outcome, an unlucky roll of the dice against an otherwise reliable system. The structural reasons a firing squad is prone to this kind of failure are not mysterious, and they follow from the protocol’s own design choices.
First, the simultaneous-fire design that exists to diffuse individual accountability also diffuses individual precision. When three shooters fire at once, on a single verbal command, under the pressure of knowingly killing a restrained human being at close range, the ordinary human tendency toward flinching is neither eliminated nor meaningfully controlled for. A marksman who can hit a stationary paper target with calm, unhurried, repeated practice on a range is being asked to perform the same physical task once, under conditions no qualification test can replicate: knowing that the target is a living person, secured and possibly sedated but not anesthetized, who may flinch, sag, or shift in the chair at the moment of the command.
Second, the target is a marker roughly the size of a fist, pinned over a heart that sits, in the actual human chest, at an angle and position that varies between individuals depending on body size, posture in the restraint chair, and how the straps happen to be positioned. That is a difficult thing to strike with total reliability even under laboratory conditions, let alone the conditions of an execution. Weiss’s observation, that the target on Mahdi appeared to be placed lower than it should have been, points to the vulnerability directly: placement is itself a human judgment, made once, under time pressure, and an error of a few centimeters is enough to produce the outcome Mahdi’s autopsy documented.
Third, and most damaging to the certainty argument, South Carolina’s General Assembly amended its execution-secrecy statute, S.C. Code § 24-3-580, in 2023 through Senate Bill 120, broadening confidentiality to cover not just drug suppliers but any person or entity directly or indirectly involved in the planning or execution of a death sentence, with the courts instructed to construe that protection broadly.²⁴ The ACLU of South Carolina has since sued to challenge the statute’s scope, arguing that it has chilled potential whistleblowers among execution-team members and left the public unable to learn even basic facts about how a given execution was carried out.²⁵ The public, and even the condemned person’s own attorneys, cannot verify after the fact whether the shooters who missed Mahdi’s heart met any particular standard of proficiency, whether they had ever fired a weapon in this context before, or whether the state’s internal review, if one exists, identified a correctable cause.
THE SAMPLE SIZE PROBLEM, AND WHY IT CUTS AGAINST THE STATE
A careful reader might object that these conclusions rest on a small sample: three executions, one of which appears to have gone largely as intended. Is it sound to speak of a failure rate from a sample that size? The objection deserves to be taken seriously, and the answer cuts against the state’s position rather than for it.
Three is indeed too small to establish a precise failure rate with statistical confidence, in the way a pharmaceutical trial with thousands of participants might. But the smallness of the sample is not a reason for confidence in the method’s reliability. It is a reason for the opposite. Idaho’s legislature was not being asked to evaluate a method with a decades-deep evidentiary base showing consistent performance across hundreds of applications. It was being asked to adopt, as its primary method, a technique whose entire modern American track record, at the time of the vote, consisted of two data points close enough in time and protocol to be genuinely comparable, one of which had already produced a documented, autopsied failure.
An institution facing that little evidence, on a decision this irreversible, would ordinarily treat the uncertainty itself as a reason for caution. Idaho’s legislature inverted that logic, treating the paucity of adverse long-term data as permission to act rather than as a reason to wait for more, a decision that only makes sense if the goal was never certainty in the first place, but the appearance of having addressed a documented problem quickly and visibly.
IDAHO’S WAGER
Idaho’s legislature voted on House Bill 37 in February and March of 2025, before any of these executions had taken place. The House voted on February 6 and the Senate on March 5. Brad Sigmon was shot two days later, and Mikal Mahdi five weeks after that. In the narrow moment of the vote, Idaho’s legislators had no modern record to consult.
But the statute did not take effect for another fifteen months, and the entire record described here became public inside that window. The autopsy findings were reported by NPR and the Death Penalty Information Center by May 2025, more than a year before Idaho’s law took effect.²⁶ Idaho’s qualification protocol, requiring three years of certification and a perfect marksmanship test, is in most respects at least as rigorous as anything South Carolina required of the officers who missed Mikal Mahdi’s heart. No engineering change in Idaho’s protocol addresses the structural vulnerabilities just described: the simultaneousfire diffusion of precision, the human variability of target placement, or the shield-law opacity that prevents public verification of what went wrong when it does.
What Idaho has built is not a more certain method than the one that failed in South Carolina. It is the same method, with the same structural vulnerabilities, deployed by a state that watched those vulnerabilities produce a documented, autopsied period of conscious suffering in another state, and voted anyway.
That is not a claim about incompetence. Idaho’s Department of Correction is not less capable than South Carolina’s. It is a claim about what “certain” was always going to mean in practice: not zero failures, but a failure rate the state has decided it can live with, because the alternative, another decade of botched IV attempts like Thomas Creech’s, was judged to be worse. The next chapter takes up what that trade costs the person on the receiving end of a missed shot, in the currency of pain, consciousness, and time.
Notes
011. “This is how South Carolina performs its firing squad execution,” Associated Press, April 10, 2025; “IDOC outlines firing squad procedures as new policy nears implementation,” rexburgstandardjournal.com, June 2026 (the team leader loads one live round into a magazine for each of the three weapons).
022. “IDOC outlines firing squad procedures as new policy nears implementation,” rexburgstandardjournal.com, June 2026; “As Idaho Reinstates Firing Squad, Volunteers Sought for Executions,” La Voce di New York, July 3, 2026; “Idaho Is the Only US State to Make Firing Squad Its Default Execution Method —Now It Needs Volunteers to Pull the Trigger,” IBTimes UK, June 2026.
033. “Idaho details how firing squad executions will work under new state policy,” KIVI-TV, June 11, 2026; “New Rules and Training Requirements Released for Idaho’s Firing Squad,” KPVI, June 12, 2026; “IDOC outlines firing squad procedures as new policy nears implementation,” rexburgstandardjournal.com, June 2026.
044. “Idaho to rely on law enforcement volunteers for firing squad executions,” Police1 (Idaho Statesman/Tribune Content Agency), June 12, 2026 (IDOC spokesperson Ryan Mortensen on the approximately ten-yard firing distance and the seven-yard qualification minimum); “This is how South Carolina performs its firing squad execution,” Associated Press, April 10, 2025 (fifteen feet in South Carolina).
055. “South Carolina executes Brad Sigmon in first US firing squad execution in 15 years,” Associated Press (Jeffrey Collins), March 7, 2025.
066. “South Carolina death row inmate executed by firing squad,” Live5News / WCSC, April 11–12, 2025; Associated Press (Jeffrey Collins), March 7, 2025; Agence France-Presse, March 8, 2025 (time of death recorded at 6:08 p.m.).
077. Chiara Eisner, “A firing squad tried to shoot a prisoner in the heart. They missed, autopsy indicates,” NPR, May 8, 2025.
088. “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.
099. Death Penalty Information Center, “Lawyers Raise Concern as Autopsy Finds South Carolina’s Second Firing Squad Execution May Have Been Botched,” May 13, 2025.
1010. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025; “SC firing squad ‘largely missed’ cop killer Mikal Mahdi’s heart, attorneys say autopsy shows,” Post and Courier, May 2025 (Dr. Marcus Bradley performed the autopsy commissioned by the South Carolina Department of Corrections and noted his belief that two bullets followed a single pathway).
1111. Post and Courier, May 2025 (describing the two recorded wound pathways, running through the heart sac, right ventricle, diaphragm, left liver lobe, pancreas, and left lower lung); Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025; CBS News, May 8, 2025.
1212. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025 (quoting attorney David Weiss).
1313. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025 (citing Associated Press reporter Jeffrey Collins’s witness account).
1414. Death Penalty Information Center, May 13, 2025; CBS News, “Man executed by firing squad was conscious for up to a minute after bullets missed target, lawyers say,” May 8, 2025.
1515. NBC News, “S.C. inmate’s firing squad execution was ‘botched,’ with bullets mostly missing his heart, lawyers say,” May 9, 2025; Post and Courier, May 2025.
1616. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025 (quoting attorney David Weiss).
1717. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025; South Carolina Public Radio, November 14, 2025 (the department’s position that all three rounds were fired and the protocol followed).
1818. “South Carolina executes third person by firing squad this year,” South Carolina Public Radio, November 14, 2025; “South Carolina executes killer who left bloody message, marking third firing-squad execution this year,” CBS News, November 14, 2025.
1919. Post and Courier, “SC slow to release autopsy after execution that inmate’s lawyers say was botched,” November 2025.
2020. “Firing squad set to become primary method of execution in Idaho,” CBS2 /IdahoNews.com, June 2026 (quoting Robin Maher, Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center).
2121. “Idaho Death Penalty Update: Law Enforcement Volunteers to Carry Out Firing Squad Executions,” Officer.com, June 2026; substantially the same statement from Maher was also published by Corrections1, East Idaho News, the Daily Inter Lake, and The Columbian in June 2026.
2222. Encyclopedia 1914–1918-Online, “Military Justice”; HistoryNet, “Why Were These WWI Soldiers Executed by Their Own Country?,” January 18, 2023.
2323. “Capital Punishment, Posthumous Punishment and Pardon — Remembering and Disremembering the Dead,” NCBI Bookshelf; Findmypast, “Shot at Dawn: Men and Boys ‘Absent Without Leave’ During World War 1,” May 28, 2024.
2424. S.C. Code Ann. § 24-3-580, as amended by 2023–2024 S.C. Senate Bill 120.
2525. ACLU of South Carolina, “ACLU of South Carolina Challenges Death Penalty Secrecy Law,” press release, January 29, 2025.
2626. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025; Death Penalty Information Center, May 13, 2025.