Certainty
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. This chapter exists because 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 this record. It chose the firing squad with the record already sitting in front of it.
What “Certain” Would Require
Before turning to the evidence, it is worth being precise about what the certainty claim actually requires to be true, because vague appeals to a bullet’s reliability trade on an ambiguity between two very different claims. 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 actually 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 inherent variability of three human beings independently aiming at a target roughly the size of a fist from a distance of five yards in South Carolina or ten in Idaho. These are not the same claim, and the gap between them is exactly 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 each member of the shooting team to receive one live round of ammunition. 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 their own round was the one that struck a vital location, or struck at all.1 The execution team consists of three primary shooters, two alternates and a team leader responsible for supervising the team and preparing the firearms; 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.2 The department’s qualification standards for the shooters 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 the qualification and is not permitted to serve. The execution itself is carried out from approximately ten yards. This is worth pausing on, because it is twice the distance from which South Carolina’s three shooters fired at Brad Sigmon and Mikal Mahdi. South Carolina positions its shooters fifteen feet — five yards — from the chair. Idaho has doubled that.3
That last pairing deserves to be pulled out and held up, because it is easy to read past. The protocol requires a volunteer to prove himself at a minimum of seven yards. It 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. That gap is the point. 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 exactly the kind of engineered reliability the certainty argument requires. Trained officers. A demonstrated marksmanship standard. A fixed, short distance. A stationary, 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 same conditions Idaho has now built.
Brad Sigmon: The Version That Mostly Worked
The previous chapter gave the account of Brad Sigmon’s execution. What matters here is what the pathology showed. 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 located near Sigmon’s heart, along with x-rays, internal organ photographs and clothing analysis, a relatively thorough documentation package by the standards South Carolina would go on to apply.4
The case should not be overstated. 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 two 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 very next data point broke the pattern.
Mikal Mahdi: The Version That Did Not
Mikal Mahdi was executed on April 11, 2025, thirty-five days after Sigmon, under the same protocol and at the same fifteen-foot distance — half of what Idaho has now adopted.5 The outcome was different in ways the state’s own commissioned autopsy could not fully hide, even though the level of documentation provided to Mahdi’s attorneys was markedly thinner than what had been provided after 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.6 That single photograph showed two bullet wounds in Mahdi’s lower chest. Not three. Two. The state’s own pathology report stated that it was “believed” two bullets had entered through a single wound, an explanation a pathologist commissioned separately by Mahdi’s lawyers did not accept without reservation.7 What both sides’ review agreed on was this: the wounds struck Mahdi’s liver and other abdominal organs, not his heart directly and this misplacement allowed his heart to continue beating for some period after the shots were fired.8
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 were fired, 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 the course of roughly forty-five seconds to a minute, before his body went still.9 Jeffrey Collins, an 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.10
The pathologist commissioned by Mahdi’s attorneys concluded that Mahdi likely experienced conscious pain and suffering for somewhere between thirty and sixty seconds after being shot, and potentially longer, given the injuries documented and the physiological time required for that degree of internal damage to become fatal without a direct heart strike.11 Weiss, reflecting on the discrepancy between the two executions’ documentation, put the uncertainty bluntly: “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.”12 The South Carolina Department of Corrections did not respond to a request for comment on the discrepancy.13
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. The previous chapter gave the account of Stephen Corey Bryant’s death. On the face of the witness record it did what Idaho’s legislators said the method would do.14
One qualification belongs beside that, and it governs everything this chapter concludes. The state was slow to release the autopsy in Bryant’s case, so what is publicly available is an eyewitness account rather than a pathology report.15 That distinction is not a technicality. The discrepancy in Mahdi’s case was entirely 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 Bryant, it is the category of evidence that has already failed once to detect a failure.
So the sample is three, and the honest reading of it runs 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 this way, speaking to Idaho reporters in the run-up to the July 1 changeover: of the three firing squad executions the state carried out that year, two “went badly.” In the same conversation she noted that in at least one case, only two of the intended bullets were ultimately found to have struck the prisoner, and that neither one had hit the heart directly. “So it tells you,” she said, “that the firing squad is not a foolproof method.”16 Maher has made the same point more broadly and in writing: every execution method in American history, she has said, was introduced with an unfulfilled promise of being foolproof and more humane than whatever it replaced. I should be exact about where her count and mine differ, because the difference matters. Only Mahdi’s execution produced a documentary record establishing failure. Bryant’s 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 own 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.17
The phrase “not a foolproof method” understates the stakes by its very plainness. 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 rigorously documented and most recent 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 to perform as designed in anywhere near that proportion of real-world uses, it would not be described in a legislative floor debate as certain. It would be grounded.
A Failure Rate With Military Precedent
The certainty problem this chapter has 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.18 The historical record of those executions includes a specific, grim procedural feature worth naming here: many military firing squad protocols included a designated officer standing by, tasked specifically with delivering a final shot if the volley failed to kill the condemned soldier outright, a procedure often referred to as the coup de grâce. Documented British courts-martial executions describe exactly this 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.19 The existence of that officer, and that procedure, is itself the clearest possible historical acknowledgment that a trained firing squad, even one composed of soldiers under military discipline, does not reliably produce an instant, certain death on the first volley. Armies that used this method for over a century built a backup role into the protocol precisely 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 build into a written execution protocol. But its absence also means that when 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 is left to die, or not, from the wounds the volley actually inflicted, monitored by the same doctor who placed the target, with no protocol-sanctioned recourse beyond waiting. Armies that have used this method the longest built in a remedy for exactly the failure mode this chapter’s evidence has documented. Idaho’s protocol has not.
Why the Failure Rate Is Not an Anomaly, It Is the Method
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 exactly this kind of failure are not mysterious, and they follow directly from the protocol’s own design choices.
First, the simultaneous-fire design that exists specifically to diffuse individual accountability also diffuses individual precision. When three shooters fire at once, on a single verbal command, under the psychological pressure of knowingly killing a restrained human being at close range, the natural human tendency toward flinch, toward a small, involuntary muscular contraction at the moment of firing, 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 identical physical task once, under conditions no marksmanship qualification test can fully replicate: knowing that the target is a living person, secured but not anesthetized, who may flinch, sag or shift in the chair at the exact moment of the command.
Second, the target itself, a small 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 meaningfully between individuals depending on body size, posture in the restraint chair and how the chair straps happen to be positioned, is a genuinely difficult target to strike with total reliability even under laboratory conditions, let alone the conditions of an actual execution. Weiss’s observation, that the target on Mahdi appeared to be placed lower than it should have been, points to exactly this vulnerability: the target’s placement is itself a human judgment call, made once, under time pressure, by whoever is responsible for positioning it and a placement error of even a few centimeters is enough to produce the outcome Mahdi’s autopsy documented.
Third, and perhaps most damning for the certainty argument specifically, South Carolina’s General Assembly amended its execution-secrecy statute, S.C. Code § 24-3-580, in 2023 through Senate Bill 120, broadening confidentiality protection 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.20 The ACLU of South Carolina has since sued to challenge the statute’s scope, arguing it has chilled potential whistleblowers among execution-team members themselves and left the public unable to learn even basic facts about how a given execution was actually carried out.21 This means 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 own 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 this chapter has drawn sweeping conclusions from a small sample: three executions, one of which appears to have gone largely as intended. Is it statistically sound to speak of a “failure rate” from a sample this size? The objection deserves to be taken seriously, because it is a fair methodological question and the honest answer cuts against the state’s position rather than for it. A sample of 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 establish one. 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 robust, 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 exactly two data points close enough in time and protocol to be genuinely comparable, one of which had already produced a documented, autopsied failure. A responsible institution facing that little evidence, on a decision this irreversible, would ordinarily treat the uncertainty itself as a reason for caution, not as license to proceed because the sample was too small to prove failure conclusively. 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 information, a decision that only makes sense if the goal was never actually certainty in the first place, but rather 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 in this chapter became public inside that window. The autopsy findings discussed in this chapter were reported by NPR and the Death Penalty Information Center by May 2025, more than a year before Idaho’s law took effect on July 1, 2026.22 Idaho’s own 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. There is no engineering change in Idaho’s protocol that addresses the structural vulnerabilities this chapter has just described: the simultaneous-fire diffusion of precision, the human variability of target placement or the shield-law opacity that prevents public verification of what actually went wrong when it does.
What Idaho has built, in other words, 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, thirty-to-sixty-second conscious suffering event 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 actually costs the person on the receiving end of a missed shot, in the specific 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.
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. Chiara Eisner, “A firing squad tried to shoot a prisoner in the heart. They missed, autopsy indicates,” NPR, May 8, 2025.
055. “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.
066. Death Penalty Information Center, “Lawyers Raise Concern as Autopsy Finds South Carolina’s Second Firing Squad Execution May Have Been Botched,” May 13, 2025.
077. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025; Death Penalty Information Center, May 13, 2025.
088. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025.
099. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025 (quoting attorney David Weiss).
1010. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025 (citing Associated Press reporter Jeffrey Collins’s witness account).
1111. Death Penalty Information Center, May 13, 2025.
1212. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025 (quoting attorney David Weiss).
1313. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025.
1414. “South Carolina executes third person by firing squad this year,” South Carolina Public Radio, November 14, 2025; CBS News, “South Carolina executes killer who left bloody message, marking third firing-squad execution this year,” November 14, 2025.
1515. Post and Courier, “SC slow to release autopsy after execution that inmate’s lawyers say was botched,” November 2025.
1616. “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).
1717. “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.
1818. Encyclopedia 1914–1918-Online, “Military Justice”; HistoryNet, “Why Were These WWI Soldiers Executed by Their Own Country?,” January 18, 2023.
1919. “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.
2020. S.C. Code Ann. § 24-3-580, as amended by 2023–2024 S.C. Senate Bill 120.
2121. ACLU of South Carolina, “ACLU of South Carolina Challenges Death Penalty Secrecy Law,” press release, January 29, 2025.
2222. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025; Death Penalty Information Center, May 13, 2025.