Representative Skaug’s argument on the floor of the Idaho House rested on a chain of three words treated as though they were interchangeable: sudden, quick, and certain.¹ The last chapter dealt with certainty. This one deals with the other two, and with the deeper claim underneath all three, that speed alone is sufficient to make an act humane. It is not, and the record already built supplies the evidence.
WHAT A BULLET ACTUALLY DOES
A rifle round fired into a human chest at close range causes death quickly through one of two pathways. Either it does massive, immediate damage to the heart itself, stopping its pumping action outright, or it does catastrophic damage to the major blood vessels near the heart, starving the brain of oxygen within seconds, so that unconsciousness follows within roughly ten to fifteen seconds and death soon after. Both pathways depend on the bullet striking the heart or the great vessels directly.
That is the premise of the target pinned over the chest. Shooters are not aiming generally at the torso. They are aiming at a marker roughly the size of a fist because the intended mechanism of death requires that precision. When the bullet misses that mark, even by a margin most people would consider small, the physiology changes, and it changes in a direction opposite to humane on any definition that treats speed and lost consciousness as morally relevant.
Mikal Mahdi’s autopsy is the clearest documented illustration available. The rounds ran downward through his liver, pancreas, and lower left lung, with fragments perforating the right ventricle, and his heart went on beating.² This was not a glancing miss in the sense of bullets going somewhere far off target; the wounds were still in his chest and upper abdomen. But a few centimeters of difference in trajectory meant the difference between a mechanism of death that stops the heart directly and one that relies on internal bleeding from organ damage, a process that can take minutes rather than seconds, during which a person remains conscious, in pain, and aware, to whatever degree the body’s physiology permits, of what is happening to him.
Dr. Jonathan Arden, the pathologist Mahdi’s attorneys retained, estimated thirty to sixty seconds of conscious suffering, a figure that represents a floor rather than a ceiling given the gaps in South Carolina’s documentation.³ Eyewitnesses described Mahdi crying out at the moment of impact, then breathing heavily and groaning multiple times over the following minute, his body visibly working to keep functioning around damage that was going to kill him but was not killing him instantly.⁴
WHAT TRAUMA MEDICINE ALREADY KNEW
None of what Mahdi’s autopsy revealed should have surprised anyone familiar with basic trauma medicine, and that is the point. Trauma surgeons and emergency physicians have understood for decades that the difference between a rapidly fatal gunshot wound and a slow one is almost entirely a matter of which specific structures a bullet strikes, not which general region of the body it enters.
A wound to the heart’s chambers or the aorta produces death within seconds to a couple of minutes, as the central pump fails or blood loss starves the brain of oxygen. A wound to the liver, the organ Mahdi’s autopsy found macerated, can produce fatal blood loss over a considerably longer period, because the liver, while heavily vascularized and capable of bleeding seriously, performs no immediately indispensable pumping function. Trauma centers exist, in significant part, because a meaningful share of liver gunshot wounds are survivable with prompt surgical intervention, which underscores how far Mahdi’s injuries were from being instantaneously fatal in the way the target’s placement was designed to guarantee.
This is not exotic knowledge available only to forensic pathologists after the fact. It is the ordinary working knowledge of any emergency physician, and it was foreseeable, before Mahdi was ever strapped into the chair, that a few centimeters of deviation would produce not merely a less tidy wound but a different physiological event, on a different timeline, with different implications for how long the person shot remains conscious.
Idaho’s marksmanship standard treats accuracy as a binary: hit the target or fail. It does not, because it cannot, treat the consequence of a near-miss as anything other than an afterthought, since the entire premise of the qualification test is that a near-miss will not happen if the shooter is good enough. Trauma medicine already knew, before Idaho built its chamber, that near-misses are not rare anomalies in real-world shooting involving human targets under stress. They are a predictable share of outcomes, and the medical literature describing what happens when they occur sat in the same libraries and databases that later informed the reporting on Mahdi’s autopsy.
THIRTY TO SIXTY SECONDS
That window deserves dwelling on, because the architecture of the certainty and humanity arguments depends on the public not dwelling on it. Thirty to sixty seconds sounds, described in the abstract, like a short interval. It is not short from the inside of it. A minute of conscious awareness that your body has been catastrophically injured and that death is approaching but has not yet arrived is not a minor procedural footnote. It is very likely among the most acutely painful and terrifying experiences a human nervous system can register, compressed into a period the state chose to inflict by aiming a rifle at a target it knew was not guaranteed to land where intended.
Compare that to the standard Representative Skaug offered on the floor: sudden, quick, and certain.⁵ Even granting the most generous reading of Sigmon’s execution, three wounds near the heart and death declared within roughly three minutes, “quick” is already doing more work in that sentence than the evidence supports. Applied to Mahdi’s documented experience, the word does not describe what happened. A minute of conscious, groaning, visibly struggling suffering is not sudden. It is not quick by any definition a person would apply to his own death if he were the one experiencing it rather than legislating about it in the abstract.
WHAT “INVOLUNTARY MOVEMENT” IS ASKED TO EXPLAIN
States defending botched executions of every method have developed a specific rhetorical strategy for the visible suffering witnesses report, and it recurs across nitrogen hypoxia, lethal injection, and now the firing squad alike. The state characterizes visible movement, gasping, groaning, or convulsing as involuntary, a medically technical-sounding term meant to reassure witnesses and the public that what they saw was reflexive rather than a sign of conscious suffering.
Alabama officials have made exactly this argument in litigation and public statements surrounding the state’s nitrogen executions, describing movements witnesses reported as either the prisoner actively resisting or as involuntary movements associated with dying, a formulation the state repeated across multiple 2025 executions, including in the run-up to the October 23, 2025 execution of Anthony Boyd.⁶ South Carolina’s own materials, and the pattern of official statements from Idaho documented in these pages, follow the same shape: whatever the witnesses saw, the state’s position is that it does not indicate what it appears to indicate.
Be precise about what “involuntary” can and cannot tell us, because the term does real medical work in some settings and considerably less in others. Some reflexive movements can occur in a body that has already lost consciousness, a genuine phenomenon separate from purposeful, pain-driven movement. But involuntary is not synonymous with painless or unconscious. A person can be fully conscious and in severe pain while a specific muscular response is, in the narrow physiological sense, involuntary, in the same way a hand might jerk away from a hot stove while its owner remains fully aware of the burn.
The state’s use of the word to describe Mahdi’s crying out, his groaning, and his labored breathing does not resolve the question the pathologist raised. It reclassifies the visible evidence in language that sounds clinical without answering the clinical question a witness or a family member would most want answered: was he aware of what was happening to him. On Arden’s estimate of thirty to sixty seconds of conscious suffering, the answer is yes.
THE COMPARISON THE STATE WANTS, AND THE ONE IT AVOIDS
Every defense of the firing squad’s humaneness that Idaho’s legislators offered was comparative: the firing squad is more humane than a botched lethal injection, more humane than eight failed attempts to find a vein in Thomas Creech’s arm, more humane than the documented cases of prisoners whose lungs filled with fluid after a drug meant to stop their hearts instead produced, according to a review of more than two hundred execution autopsies, a sensation doctors have compared to drowning.⁷
That comparison is not manufactured out of nothing. The cases behind it — Clayton Lockett, Doyle Hamm, Alan Miller, and the others— are real, and the suffering they document is real. But notice the comparison the state consistently avoids. The question is not whether the firing squad is more humane than a botched lethal injection. It is whether killing a restrained person by any method is compatible with a claim of humaneness at all, and, failing that broader question, whether the firing squad is actually more humane than the method it is replacing, or merely differently unreliable.
The previous chapter answered the second question. The firing squad’s failure mode in South Carolina, a thirty-to-sixty-second period of conscious suffering following a missed shot, is not obviously preferable, on humaneness grounds, to a botched lethal injection’s failure mode, a longer and more clinical process of struggling for breath as pulmonary edema sets in. Both are failures of the same underlying claim: that a state can engineer a reliably painless and instantaneous method of killing a person who does not want to die. The firing squad has not solved that problem. It has relocated it, from the venous system to the ballistic trajectory, and the relocation carries its own documented failure mode.
IDAHO’S OWN DATA, HAD IT CHOSEN TO ASK
Nothing prevented Idaho’s Department of Correction from commissioning an independent review of the South Carolina autopsy record before finalizing its protocol, engaging a forensic pathologist to examine what was publicly available about Sigmon’s and Mahdi’s executions and produce an assessment of the risk Idaho’s own version of the method carried. No public record indicates that the department did so.
The qualification standards address marksmanship. They do not address the physiological question the department’s public materials never engaged with: what happens, medically, when the shot lands a few centimeters from where it is aimed, and how long the resulting process takes. This is not a technically difficult question to have answered. Trauma surgeons and forensic pathologists exist in every state, Idaho included, and a state building a 1.2 million dollar chamber to perform this exact procedure could have commissioned that review before construction began, rather than after the fact, in response to litigation or journalism, the way South Carolina’s documentation emerged.
That Idaho did not, so far as the public record shows, is not proof of bad faith. It may reflect an assumption, unexamined and unstated, that the marksmanship standard alone was sufficient to guarantee the outcome the legislature had promised. But the absence of that inquiry is itself a choice, and if it goes wrong, it will be measured in the same currency Mikal Mahdi’s autopsy was measured in.
Humanity Is a Property of Acts, Not Instruments
There is an argument here that goes beyond the medical evidence, because the evidence, however damning, risks obscuring a simpler point. The debate over which execution method is more humane than another proceeds from an assumption I do not accept: that humaneness is a property that can be engineered into an instrument, the way a manufacturer might engineer a seatbelt to be more effective at preventing injury in a crash.
A seatbelt’s purpose is to protect a person from harm. An execution method’s purpose is to kill a person who has been rendered helpless to resist. These are not analogous problems, and the language of humane execution borrows the moral vocabulary of harm reduction and applies it to an act whose purpose is to cause the ultimate harm. A humane trap, in ordinary usage, is one designed to kill an animal as quickly and painlessly as possible, because the animal’s suffering serves no purpose anyone defends; the goal is to end a life that must be ended with as little cruelty as the situation allows.
Applying that framework to a conscious, legally competent adult who is restrained specifically so that he cannot resist his own killing asks us to accept a premise that most people, examined outside the context of capital punishment, would probably not accept: that the state’s interest in killing this particular person is uncontroversial, and that the only remaining moral question is the manner of delivery. I do not accept that premise, and these pages do not ask the reader to accept it either.
But even granting it, for the sake of argument, in order to evaluate the firing squad on its own advocates’ terms, the evidence shows that the delivery mechanism does not reliably achieve the thing its defenders claim for it. There is no humane way to reliably fail to achieve a quick, unconscious death for some meaningful share of the people subjected to the method. On its own record it is an execution method that sometimes works quickly and sometimes does not, deployed by a state that has decided the gamble is acceptable because the alternative gamble, a failed lethal injection, is judged to carry worse optics.
What Idaho Chose to Ignore
Idaho’s Department of Correction, in its public materials ahead of July 1, 2026, did not engage with the thirty-to-sixty-second window documented in Mahdi’s autopsy. It did not engage with Weiss’s account of Mahdi crying out, groaning, and struggling to breathe for roughly eighty seconds. The public case for the firing squad’s humaneness, built by Representative Skaug and echoed in local press coverage, rested almost entirely on the theoretical mechanism — a bullet through the heart causes fast unconsciousness — rather than on the documented distribution of outcomes when that mechanism fails to fire true.⁸
This is not a subtle omission. It is the single most important piece of evidence available to anyone evaluating the humaneness claim, and it is missing from the record Idaho’s legislature built to justify House Bill 37.
I do not think the omission was accidental, and I do not think it requires bad faith to explain either. It is what happens when an institution needs a policy to be true and has the power to control which facts reach the public record supporting it. The next chapter turns to that control directly, and to the third promise, because the gap just documented, between the theoretical mechanism legislators described and the autopsied reality South Carolina produced, does not close itself. It has to be actively managed, behind hoods and shields and pull-shades.
Notes
011. “Firing squad set to become primary method of execution in Idaho,” CBS2 /IdahoNews.com, June 2026 (quoting Rep. Bruce Skaug).
022. Chiara Eisner, “A firing squad tried to shoot a prisoner in the heart. They missed, autopsy indicates,” NPR, May 8, 2025; “SC firing squad ‘largely missed’ cop killer Mikal Mahdi’s heart, attorneys say autopsy shows,” Post and Courier, May 2025.
033. Death Penalty Information Center, “Lawyers Raise Concern as Autopsy Finds South Carolina’s Second Firing Squad Execution May Have Been Botched,” May 13, 2025; CBS News, May 8, 2025.
044. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025; “Witnesses recount harrowing final moments of Mikal Mahdi’s execution by firing squad in SC,” WACH, April 12, 2025.
055. “Firing squad set to become primary method of execution in Idaho,” CBS2 /IdahoNews.com, June 2026.
066. “Alabama sets date for sixth execution of 2025,” Alabama Reporter, August 19, 2025; “Alabama sets October execution using nitrogen gas,” Associated Press (Kim Chandler), August 18–19, 2025; “Alabama inmate maintains innocence ahead of execution by nitrogen for 1993 murder,” Associated Press, October 8, 2025; “Alabama executes man with nitrogen gas for 1993 murder over $200 drug debt,” Associated Press, October 23, 2025 (execution of Anthony Boyd).
077. “Gasping For Air: Autopsies Reveal Troubling Effects of Lethal Injection,” NPR, September 21, 2020 (review of more than two hundred execution autopsies finding pulmonary edema in 84 percent of cases); Death Penalty Information Center, “NPR Investigation of Lethal-Injection Autopsies Finds Executed Prisoners Experience Sensations of Suffocation and Drowning.”
088. “Firing squad set to become primary method of execution in Idaho,” CBS2 /IdahoNews.com, June 2026; Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025.