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 Chapter six dealt with certain. This chapter 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 gives us the exact evidence needed to show why.
What a Bullet Actually Does
Start with the mechanism itself, described plainly rather than euphemistically. A rifle round fired into a human chest at close range causes death, when it causes death quickly, through one of two pathways: massive, immediate damage to the heart itself, which stops its pumping action outright or catastrophic damage to the major blood vessels near the heart, which causes such rapid blood loss that the brain is starved of oxygen within seconds and unconsciousness follows quickly, usually within ten to fifteen seconds, with death following soon after. Both of those pathways depend on the bullet actually striking the heart or the great vessels directly. This is the entire 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 precisely 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 completely and it changes in a direction that is the opposite of humane by any definition that treats speed and lost consciousness as morally relevant.
Mikal Mahdi’s autopsy is the clearest documented illustration available. His wounds struck his liver and other abdominal organs rather than his heart.2 This is not a glancing miss in the sense of the 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, causing unconsciousness in seconds and a mechanism of death 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 own physiology permits, of what is happening to them. The pathologist commissioned by Mahdi’s attorneys estimated thirty to sixty seconds of conscious suffering, a figure that itself represents a floor rather than a ceiling given the uncertainty 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, ultimately, 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 precisely the point. Trauma surgeons and emergency medicine physicians have understood for decades that the difference between a rapidly fatal gunshot wound and a slow, survivable-in-the-short-term one is almost entirely a matter of which specific structures a bullet happens to strike, not merely 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 body’s central pump fails outright or catastrophic blood loss starves the brain of oxygen. A wound to the liver, by contrast, the organ Mahdi’s autopsy found damaged, can produce fatal blood loss over a considerably longer period, precisely because the liver, while heavily vascularized and capable of bleeding seriously, does not perform the same immediately indispensable pumping function the heart does. Trauma centers exist, in significant part, because a meaningful share of liver gunshot wounds are survivable with prompt surgical intervention, a fact that itself 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 or specialized knowledge available only to forensic pathologists after the fact. It is the ordinary working knowledge of any emergency medicine physician, and it was entirely foreseeable, before Mahdi was ever strapped into the chair, that a few centimeters of deviation in bullet placement would not merely produce a slightly less tidy wound. It would produce a fundamentally different physiological event, on a fundamentally different timeline, with fundamentally different implications for how long the person shot remains conscious. Idaho’s marksmanship standard treats accuracy as a binary pass-fail qualification: hit the target or fail. It does not, because it cannot, treat the consequence of a near-miss as anything other than an afterthought, because 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 ever built its chamber, that near-misses are not rare anomalies in real-world shooting scenarios involving human targets under stress. They are a predictable share of outcomes, and the medical literature describing what happens when they occur was available to Idaho’s legislature in exactly the same libraries and databases that later informed the reporting on Mahdi’s autopsy.
Thirty to Sixty Seconds, Named Honestly
That time window deserves dwelling on, because the entire 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. Ask anyone who has held their breath, or waited through a medical procedure or sat through the longest minute of a difficult conversation, what sixty seconds of acute physical and psychological distress actually feels like from the perspective of the person experiencing it, rather than the witness clock-watching from behind bulletproof glass. 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 one of the most acutely painful and terrifying experiences a human nervous system is capable of registering, compressed into a period the state itself chose to inflict by aiming a rifle at a target it knew was not guaranteed to land where intended.
Compare this to the standard Representative Skaug offered on the floor: “sudden, it is quick, and it is certain.”5 Even granting the most generous possible reading of Sigmon’s execution, three wounds near the heart, death declared within roughly two minutes, “quick” is already doing more work in that sentence than the evidence supports. Applied to Mahdi’s documented experience, the word simply 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 their own death if they 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, worth naming here because 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 “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 this book has documented from Idaho, follow the identical rhetorical strategy: whatever the witnesses saw, the state’s official position is that it does not indicate what it appears to indicate.
Be precise about what “involuntary” can and cannot tell us here, because the term does real medical work in some settings and considerably less in others. It is true that some reflexive movements can occur in a body that has already lost consciousness, a genuine medical phenomenon separate from purposeful, pain-driven movement. But “involuntary” is not synonymous with “painless” or “unconscious.” A person can be fully conscious and experiencing severe pain while a specific muscular response is, in the narrow physiological sense, involuntary, in the same way a person’s hand might involuntarily jerk away from a hot stove while they remain fully aware of the burn. The state’s use of “involuntary” to describe Mahdi’s crying out, his groaning and his labored breathing does not resolve the question the pathologist raised, whether Mahdi was conscious during that window. It simply reclassifies the visible evidence in language that sounds clinical without actually answering the clinical question a witness or a family member would most want answered: was he aware of what was happening to him. This book’s answer, based on the pathologist’s own estimate of thirty to sixty seconds of conscious suffering, 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 implicitly or explicitly 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 lethal injection 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 This 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 making, because it is the comparison that actually matters for a humaneness argument to hold together: not “is the firing squad more humane than a botched lethal injection,” but “is killing a restrained person by any method compatible with a claim of humaneness at all,” and failing that broader question, “is the firing squad, specifically, actually more humane than the method it is replacing, or merely differently unreliable.”
Chapter six already 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, 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 new and equally documented failure mode.
Idaho’s Own Data, Had It Chosen to Ask
Nothing prevented Idaho’s Department of Correction from commissioning its own 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 what risk, precisely, Idaho’s own version of the same method carried. No public record indicates the department did this. The qualification standards address marksmanship. They do not address, because the department’s public materials never engaged with, the specific physiological question this chapter has spent its length exploring: what happens, medically, when the shot lands a few centimeters from where it is aimed and how long does the resulting process take. This is not a technically difficult question to have answered. Trauma surgeons and forensic pathologists exist in every state, including Idaho and a state building a 1.2 million dollar chamber specifically to perform this exact procedure could have commissioned exactly this kind of independent physiological review before construction began, rather than after the fact, in response to litigation or journalism, the way South Carolina’s own documentation emerged. That Idaho did not do this, so far as the public record shows, is not proof of bad faith. It may simply 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 it is a choice this chapter’s evidence suggests the state may come to regret, in exactly 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 specific medical evidence, because the evidence, however damning, risks obscuring a simpler and more important point. The entire 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 car manufacturer might engineer a seatbelt to be more effective at preventing injury in a crash. A seatbelt’s purpose, the thing it is for, is to protect a person from harm. An execution method’s purpose, the thing it is for, is to kill a person who has been rendered entirely 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 entire 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 simply to end a life that must be ended with as little cruelty as the situation allows. Applying that framework to a fully conscious, legally competent adult human being who is restrained specifically so that he cannot resist his own killing asks us to accept a premise that I do not think most people, examined outside the specific context of capital punishment, would actually accept: that the state’s interest in killing a particular person is itself uncontroversial, and that the only remaining moral question is the manner of delivery. I do not accept that premise, and this book does not ask you to accept it either. But even granting it, purely for the sake of argument, in order to evaluate the firing squad on its own advocates’ terms, the evidence shows that the delivery mechanism itself does not reliably achieve the thing its own 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. Call it what its own record shows it to be: 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-facing 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 the documented, real-world 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 public record Idaho’s legislature built to justify House Bill 37. I do not think this omission was accidental, and I do not think it requires bad faith to explain, either. It is simply 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. Chapter eight turns to that control directly, and to the third promise, honesty, because the gap this chapter has 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, hidden behind hoods and shields and pull-shades and the next chapter is about exactly how that management works.
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.
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.
044. Chiara Eisner, NPR, May 8, 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.