Of the four promises this book examines, honesty is the one made most often by the firing squad’s more sophisticated defenders rather than its legislative sponsors, and it deserves to be taken more seriously than the other three precisely because it contains a real insight before it collapses into its own contradiction. The argument runs like this: lethal injection dresses killing up as medicine, with a gurney that looks like a hospital bed, an IV line, a curtain that opens onto something staged to resemble a clinical procedure. The firing squad, by contrast, does not pretend. It is a gun, aimed at a person, fired by other people and everyone in the room knows exactly what is happening. There is a version of this argument I find persuasive, and it deserves its strongest form before I show why, in practice, Idaho and South Carolina’s actual protocols do not earn the honesty they claim.
The Case for the Gun’s Candor
Lethal injection’s medical costume is not incidental to its design. It was chosen, in the 1970s and 1980s, specifically because legislators and corrections officials wanted an execution method that would not look like killing to the witnesses and the public watching from outside the chamber. A person lying on a gurney, an IV line taped to their arm, drugs administered by someone who, in earlier decades, was sometimes described in official materials as delivering a “treatment,” borrows every visual signal our culture associates with medicine, with care, with the alleviation of suffering rather than its infliction. That borrowing is a form of dishonesty, and it is worth naming as such regardless of what one believes about capital punishment generally. A method engineered to resemble something it is not, in order to make its witnesses more comfortable with what they are actually watching, is functioning as a euphemism made physical. The firing squad does not offer that euphemism. There is no gurney dressed as a hospital bed. There is a chair, straps, a wall with gun ports and a target. Nobody watching a firing squad execution can mistake it for medical care. In that specific, narrow sense, the method’s advocates have a point and I do not want this chapter to pretend otherwise. The bluntness of the gun is, compared to the euphemism of the needle, a kind of honesty.
Where the Honesty Ends
But candor about the instrument is not the same thing as candor about the process, and it is at the level of process, not instrument, that Idaho’s and South Carolina’s actual protocols reveal themselves to be exercises in careful, deliberate concealment, no less managed than lethal injection’s medical theater, just managed toward a different aesthetic. Consider the hood. In South Carolina’s documented protocol, a prison employee places a hood over the condemned person’s head before the curtain to the shooters’ window is opened.1 The hood serves no function related to the mechanics of killing; a hood does not make a bullet more or less lethal. Its function is entirely representational: it prevents the condemned person from seeing the shooters, and, just as importantly, it prevents the shooters from having to look into the eyes of the person they are about to kill. This is not honesty. This is the deliberate removal of the single piece of information, mutual eye contact between killer and victim, that would most completely puncture the psychological distance the entire protocol is engineered to preserve. A truly honest execution, in the sense the method’s defenders claim to want, would require no hood at all. The hood exists precisely because the architects of this protocol understood that total honesty, shooter and condemned looking directly at one another in the moment before death, would be unbearable for the people asked to pull the triggers and so they built in a mechanism to prevent it.
Consider the black pull-shade covering the gun ports themselves, opened only at the last possible moment and the wall separating the shooters from the room where witnesses and the condemned person sit. The shooters’ faces are never seen by anyone in the witness gallery. Their identities, under shield laws passed in South Carolina in 2023 and mirrored in Idaho’s own statutory framework, are protected from public disclosure entirely.2 Chapter eleven will examine what this anonymity does to the officers themselves, but for the purposes of this chapter, the relevant point is simpler: an execution method whose central actors are legally shielded from identification is not a candid method. It is a method that has simply moved its concealment from the condemned person’s arm, where the needle goes in, to the shooters’ identity, where the public is prevented from ever learning who specifically fired the shots that missed Mikal Mahdi’s heart.
Where the Medical Costume Came From
It is worth knowing exactly where lethal injection’s medical costume originated, because the origin story sharpens the honesty argument this chapter is making considerably. In 1977, an Oklahoma state legislator named Bill Wiseman, troubled by the media spectacle surrounding Gary Gilmore’s firing squad execution in Utah earlier that same year, asked the state’s medical examiner, a forensic pathologist named Jay Chapman, whether there might be a more humane way to kill a condemned person than a firing squad, an electric chair or a gas chamber.3 Wiseman later described his own motive in stark terms: having voted for the death penalty’s reinstatement for what he called political reasons despite believing it wrong, he decided that if the state was going to do the wrong thing, it should at least do it in a way that did not look, in his words, like a big horrible thing.3 Chapman was not a pharmacologist, an anesthesiologist or an execution specialist of any kind. By his own later account, he devised a three-drug protocol, a barbiturate, a paralytic and a drug to stop the heart, within days, based on his general medical training rather than any specialized study of how to kill a human being painlessly. He did consult an anesthesiologist at Oklahoma University Medical School, Stanley Deutsch, who reviewed and approved the proposal before Wiseman took it to the legislature. But the design was Chapman’s; Deutsch’s role was review, not primary drafting, and Deutsch himself later expressed doubts about how the protocol was actually being administered.4 Chapman himself later described the limits of his own qualification for the task with unusual bluntness, telling one interviewer that he was an expert in dead bodies, not in producing them.5 The Oklahoma legislature passed a bill based on his proposal in May 1977, and other states, along with eventually much of the rest of the world’s remaining death penalty jurisdictions, adopted essentially the same recipe over the following decades. The irony here bears directly on the honesty argument. Lethal injection’s medical costume, the gurney, the IV line, the appearance of a clinical procedure, was not developed by anyone with genuine medical expertise in producing a painless death. It was developed, within days, by a medical examiner responding to a legislator’s discomfort with the optics of a different method, the firing squad, that had just generated unwelcome national media attention. Chapman himself has since criticized the very protocol that bears his name, warning as early as 1977 that improperly administered doses could leave a condemned person conscious and in severe pain, and reflecting decades later that the entire episode was, in his own words, “a blip, a very, very minor blip” on the work he did, one he never expected would be adopted so widely.6
The point for this chapter is not that Chapman acted in bad faith. By all available accounts, he was asked a good-faith question and gave a good-faith, if medically underdeveloped, answer. The point is that the method Americans have spent nearly five decades treating as the serious, scientific, medically credible alternative to the firing squad was, at its origin, exactly as improvised as the method it was designed to replace, devised in response to the same kind of bad publicity that is now pushing states back toward the gun. The medical costume was real in the sense that it borrowed medical imagery. It was never real in the sense of resting on genuine medical expertise about how to kill a person without pain. Idaho’s turn to the firing squad in 2025 and 2026 is not a departure from a rigorously developed medical standard. It is a return to the same improvisational, publicity-driven process that produced the standard in the first place, simply running in the opposite direction.
The Doctor Returns
Perhaps the clearest evidence that the firing squad’s honesty is itself staged rather than genuine is the detail, documented in multiple accounts of South Carolina’s 2025 executions, that the target pinned over the condemned person’s heart is positioned not by a corrections officer or a member of the shooting team but by a doctor, using a stethoscope to locate the precise point of maximum cardiac impulse before placing the marker.7 Sit with that image for a moment. The method sold to the public as an unmedicalized alternative to lethal injection’s clinical theater requires, at its most critical procedural step, a physician performing a medical examination to ensure the kill point is correctly identified. The firing squad has not actually escaped medicine. It has simply moved the doctor from administering the lethal substance to certifying the target, a change in the doctor’s role but not in medicine’s presence and it did so, one suspects, for exactly the reason lethal injection’s designers wanted a gurney that looked like a hospital bed: because precision requires expertise, and expertise, in this context, means a clinician.
Rehearsal Against Cardboard
Idaho’s marksmanship qualification standard requires volunteers to hit, with one hundred percent accuracy, a target “of the same size, shape, and height as will be used in an actual execution.”8 Read that requirement carefully. It means that before Idaho ever fires a shot at a living person, its shooting team will have practiced, repeatedly, against an inanimate object built to the precise specifications of a human chest with a heart-sized target affixed to it. This is not, in itself, an unreasonable training method; one would not want the state’s first attempt at this task to be the actual execution. But it is worth naming what this rehearsal represents, because it cuts directly against the honesty claim. An execution method whose defenders describe it as uniquely candid, uniquely unwilling to hide behind procedure, in fact requires a substantial infrastructure of simulation, drilling and practiced routine, built specifically so that the actual event feels, to the people performing it, like something they have already done many times before. That is the opposite of candor. That is desensitization, engineered deliberately, so that the shooters’ hundred-and-first shot, the one fired at an actual person, feels procedurally identical to their hundredth shot, fired at cardboard.
The Witness’s View, and What It Cannot See
Even the witnesses invited to observe a firing squad execution, the group whose presence is often cited as evidence of the method’s transparency, see far less than the method’s honesty claim implies. In South Carolina’s documented protocol, witnesses sit behind bulletproof glass, in a room separate from the shooters, watching a curtain open onto a person already hooded, already restrained, already reduced to a target with a marker on his chest. They do not see the shooters. They do not see the moment the target is placed, or by whom. They see, in Jeffrey Collins’s account of Sigmon’s execution, an abrupt crack of rifles they were not warned to expect, a target disappearing, a body flinching and then a doctor emerging some minutes later to confirm death.9 This is a witness experience curated as tightly as any lethal injection viewing has ever been, arguably more tightly, since at least a lethal injection witness can typically see the person’s face throughout the process, while a firing squad witness watches a hooded figure whose face is deliberately hidden from the moment the process begins.
What the Public Actually Sees Versus What the State Says It Sees
There is a final layer of managed concealment worth naming, because it operates not on the witnesses inside the chamber but on the public consuming coverage of the execution afterward. States that use the firing squad have consistently paired the method’s visual bluntness with tightly controlled official communications describing what happened, communications that witnesses’ own accounts, quoted throughout this book, frequently contradict in their particulars. South Carolina’s official statements following Mahdi’s execution did not mention the discrepancy in autopsy documentation described above; that information reached the public because journalists and defense attorneys pushed for it, not because the state volunteered it. Idaho’s own pattern, established in its handling of Thomas Creech’s failed execution, follows the same shape: an official statement, delivered promptly, framing whatever happened in the most institutionally favorable light available, followed, sometimes months later, by additional detail that complicates or contradicts that initial framing, usually surfacing through litigation, journalism or advocacy rather than through the state’s own voluntary disclosure. This two-tier information structure, an immediate official narrative and a slower, harder-won corrective record, is itself a form of the dishonesty this chapter has been describing, operating at the level of public communication rather than physical architecture. The hood conceals the shooters from the condemned person and the witnesses in the room. The state’s communications strategy conceals the full picture from everyone else, for as long as it can, using exactly the same logic: control what is seen and control it for as long as possible, because the full picture, released promptly and completely, would not support the certainty and humaneness claims the state has staked its legislative program on.
Idaho’s Version of the Same Concealment
Idaho’s protocol, finalized ahead of the July 1, 2026 effective date, follows the same architecture South Carolina pioneered: gun ports screened until the moment of firing, a target positioned over the heart, restraints and, per the department’s own qualification standards, shooters whose specific identities remain protected under the state’s execution secrecy statutes.10 Nothing in Idaho’s public materials suggests any departure from this pattern of managed concealment. If anything, Idaho’s 1.2 million dollar purpose-built chamber represents a more thoroughly engineered version of the same architecture South Carolina assembled on shorter notice: sandbags positioned with more permanence, gun ports designed into the original construction rather than retrofitted, a facility built from the ground up to manage exactly what witnesses, the condemned and the public can and cannot see.
What Honesty Would Actually Require
This chapter closes by taking the honesty argument fully seriously, on its own terms, because that is the clearest way to expose its emptiness. If a state genuinely believed that the firing squad’s core virtue was its refusal to hide what it is doing, that state would have no need for a hood, no need for a shield law protecting shooter identities, no need for a black pull-shade, no need for bulletproof glass between witnesses and the act itself. A genuinely honest execution, by the logic the method’s defenders themselves supply, would happen in full view: the condemned person’s face visible throughout, the shooters’ faces visible to the witnesses and the public record, no curtain, no shade, no hood, nothing concealed. No state that has adopted the firing squad, not South Carolina, not Utah, not Idaho, has built anything resembling that level of transparency, because no state actually wants it. What every one of these jurisdictions has built instead is a method that trades one set of concealments, the medical costume of the gurney and the IV line, for a different set, the hood, the shield law, the pull-shade, the doctor quietly certifying the target with a stethoscope before anyone else is allowed to look. The firing squad is not honest. It is differently dishonest, and its dishonesty serves the identical function lethal injection’s medical theater has always served: making it possible for the people who authorize, prepare and carry out an execution to do so without having to fully confront, in real time and without mediation, what they are actually doing to another human being. Chapter nine turns to the fourth promise, free choice and asks what it can possibly mean for a condemned person to select this method, hooded and shielded as it is, from a menu of options every one of which the state itself designed.
Notes
011. “This is how South Carolina performs its firing squad execution,” Associated Press, April 10, 2025.
022. Death Penalty Information Center, “Lawyers Raise Concern as Autopsy Finds South Carolina’s Second Firing Squad Execution May Have Been Botched,” May 13, 2025.
033. “‘Father of lethal injection’ talks about history, his legacy to Oklahoma,” Tulsa World, June 12, 2025; “Meet A. Jay Chapman, Whose Lethal Injection Recipe Has Helped Kill 1,200 People,” Fordham Law News, May 3, 2017; Human Rights Watch, “So Long as They Die: Lethal Injections in the United States,” 2006 (Chapman had no expertise in pharmacology or anesthesia); NPR, “The Executioner’s Lament” (transcript), reporting Bill Wiseman’s account of voting for capital punishment’s reinstatement and seeking “a quick, clean alternative to the electric chair.” Deborah W. Denno, "The Lethal Injection Quandary: How Medicine Has Dismantled the Death Penalty," 76 Fordham L. Rev. 49 (2007) (interview with Chapman); "Meet A. Jay Chapman, Whose Lethal Injection Recipe Has Helped Kill 1,200 People," Fordham Law News, May 3, 2017; "Lethal Injection Creator Jay Chapman on Botched Executions," Time.
044. “Lethal Injection Creator Jay Chapman on Botched Executions,” Time, February 2026; “Meet A. Jay Chapman, Whose Lethal Injection Recipe Has Helped Kill 1,200 People,” Fordham Law News, May 3, 2017.
055. Ty Alper, “What Do Lawyers Know About Lethal Injection?,” 1 Harv. L. & Pol’y Rev. (Online), March 3, 2008, citing Deborah W. Denno, “The Lethal Injection Quandary: How Medicine Has Dismantled the Death Penalty,” 76 Fordham L. Rev. 49, 66 (2007).
066. “‘Father of lethal injection’ talks about history, his legacy to Oklahoma,” Tulsa World, June 12, 2025 (Chapman’s contemporaneous 1977 warning that improper administration could leave a prisoner conscious and in pain); “Lethal Injection Creator Jay Chapman on Botched Executions,” Time, February 2026 (“a blip, a very, very minor blip”). Deborah W. Denno, "The Lethal Injection Quandary: How Medicine Has Dismantled the Death Penalty," 76 Fordham L. Rev. 49 (2007) (interview with Chapman); "Meet A. Jay Chapman, Whose Lethal Injection Recipe Has Helped Kill 1,200 People," Fordham Law News, May 3, 2017; "Lethal Injection Creator Jay Chapman on Botched Executions," Time.
077. “South Carolina death row inmate executed by firing squad,” Live5News / WCSC, April 11–12, 2025 (describing the target-placement protocol).
088. “Firing squad set to become primary method of execution in Idaho,” CBS2 / IdahoNews.com, June 2026.
099. “South Carolina executes Brad Sigmon in first US firing squad execution in 15 years,” Associated Press (Jeffrey Collins), March 7, 2025.
1010. “IDOC outlines firing squad procedures as new policy nears implementation,” rexburgstandardjournal.com, June 2026; “Idaho details how firing squad executions will work under new state policy,” KIVI-TV, June 11, 2026 (on shooter anonymity under Idaho law).