Somewhere south of Boise, in a renovated block of a maximum-security prison, there is a chair. It has straps for the ankles, the waist, the arms. Facing the chair, through a wall with gun ports cut into it, there is a spot marked out with sandbags. A rectangle of white cloth hangs there. A small target is sewn or pinned to it, over where the heart of a human being should be.1
How the Firing Squad Is Supposed to Work
Idaho’s protocol tells you exactly who stands on the other side of that wall. Three primary shooters, plus two alternates and a team leader who loads the rifles.2 Every one of them must be a certified Idaho law enforcement officer with at least three years of training through the state’s Peace Officer Standards and Training program, with no recent disciplinary history involving firearms or the use of force.3 None may be related to the condemned person, or to anyone the condemned person killed.4 Each of the three rifles, a Daniel Defense DD5-P chambered in .308, a weapon the manufacturer classifies as a pistol though Idaho’s own paperwork calls it a rifle, is loaded with a single .308 110-grain TAP round.5 The shooters fire from approximately ten yards, on a cadence called by the team leader, in unison.6 To qualify at all, a volunteer must hit a target built to those same specifications, every time in testing, from a distance the protocol sets no higher than seven yards. A single miss disqualifies him.7 Every shooter’s identity is sealed by state law. Only the prison director and one deputy know who pulled which trigger.8 If, after the volley, up to two minutes pass and an electrocardiogram in the next room still shows a heartbeat, the director can order the same three shooters to fire again.9
That last provision is worth sitting with before you read another word of this book. A protocol that builds in a second volley, monitored by machine, for the specific contingency that the first one does not finish the job, is a protocol that has already conceded the point this book exists to make. The firing squad is by no means a foolproof execution method. Indeed, states don’t draft contingency procedures for outcomes they believe are impossible.
Why so many shooters? Why not one shot at the brainstem? Why aim at the heart and not the head? Why so far away? Though the protocols vary by state, one thing is certain, Idaho is desperately trying to limit the moral culpability or weight that participants might feel participating in a firing squad execution.10 But how do you convince someone that they haven’t shot somebody when they signed up to shoot somebody?
From Fallback to Primary — Why Idaho Is Different
As of July 1, 2026, the state of Idaho has made the firing squad its primary method of execution. It is the first American jurisdiction ever to do so.11 Every other state that allows the bullet, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, keeps it as a fallback, a last resort, often simply an option chosen by a condemned person from a menu of horrors.12 Idaho alone has decided the bullet is the plan. Lethal injection, for the first time anywhere in this country, has become the backup.13
Here is why that matters. It would be easy to read this as one more entry in the grim ledger of American capital punishment, no different from four hundred years of hangings, electrocutions, gas chambers, needles. It is not. Every previous shift in method has been sold to the public as an upgrade, a movement toward mercy, a substitute more humane than whatever came before. The firing squad is different. It is the first method in the modern era adopted not as an experiment, not as a stopgap, but as a considered, deliberate, primary choice. Idaho made this choice with open eyes about the drug shortages and the lawsuits that have crippled lethal injection. Idaho made it in full view of a public record already showing that the bullet itself fails. The firing squad is an intentional mistake. Idaho made it with the evidence already in front of it.
Utah is where the modern American firing squad has mostly lived. It is also where the modern death penalty itself began. Since the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in 1976, three men have died in front of Utah’s rifles. Gary Gilmore was the first, on January 17, 1977, the first person executed anywhere in the country after the death penalty returned. He demanded it. He waved off his own appeals and told the state to stop delaying. His last words, “Let’s do it,” became the epitaph of the whole era. That is worth holding onto. The firing squad did not enter the modern age as a horror the public recoiled from. It entered as a choice a condemned man insisted on. John Albert Taylor was next, on January 26, 1996, nineteen years later. Ronnie Lee Gardner was last, on June 18, 2010, fourteen years after that. Three men across thirty-three years. That is how rare the American firing squad has been. That is how deliberately Idaho has now chosen to make it common. Utah kept the bullet as an option, a thing a prisoner could request. Idaho took that same method and made it the rule. Everything Idaho built traces back to an execution chair in Utah and a man who asked to sit in it.14
In the sixteen months between Brad Sigmon’s execution and the day Idaho’s law took effect, South Carolina performed three firing squad executions, the first any state had performed since 2010.15 Brad Sigmon died first, on March 7, 2025. By most accounts, the witnesses’ accounts and the state’s own commissioned autopsy, the three bullets fired at him struck close to where they were aimed.16 Thirty-five days later, Mikal Mahdi was strapped into the same chair. This time the autopsy told a different story. Two wounds, not three. Neither one through the heart.17 A prisoner who, his lawyers’ pathologist said, likely stayed conscious for thirty to sixty seconds or more while his body kept functioning around the damage.18 Stephen Bryant followed in November, and by the account of the witnesses in the room his execution did what the protocol said it would do.19 One execution that worked, one that demonstrably did not, one that appears to have worked, inside eight months, inside a single state. That was the record on the desk when Idaho made the bullet its default.
Four Promises, and the Question They Avoid
I have organized this book around four claims. Every advocate of the firing squad keeps returning to them, from Idaho legislators to South Carolina prosecutors to the condemned men who have chosen the bullet themselves. I call them promises because that is what they are. Assurances made to a public grown queasy about lethal injection’s failures. Offered by people who want the killing to continue but need to sell it to the public as clean.
The first promise is certainty. A bullet, unlike a vein, cannot fail to be found, or so the claim goes. Chapter 6 shows you the autopsy reports that say otherwise.
The second promise is humanity. A gunshot to the chest is fast, the claim goes, and fast is the same thing as painless. Chapter 7 walks through what a bullet does to a body when it misses the heart by a few centimeters. Chapter 7 asks how long a conscious person continues suffering.
The third promise is honesty, and it is the hardest of the four to dislodge, because its defenders have made it sound like a virtue. At least the firing squad does not pretend to be medicine, they say. No IV, no lethal drug dressed up in a doctor’s vocabulary, just a gun and the plain admission of what a gun is for. Chapter 8 takes that claim at its word and then asks what “honest” can mean about a killing conducted behind a black pull-shade, carried out by shooters whose identities the state seals by law, aimed by men who train against cardboard rather than against human flesh, that responds very differently when hit. An honesty that hides its own executioners is not honesty. It is theater with better lighting.
The fourth promise is free choice. Sigmon chose the bullet over the needle and the chair. Mahdi did too, after him. The claim is that this choice makes the execution consensual. Chapter 9 asks what “choice” can mean when every option on the menu ends the same way. Or perhaps better put, what does choice mean when the party doing the killing wrote the menu?
Between these four chapters sits the story of Idaho itself, because promises are not abstractions. They land on particular people. Idaho currently holds eight human beings under sentence of death. Seven men live at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution. One woman, Robin Row, lives at the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center.20 Among the men is Thomas Eugene Creech, seventy-five years old as I write this. He is the longest-serving death row prisoner in the state’s history, and among the longest-serving anywhere in the country. He is a man Idaho already tried and failed to kill.21 On February 28, 2024, an execution team spent an hour trying eight times to find a vein in Creech’s arms suitable for lethal injection. The warden called it off.22 Creech was returned, alive, to his cell. He is alive still. He is one reason the legislature built a new chamber with a wall full of gun ports. He may be the first man Idaho tries to kill in it.
Let me say something plainly, because plainness is the only honest register left for this subject. I organized and helped lead the march in Dallas on July 7, 2016. Micah Johnson ambushed that march that night and killed five police officers.23 I was on that street when it happened. I know something about what a bullet does to a body at close range. I do not write about gunfire as an abstraction or a policy mechanism. I write about it having stood near enough to know exactly what it does, and how little control anyone, marksman or murderer, actually has over where a bullet ends up and what it destroys on the way. The knowledge I have of gun violence is part of why I have pursued this topic. I mean, don’t we need less shooting in this country?
I write too as someone who has stood in the chamber for twelve executions, more than any other spiritual advisor in the country. That number includes the deaths of Kenneth Smith and Anthony Boyd, among the first people executed by nitrogen gas in the United States.24 I do not raise this to establish credentials. I raise it because it matters for what follows. Every method of execution I have witnessed sold itself to the public with these same four promises: certain, humane, honest, chosen. I have watched all four promises break in real time, in rooms where I stood close enough to touch the person they broke on.
Nitrogen gas was supposed to be instantaneous. It was not, not for Kenneth Smith, who convulsed and heaved against his restraints for several minutes while witnesses watched. I was one of them.25 It was not instantaneous for Anthony Boyd either. The horror seemed incessant. I estimated he was conscious and fighting for life for at least nineteen minutes.26 The promises of nitrogen executions were a lie. Lethal injection was supposed to be medical and peaceful. I have watched it take far longer than advertised. I have watched the person on the gurney struggle for breath in ways the protocol never anticipated. The firing squad is not a uniquely dishonest method surrounded by honest ones. It is the next entry in a long American tradition of manufacturing euphemism for one underlying act: the state’s deliberate destruction of a human being who cannot fight back.
Why the Firing Squad Stands Alone
Here is what makes the firing squad worth a book of its own, rather than one more chapter in a general history of capital punishment. It strips away more of the euphemism than any other method now in use. There is no IV line to imagine as medicine. There is no gas chamber that can be described, however falsely, as merely going to sleep. There is a gun. There is a bullet. There is a target pinned over a man’s heart, and human beings pulling triggers because a legislature decided this might be the method the courts cannot take from them. That starkness is an opening. The firing squad forces the question every euphemism exists to avoid. Not, “Is this method humane?” But rather, “Is shooting a restrained, unarmed person ever a legitimate act of government?”
None of what follows depends on anyone’s view of the people on death row. I do not expect every reader to arrive at abolition, and I am not asking you to relitigate their guilt on my terms. Some readers will finish these chapters still believing Thomas Creech and the others on death row in Idaho deserve to die for what they did. Some will finish believing that Mikal Mahdi, who murdered Orangeburg Public Safety Captain James Myers in South Carolina and burned his body in a shed, deserves to die too.27 Guilt is not the question this book asks. Here is the question, and I think it is unavoidable once you have read the autopsy reports in chapter six: “Can a state that has watched its own pathologist describe thirty to sixty seconds of a conscious man’s suffering call what it did Certain? Humane? Honest? A Choice?” If the answer is no, and I believe by the end of this book you will agree it is no, then Idaho’s wager is not a policy innovation. It is a bet that the public will not look closely enough at four broken promises to notice that one of them has already failed, in autopsied and documented form, in a state that used this method three times in a single year, well over a year before Idaho’s own law took effect.
This book asks you to look closely. It runs in five parts. Part One tells how Idaho arrived at July 1, 2026, from Thomas Creech’s failed execution through the votes that followed. Part Two is the analytical heart of the book, one chapter for each broken promise. Part Three returns to Idaho itself: the people on its row, the officers who will be asked to shoot them, the witnesses who will watch, the money and the litigation the state has already spent. Part Four looks past Idaho, to the federal government and the states now following its lead. Part Five closes with what I believe the firing squad actually reveals, once you strip away everything else, about what an execution is and has always been.
The target is sewn over the heart because the heart is supposed to mean an instant kill. Six times in the modern era, in Utah and then in South Carolina, marksmen have been handed three to five rifles and told exactly where to aim.28 Three of those six, all in Utah between 1977 and 2010, predate any serious post-execution pathology; the public record does not describe them as having failed, and it does not contain documentation capable of establishing that they did not. Of the three that produced a modern record, one is documented to have missed, and the man in the chair stayed conscious while it did. That is the entire evidentiary basis for the promise Idaho has now built a room around. This book is about the distance between what the state promised and what the state can show. For the man in the chair. For the officer behind the wall. For a state that has decided the miss is a risk worth taking.
Notes
011. Kevin Fixler and staff, “Idaho Will Soon Turn to Firing Squad Executions. Police Will Pull the Triggers,” Idaho Statesman, June 10, 2026; “Firing squad set to become primary method of execution in Idaho,” IdahoNews.com (CBS2 Boise), June 2026, https://idahonews.com/news/local/firing-squad-set-to-become-primary-method-of-execution-in-idaho.
022. Royce McCandless, “How death by firing squad will work in Idaho,” Idaho Press, June 2026, https://www.idahopress.com/news/idaho-firing-squad-procedures/article_24e2c5ac-4b55-4db2-93e1-cc16eadb32f3.html; “IDOC outlines firing squad procedures as new policy nears implementation,” Rexburg Standard Journal, June 2026, https://www.rexburgstandardjournal.com/news/local/idoc-outlines-firing-squad-procedures-as-new-policy-nears-implementation/article_df29e88d-8767-4034-b7df-4524ae56368a.html. The general execution framework these reports describe, including the Escort Team and Administrative Team structure into which the firing squad function was added, is set out in the Idaho Department of Correction’s own Standard Operating Procedure, “Execution Procedures,” Control Number 135.02.01.001, Version 5.0 (approved October 11, 2024), published at https://forms-idoc.idaho.gov/WebLink/0/edoc/283090/Execution%20Procedures.pdf. This version of the document predates the July 2026 firing squad implementation and does not itself describe the firing squad procedure; the firing-squad-specific revision of this SOP, and the companion document it references, “Execution Chemicals Preparation and Administration,” were not independently located online for this book and are cited here through the news accounts above.
033. Idaho Department of Correction execution standard operating procedure, IDOC Form 283090, as reported in “Idaho’s Firing Squad: Quick Death Or Torture?,” Fix This Nation, 2026, https://fixthisnation.com/idahos-firing-squad-quick-death-or-torture/; “Idaho to rely on law enforcement volunteers for firing squad executions,” Police1, 2026, https://www.police1.com/corrections/idaho-to-rely-on-law-enforcement-volunteers-for-firing-squad-executions; McCandless, Idaho Press, June 2026. The base SOP’s parallel qualification standard for the Medical Team, requiring “no personnel disciplinary action in the past 12 months,” reflects the same disciplinary-history principle. IDOC, “Execution Procedures,” Control Number 135.02.01.001, Version 5.0.
044. Royce McCandless, “How death by firing squad will work in Idaho,” Idaho Press, June 2026. The base SOP imposes an identical no-relation requirement on Escort and Medical Team members: “No blood or legal relationship to the victim or victim’s family,” and “No blood or legal relationship to the condemned person or family.” IDOC, “Execution Procedures,” Control Number 135.02.01.001, Version 5.0.
055. “Idaho Death Penalty Update: Law Enforcement Volunteers to Carry Out Firing Squad Executions,” Officer.com, 2026, https://www.officer.com/command-hq/corrections/news/55383582/idaho-death-penalty-update-law-enforcement-volunteers-to-carry-out-firing-squad-executions; “Idaho to rely on law enforcement volunteers for firing squad executions,” Police1, 2026; Royce McCandless, Idaho Press, June 2026 (rifle cost confirmed by IDOC spokesperson as $4,843.94 per unit).
066. “Idaho Death Penalty Update,” Officer.com, 2026; “Idaho’s Firing Squad: Quick Death Or Torture?,” Fix This Nation, 2026.
077. “Idaho’s firing squad law takes effect July 1. Here’s what to know,” Yahoo News/Idaho Statesman, June 2026, https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/idahos-firing-squad-law-takes-100000220.html; “Idaho to rely on law enforcement volunteers for firing squad executions,” Police1, 2026 (quoting IDOC standard operating procedure: “Failure to accurately hit the specific target with one round from each IDOC-provided firearm disqualifies the volunteer from selection”).
088. “Idaho’s firing squad law takes effect July 1. Here’s what to know,” Yahoo News/Idaho Statesman, June 2026; “As Idaho Reinstates Firing Squad, Volunteers Sought for Executions,” La Voce di New York, July 3, 2026, https://lavocedinewyork.com/en/news/2026/07/03/as-idaho-reinstates-firing-squad-volunteers-sought-for-executions/. The base SOP’s confidentiality clause for other execution personnel is stated directly: “The identity of all individuals (except those Administrative Team Members identified by law or rule) participating in or performing any ancillary functions in the execution and any information contained in the records that could identify those individuals is confidential and not subject to disclosure.” IDOC, “Execution Procedures,” Control Number 135.02.01.001, Version 5.0, citing IDAPA 06.01.01.108.04 and 06.01.01.135.
099. “Idaho Death Penalty Update,” Officer.com, 2026; “Idaho to rely on law enforcement volunteers for firing squad executions,” Police1, 2026. The base SOP requires a functioning backup electrocardiograph machine and defibrillator on site and confirmed operational by the Medical Team Leader before every execution, and directs staff to monitor the condemned person’s level of consciousness throughout the procedure. IDOC, “Execution Procedures,” Control Number 135.02.01.001, Version 5.0.
1010. “This is how South Carolina performs its firing squad execution,” Associated Press, April 10, 2025, https://www.29news.com/2025/04/10/this-is-how-south-carolina-performs-its-firing-squad-execution/; Idaho Department of Correction firing squad qualification standards, as reported in IdahoNews.com, June 2026.
1111. Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho Governor Signs Legislation Authorizing Firing Squad as State’s Primary Execution Method,” March 17, 2025, https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/idaho-governor-signs-legislation-authorizing-firing-squad-as-states-primary-execution-method; Death Penalty Information Center, “2025 Roundup of Death Penalty Related Legislation,” February 4, 2026.
1212. Death Penalty Information Center, “Department of Justice Releases Memo Calling for Expansion of Federal Death Penalty and New Methods,” April 27, 2026; LegalClarity, “What States Still Use the Firing Squad?,” April 1, 2026, https://legalclarity.org/what-states-still-use-the-firing-squad/.
1313. Death Penalty Information Center, “Idaho Governor Signs Legislation Authorizing Firing Squad as State’s Primary Execution Method,” March 17, 2025; “2025 Roundup of Death Penalty Related Legislation,” Death Penalty Information Center, February 4, 2026.
1414. Utah’s three modern firing squad executions: Gary Gilmore, January 17, 1977; John Albert Taylor, January 26, 1996; Ronnie Lee Gardner, June 18, 2010. Gilmore was the first person executed in the United States after the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Gregg v. Georgia allowed executions to resume; he waived his appeals and demanded that his sentence be carried out. See Death Penalty Information Center execution records; The Hill, “US inmate set to die by firing squad, which states allow this?,” March 7, 2025, https://thehill.com/homenews/5182921-us-inmate-set-to-die-by-firing-squad-which-states-allow-this/.
1515. The Hill, “US inmate set to die by firing squad, which states allow this?,” March 7, 2025, https://thehill.com/homenews/5182921-us-inmate-set-to-die-by-firing-squad-which-states-allow-this/.
1616. Chiara Eisner, “A firing squad tried to shoot a prisoner in the heart. They missed, autopsy indicates,” NPR, May 8, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/05/08/nx-s1-5389846/firing-squad-south-carolina-death-penalty-execution.
1717. Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025; Death Penalty Information Center, “Lawyers Raise Concern as Autopsy Finds South Carolina’s Second Firing Squad Execution May Have Been Botched,” May 13, 2025.
1818. Eisner, NPR, May 8, 2025; DPIC, May 13, 2025.
1919. “South Carolina executes third person by firing squad this year,” South Carolina Public Radio, November 14, 2025; Associated Press, account of the November 14, 2025 execution of Stephen Corey Bryant.
2020. Idaho Department of Correction, “Death Row,” idoc.idaho.gov, last updated March 30, 2026; KTVB, “‘There has been a real loss of confidence and support’: Experts weigh in on death penalty in Idaho,” April 25, 2024.
2121. KTVB, “‘There has been a real loss of confidence and support’: Experts weigh in on death penalty in Idaho,” April 25, 2024.
2222. Idaho Department of Correction, “Execution updates,” idoc.idaho.gov; KTVB, April 25, 2024.
2323. This account is drawn from the author’s own participation in and presence at the July 7, 2016 Dallas march, as documented in contemporaneous news coverage of the march and the ambush that followed it.
2424. Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, “Lengthy Execution by Nitrogen Gas in Alabama Renews Concerns Over Method,” The New York Times, October 24, 2025; Death Penalty Information Center, “Alabama Execution Witnesses Report ‘Violent Thrashing’ of Prisoner and More Than 225 ‘Agonized Breaths’ in Nitrogen Gas Execution,” October 27, 2025, https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/alabama-execution-witnesses-report-violent-thrashing-of-prisoner-and-more-than-225-agonized-breaths-in-nitrogen-gas-execution.
2525. Jeff Hood’s public statements describing Kenneth Smith’s January 2024 execution.
2626. Jeff Hood’s public statements following Anthony Boyd’s October 2025 execution.
2727. CBS News, “South Carolina is set to execute another inmate by firing squad, one month after first such execution in decades,” April 9, 2025; Live5News/WCSC, “South Carolina death row inmate executed by firing squad,” April 11–12, 2025.
2828. Death Penalty Information Center, “2025 Roundup of Death Penalty Related Legislation,” February 4, 2026; The Hill, March 7, 2025.