Bring in the Firing Squads
America’s appetite for capital punishment is at odds with its insistence on sanitized death.
At 5:57 on October 23, Anthony Boyd began to suffocate. Strapped to a gurney, he convulsed, shaking back and forth and thrashing against his restraints. As his movement slowed, the assembly of onlookers grew disturbed as he began to gasp for air, agonizing as his body was slowly deprived of oxygen. His official time of death would not be until 6:33.
This method of execution is surprisingly new. Though commonly confused with hydrogen cyanide gas chambers, out of use since 1999, Boyd’s death marks only the eighth nitrogen hypoxia execution. This method is the latest frontier in the United States’ pursuit of execution methods that are effective, efficient, and humane, following decades of political, logistical, and moral concerns about lethal injections. And yet, if Boyd’s execution shows anything, it’s that a bloodless execution is not necessarily a humane one.
America’s appetite for capital punishment is at odds with its insistence on sanitized death. In the decades since hanging was forsaken by a nation that no longer identified with what it saw as barbarism, the hunt for alternatives has been far from fruitful. Not for lack of innovation, medicalization, or sterilization, our methods today seem to have only decreased the suffering of onlookers, to the increased cruel and unusual suffering of the convicted. The general public may prefer sanitized executions, but if the state insists on killing, it should do so in arguably the only manner consistent with Americans’ eighth amendment rights: by firing squad.
“Due to the nature of the punishment process including lengthy trials, numerous appeals, and the increasing likelihood that any given prisoner on death row will simply die of natural causes, many families see the ordeal as more work than it’s worth.”
Though agonizingly long, Anthony Boyd’s execution was technically not botched: his death occurred within the margin of acceptability for the manner of execution. Whatever that says about the margin itself, others are even less lucky, with botched executions representing something of a guilty routine in capital punishment. The lethal injection of Oklahoman Clayton Lockett turned into what the prison warden would later describe as a “bloody mess,” taking 43 minutes and 16 different needle insertions to end his life after doctors mistakenly hit an artery. Alabama prisoner Doyle Lee Hamm would later die of lymphoma after 2.5 hours of failed attempts to end his life by the same method.
Lethal injection is the most common—and most frequently botched—execution method in the United States, its medicalized image masking the unreliability and needless suffering it introduces. Though hanging and the electric chair saw botch rates of 3.1 percent and 1.9 percent respectively, over 7 percent of lethal injections have been botched since its introduction in 1982. Lethal gassing, involving either the introduction of a lethal gas into a gas chamber or asphyxiation by nitrogen, is not far behind, with a full 5.4 percent of gas executions failing significantly enough to be considered botched. These prisoners suffered from torturous leaky gas chambers, were hung twice thanks to snapped rope, and even caught fire in the electric chair. By comparison, the number of botched firing squad executions in over a century of data is zero.
Americans favor lethal injection because it looks calm, clean, and clinical, not because it is. As the rest of the developed world has steadily fallen out of love with capital punishment, the U.S. being the only western country that both has the death penalty and actively uses it. In that regard we join Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, Vietnam, China and North Korea—a list on which most Americans would not feel at home. As a result, rather than confronting the killing itself, the American project revolves around making it look cleaner: swapping gallows for gurneys, bullets for needles, and now cyanide for nitrogen. Each innovation, we feel, washes the blood off our hands. Our capital punishment, we say, is civilized.
This misplaced empathy defines how we see not only the public and the convicted, but also the families of victims. The justification for capital punishment is frequently centered around appeals for deterrence and justice for the victims’ loved ones. While data on deterrence remains inconclusive at best, evidence supporting the healing effects of capital punishment is even less convincing. Due to the nature of the punishment process including lengthy trials, numerous appeals, and the increasing likelihood that any given prisoner on death row will simply die of natural causes, many families see the ordeal as more work than it’s worth, calling it “a false promise that goes unfulfilled, leaving victims’ families frustrated and angry after years of fighting the legal system.”
Of course, there remains the fact that many Americans see capital punishment simply as a moral necessity, a stance that justifies almost any procedural annoyance to the end of justice. If the point, then, is to make a statement regarding our nation’s character, then we should consider more carefully exactly what it is we are declaring. Our own founding documents forbid cruel and unusual punishment, and deliberately continuing to use methods known to cause unnecessary suffering rather obviously qualifies. If we maintain that the death penalty is necessary due to the dignity of life, then our methods for enacting it should reflect that ethos. Even for the guilty, dignity is nonnegotiable; the state’s legitimacy depends on that consistency.
Although 30 states still allow capital punishment, only five, South Carolina, Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah, allow firing squads. Researchers, experts on capital punishment, and legal experts find consensus around firing squads for their efficiency, research suggesting that those executed by firing squad can be pronounced dead just two to three minutes after being shot, their hearts stopping in as little as 15 seconds. Dr. Jonathan Groner, a surgeon at Ohio State and a death penalty expert agrees, saying firing squads allow a quicker and more painless death than other execution methods: “There’s pain, certainly, but it’s transient,” he explains. “If you’re shot in the chest and your heart stops functioning, it’s just seconds until you lose consciousness.”
Even beyond morality, there are additional practical arguments in favor of firing squads, ones some states are already beginning to consider. One of many reasons for delayed executions is the unreliable availability of the medications used for lethal injections, the most widely-legalized method. Most American pharma companies refuse to allow their drugs to be used for execution, and overseas many countries altogether ban the export of drugs for that purpose. As a result, many of the convicted are only still alive because there are no legal ways to kill them. Lawsuits have sparked in Texas from inmates alleging the state plans to use expired drugs, the state having turned to a compounding pharmacy after the refusal of traditional drug suppliers. Idaho has similarly lost the race against time, needing to postpone an execution after their supply expired.
South Carolina, then, has begun allowing death row inmates to directly opt for death by firing squad. Earlier this year, Brad Sigmon became the first American executed by firing squad in 15 years, his lawyers saying he chose the more “violent” process due to concerns about the efficacy of other methods.
One obvious critique of firing squads is that they appear barbaric or evoke authoritarian regimes. But while cruelty can be in the spectacle of death, at present there is far more inhumanity in the suffering that accompanies it. Others, too, reject firing squads on the basis of their disagreement with capital punishment altogether. While that may be consistent, opponents of the death penalty should at least wish to minimize suffering, if and when it occurs.
No execution is bloodless, but the paradox of America’s death penalty system is that it prizes the appearance of mercy over the reality of it. Alex Kozinski, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals’ Ninth Circuit, once argued for firing squads saying “if we are willing to carry out executions, we should not shield ourselves from the reality that we are shedding human blood.”
Any country willing to take a life should be able to look the act in the eye. If we’re going to keep killing people in the name of justice, let’s at least have the respect for human dignity to do it right. It’s time to stop pretending that cruelty wrapped in white coats is compassion.
