Why the firing squad may be making a comeback

CNN

10-04-2025

South Carolina plans to execute Mikal Mahdi on Friday for the murder of a police officer, draping a hood over his head and firing three bullets into his heart.
The choice to die by firing squad – rather than lethal injection or the electric chair – was Mahdi's own, his attorney said last month: 'Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the lesser of three evils.'
If it proceeds, Mahdi's execution would be the latest in a recent string of events that have put the spotlight on the firing squad as a handful of US death penalty states explore alternatives to lethal injection, by far the nation's dominant execution method.
Mahdi's scheduled execution comes soon after the nation's first firing squad execution in 15 years, which South Carolina carried out on March 7. Five days later, Idaho's Republican governor signed into law HB 37, which will make Idaho the only state in the country with the firing squad as its primary execution method.
There are a couple reasons why some states and death row inmates are turning to a method that might be seen as antiquated.
First, the firing squad's reemergence is an outgrowth of states' troubles with lethal injection executions – including inadequate supplies of drugs, failed executions and legal challenges by inmates who claim their lethal injection protocols are torturous or risk violating Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
'Lethal injection is how states execute – and also the reason they don't,' said Corinna Lain, a law professor at the University of Richmond School of Law and author of the forthcoming book, 'Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection.'
Second, compared to the alternatives, experts say the firing squad is generally thought to be easy, fast and effective, despite its overt violence, which has likely contributed to states' hesitancy to use it.
Some have wondered aloud about this point in recent years, including US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
In its 2015 ruling in Glossip v. Gross, the court upheld Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol. But it also ruled inmates challenging an execution method needed to identify an alternative.
Sotomayor, today the court's most senior liberal, noted in her dissent that inmates might turn to the firing squad to meet this requirement, writing there was 'evidence to suggest' it is 'significantly more reliable than other methods,' and there was 'some reason to think that it is relatively quick and painless.'
'Certainly, use of the firing squad could be seen as a devolution to a more primitive era,' Sotomayor wrote, noting the 'visible brutality' could lead inmates to also challenge the method on Eighth Amendment grounds.
'At least from a condemned inmate's perspective, however, such visible yet relatively painless violence may be vastly preferable to an excruciatingly painful death hidden behind a veneer of medication,' she said.
The firing squad is among the country's oldest execution methods, according to Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School who studies the death penalty and execution methods. But it's been used rarely, with just over 140 inmates put to death using that method since 1608, per her research.
By contrast, lethal injection has been used more than 1,400 times since its advent in 1982.
The firing squad had been used even more sparingly since 1976, when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of capital punishment: Only four people have been executed by firing squad since then, including Brad Sigmon in South Carolina last month, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The other executions all occurred in Utah.
Of the 27 states with the death penalty, only five authorize firing squad, and most include it as an option only if lethal injection is impossible, according to DPIC. All death penalty states – plus the US government and the US military – authorize lethal injection. Nine states authorize electrocution, and five authorize nitrogen hypoxia.
'With each development of a new technology of execution, the same promises are made: 'This method is safe, reliable and more humane than the alternative,'' said Austin Sarat, a professor of law and politics at Amherst College.
The search for a method that checks these boxes culminated with lethal injection. But about 15 years ago, states began losing access to the drugs they needed, causing them to use different drug combinations or seek a different method altogether.
Idaho struggled for years to obtain pentobarbital, the drug it needed for executions, Rep. Bruce Skaug, the Republican lawmaker who sponsored HB 37, told CNN. But when it did manage to get the drug, it failed at its first attempted lethal injection in 12 years: In February 2024, executioners were unable to set an IV line on inmate Thomas Creech, forcing officials to abort the execution.
'Because of that failure,' Skaug said, 'this year, we decided to bring firing squad to the number one option.'
'Justice delayed is justice denied,' Skaug said, telling CNN the victims of the nine people on Idaho's death row deserve justice.
The firing squad will allow Idaho to avoid the challenges presented by lethal injection, Skaug said. Crucially, he does not anticipate the state will have issues sourcing firearms and ammunition it needs, he said.
'But really, personally, I find it more humane,' he said. 'It's sudden, it's quick. I'm told by experts that the convicted person is instantly unconscious, and so that's really a humane way of death.'
Indeed, the firing squad 'is thought to cause nearly instant unconsciousness,' Dr. Jonathan Groner, emeritus professor of clinical surgery at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, previously told CNN. Firing bullets into a person's heart 'would instantly stop the blood flow to the brain, which, like a cardiac arrest, causes rapid loss of brain function,' he said.
In 1938, officials performed an electrocardiogram on a Utah inmate who was put to death by firing squad. A doctor said it showed his heart stopped beating 15 seconds after the bullet was fired, though the inmate was declared dead more than two minutes later, according to Associated Press reporting at the time.
An Associated Press reporter who witnessed Sigmon's firing squad execution in South Carolina last month said it was 'much quicker' than those he had seen using lethal injection and the electric chair.
'The time from the shots being fired to the time death was declared was a little over two minutes,' Jeffrey Collins said.
Sarat's research also suggests states are unlikely to stray from their own protocols during a firing squad execution. Critics call this circumstance a 'botched execution.'
For his 2014 book, 'Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty,' Sarat reviewed nearly 9,000 executions carried out in the United States between 1900 and 2010. While he documented only 34 firing squad executions, it was the only method to boast a zero percent 'botch rate' within that time frame.
Of the other methods – including electrocution, lethal gas and hanging – lethal injection had the highest botch rate of more than 7%.
Still, states have remained averse to the firing squad, a position that experts who spoke to CNN believe stems from its overt violence.
Writing for USA Today, Bo King, an attorney for Sigmon, wrote about seeing blood flow from a 'fist-sized hole' over his client's stomach before hearing the explosions of the three rifles used in his execution last month, leaving the lawyer 'sick with rage.'
In this way, the firing squad is lethal injection's 'exact opposite,' said Lain, the University of Richmond law professor.
'Ending life before the body is ready to end it requires violence,' Lain told CNN. 'And the chief benefit of lethal injection is it hides it. The chief downside of the firing squad is that it shows it explicitly. It shows what the death penalty is, which is the state shedding blood in your name.'
'I think it is an explicit debasement of our society. It is an embrace of brutality,' she said of the firing squad. 'But if there is a bright side, perhaps it is that it will start some very important conversations about the death penalty that have been long standing but suppressed, because lethal injection has internalized that violence.'
This sentiment echoes Sotomayor, who in her Glossip v. Gross dissent alluded to the potential apprehension states might have in carrying out executions by firing squad.
'The States may well be reluctant to pull back the curtain for fear of how the rest of us might react to what we see,' she wrote. 'But we deserve to know the price of our collective comfort before we blindly allow a State to make condemned inmates pay it in our names.'
Skaug, the lawmaker, believes Idahoans will not be made uneasy by the firing squad. They're familiar with firearms, he said – for war and self-defense, but also as tools. And those facing execution, he added, 'carried out violent acts against other people … horrifically violent acts.'
'So, a bit of violence with bullets to the heart does not bother us, those that want to see this carried out.'