Idaho lawmakers recently passed a bill to join Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma, and South Carolina in authorizing firing squads as a means of capital punishment. This development comes as states search for alternatives to lethal injections due to pharmaceutical companies barring the use of these “inhumane” drugs.
Under this bill passed in Idaho, firing squads would only be used if the drugs that are required for lethal injections cannot be obtained. It gives authorities the option to order a death by firing squad, if the lethal injection drugs are unavailable within five days of the execution warrant being issued.
While it can be argued that no form of execution is humane, I believe that firing squad executions are the most compassionate forms of execution because of their speediness and painlessness in comparison to other means of capital punishment.
My claim is based on the expectations that the bullets will strike the heart of the inmate, rendering them unconscious and leading them to quickly bleed to death.
In a 2017, 10-page dissent, Associate Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “In addition to being near-instant, death by shooting may also be comparatively painless.”
Sotomayor’s comments on the topic came from an Alabama case in which an inmate asked to be executed by firing squad instead of lethal injection, a case in which the Supreme Court majority refused to hear. Later in her dissent, Sotomayor explained that a lethal injection could cause intense pain and discomfort by physically paralyzing the inmate while they are still awake.
National Public Radio (NPR) affirmed this claim, explaining that in the majority of lethal injections, patients experience respiratory distress and sensations of drowning, asphyxiation, panic and terror.
NPR reviewed over 200 autopsy reports from lethal injection executions in nine states between 1990 – 2019 and found evidence of pulmonary edema in 84% of cases. Pulmonary edema causes the feeling of suffocation or drowning.
While death by firing squad is not ideal, because of its messiness and more violent nature, I believe we should consider it as an alternative to other means of execution. Very few firing squad deaths have gone awry, and it is relatively painless and quick death.
We cannot continue to subject inmates to excruciatingly painful deaths, such as those inflicted by lethal injection, simply out of convenience. It is not ethical to knowingly inflict pain on another individual, just because it is easier for the executioner.
Some claim that execution by firing squad is not guaranteed to be painless 100% of the time, and that it is significantly more traumatizing to witness because of the brutality of the execution compared to lethal injection.
However, ABC reported that a study by Austin Sarat, an Amherst college professor, studied over 8,700 executions in the United States between 1890 and 2010, and found that 3.15% of them were mismanaged.
Among this percentage of botched executions, it was found that 7.12% of all lethal injections went wrong. Comparatively, the study notes not even one of 34 firing squad executions went wrong.
As obtaining the necessary drugs for lethal injections becomes increasingly difficult, states are reconsidering other forms of capital punishment, including electric chairs, gas chambers, and firing squads.
Wyoming is one of 27 U.S. states that still allow the death penalty, and in 2015, the Wyoming House voted to make the firing squad an alternative method of execution, stipulating that inmates must be unconscious before being fired at.
Compared to other means of execution, death by firing squad has been deemed by many researchers as the most humane way of carrying out the death of an inmate.
