Why Doesn’t the US Execute People by Firing Squad?

Photo via the IMLS Digital Collections & Content Flickr account, image property of the Shoreline Historical Museum

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you sentence someone to death. Let’s put aside the sticky, obvious questions like what gives the state the moral authority to kill its citizens and whether we can trust any existing system of legislators, judges, and juries to the point where we would give them the power over life and death. Bottom line is, you’re gonna execute someone. The only question you should have is, What’s the cheapest way of killing this guy?

Assume that the system you operate under makes it so killing a convicted criminal involves so much red tape and appeals (not to mention the cost of housing someone who is waiting to die) that it’s cheaper to send him to prison for life than to kill him. Further assume that the quasi-sacred document your society bases all laws off of has a bit in it about “cruel and unusual punishment” that the authors probably intended something specific by, but that today is largely incomprehensible—so much so that the current agreed-upon method for executing someone is to pump him full of extraordinarily expensive chemicals until he expires. Which brings us to the question at hand: How are you going to execute this person?

If you’re Bruce Burns, a Republican lawmaker from Wyoming, the answer is “firing squad.” This week the state senator introduced a bill to make cartoonists’ favorite method of execution legal in his state.

The law in Wyoming says that if lethal injection isn’t acceptable for whatever reason (i.e. the Supreme Court decides it’s unconstitutional), a gas chamber is the preferred method of execution. Except Wyoming doesn’t have a gas chamber. So Burns, utilizing that common-sense spirit Republican policymakers are known for, is all, Hey, why don’t we just shoot them or whatever?

“The state of Wyoming doesn't have a gas chamber currently, an operating gas chamber, so the procedure and expense to build one would be impractical to me,” Burns told the Associated Press. “I consider frankly the gas chamber to be cruel and unusual, so I went with firing squad because they also have it in Utah.”

In the same AP story, Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-capital punishment group, speculates that if the bill becomes a law it will be challenged in court on the grounds that execution by firing squad is cruel and unusual. In a lot of discourse surrounding ways to punish criminals, that question comes up—is a particular method of punishment too vicious or strange to consider?

I have zero experience in navigating the legal definitions of “cruel” and “unusual,” but it seems like whether a punishment is either of those things is a fairly personal moral judgment. For instance, lethal injection seems pretty dang cruel and unusual to me. But so does killing someone, and so does putting someone in prison for their lifetime. Giving select criminals the option to get flogged rather than doing prison time, as sociologist Peter Moskos has suggested, makes some kind of moral sense to me. Heck, I think forcing the elected official who approves the execution to personally shoot the criminal in the head would make better moral sense than the impersonal killing procedures used in US death rows.

You might violently disagree with me on that stuff, and that’s OK. Arguing over the morally “right” way to execute criminals is a pretty fun pastime though. How do you judge the relative humaneness of hanging versus the electric chair (the method lethal injection has largely replaced in the US) versus a firing squad? Do you try to measure the pain they cause the executed man or woman, and how do you do that? Firing squads, which were only recently outlawed in Utah, involve some human interaction, as volunteer law enforcement officers are doing the firing—is that a point in its favor, or against it?

More importantly, who cares? Dead is dead, and talk of certain kinds of executions being cruel and unusual just means the speaker wants to avoid the squishy fact that the government is directly killing someone. Burns has the right idea in seeking a cheaper form of state-sanctioned murder; he’s just not creative enough. If we left the lily-livered equivocating pseudo-morality of “cruel and unusual punishments” out of the equation, we could behead people, a la Game of Thrones. If we could get past the totalitarian associations we might have with the method, we could start using a single bullet to the back of the head. And if we’re killing people using drugs, why not just pump people full of heroin until they expire?

All of those above options are cheaper than lethal injection, and probably cheaper than firing squads—as is not killing people. But Burns clearly just wants to make some fun headlines by proposing firing squads (there’s only one man on death row in Wyoming, and the state has only executed one person in the last half-century), and advocating for eliminating the death penalty in order to save a few bucks might give people the wrong idea. It might sound compassionate, and what politician would want that kind of reputation?

@HCheadle