We’re Really Doing Execution by Firing Squad Again?

Slate is offering six months of Slate Plus to current and recently laid-off federal government employees. Frankie reported in 2021 that, offered the choice of hanging or the firing squad, Gilmore said, “I’d rather be shot.” Gilmore preferred the firing squad because “he considered it a more ‘dignified’ way to die than hanging.” Like Gilmore and Gardner, Sigmon also chose to be shot. In the 1951 execution of Eliseo Mares, for example, four executioners all shot into the wrong side of his chest, and he died slowly from blood loss.” In addition, firing squads “did not gain much use,” law professor Deborah Denno explains, because even when they went as planned, people “viewed them as barbaric” and were offended by their “bloody reality.” Moreover, as the AP’s Michael Tarm puts it, “The image of gunmen in a row firing in unison at a condemned prisoner may conjure up a bygone, less enlightened era.” That less enlightened era was certainly on display in Sigmon’s execution. Borrowing from what Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested in 2017, we can’t know whether his death was “comparatively painless” or whether, as Denno says, South Carolina’s firing squad delivered a “swift and certain death.” Related From Slate What’s the Deal With Amy Coney Barrett Lately? In his view, someone shot like Sigmon “could remain conscious for up to 10 seconds after being shot depending on where bullets strike … and those seconds could be ‘severely painful, especially related to shattering of bone and damage to the spinal cord.’ ” Randy Gardner, the brother of Ronnie Gardner, who was executed by firing squad in 2010, agrees with Antognini.