Are firing squads really more ‘humane’ than lethal injection?

On Friday afternoon, the state of South Carolina carried out the first execution by firing squad in the United States in 15 years .

As a method of execution, the firing squad had been largely abandoned over the belief that it was too brutal of a way to end someone’s life. This was just the fourth time one has been used in the U.S. in nearly half a century.

But Brad Sigmon, who had been convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents in 2001, chose to be shot to death because he believed it would involve less suffering than the two other options the state had given him: electrocution and lethal injection.

Lethal injection has been used in nearly 90% of all executions in the U.S. since 1977, according to a database from the Death Penalty Information Center, because it has been widely considered the most humane form of capital punishment.

But confidence in lethal injection has faded in recent years amid a series of botched executions and the emergence of evidence that it may not be as painless as it was once believed to be. That’s led some lawmakers, experts and prisoners themselves to make the case that firing squads may in fact be the least barbaric way to put someone to death.

The evolution of executions

In 1608, an accused mutineer named Captain George Kendall was killed by a firing squad in the first recorded execution on American territory. Over the next three-and-a-half centuries, roughly 140 firing squad executions were carried out in the U.S., nearly all of them in Utah. Compared to other methods of execution, shootings were relatively rare. During the same period, there were more than 9,000 hangings and 4,000 uses of the electric chair, according to a historical catalog compiled by the late death penalty researcher M. Watt Espy.

It wasn’t until the 1970s, in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling barring “cruel and unusual punishment,” that states began seeking less violent methods of executing prisoners. The first law legalizing lethal injection was introduced by an Oklahoma lawmaker who opposed the death penalty entirely, but felt the state should at least find an alternative to what he called the “dirty deed” of electrocuting a person to death. The first lethal injection was carried out in 1982 in Texas. Injection soon became the primary method of execution throughout the country.

'A circus of suffering'

Lethal injection is different from the electric chair, gas chamber, gallows or firing squad because it doesn’t necessarily involve a violent death. For decades, the primary approach was to inject the condemned person with a three-drug cocktail designed to put them asleep, paralyze them and then stop their heart. In theory, this would mean that they died without experiencing any pain.

But the procedure is also much more complex than other execution methods, which increases the chances that something can go wrong. Between 1982 and 2010, there were 75 botched injection executions that featured “unan-tic-i-pat-ed prob-lems” or “unnec-es-sary agony for the pris-on-er,” according to research by Amherst College professor Austin Sarat. By contrast, there are only two known reports of botched firing squad shootings in American history and one of those involved a prisoner who may have been deliberately shot in the stomach to prolong his suffering.

There’s also new evidence that lethal injection may not provide a peaceful death even when everything appears to go right. In 2020, news outlet NPR looked at the autopsies of more than 200 people who had died by lethal injection. They found that the overwhelming majority of their bodies showed signs that the prisoner likely endured what one medical expert described as a “cir-cus of suf-fer-ing” before dying.

More than 20 pharmaceutical companies have also refused to have their products used in executions, which has left states struggling to find the drugs they need to perform lethal injections. In some cases, they have experimented with unproven alternatives, with disastrous results.

An Oklahoma prisoner named Michael Lee Wilson said he could feel his “whole body burning” as he was being executed using a controversial drug cocktail in 2014. There have also been instances of prisoners gasping for air, heaving and coughing, convulsing and being subjected to “three hours of pain” before finally dying.

'Relatively painless violence'

Some legal scholars have made the case that firing squads, for all of their brutality, may be the least inhumane way to put someone to death. That includes liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote in a 2015 opinion that “such visible yet relatively painless violence may be vastly preferable to an excruciatingly painful death hidden behind a veneer of medication.”

Sigmon’s lawyers told the Associated Press that he chose to die by firing squad to avoid the “monstrous” results of a botched lethal injection. He was executed at 6 p.m. ET on Friday. According to AP, his arms “briefly tensed” when he was shot and then appeared to “give another breath or two” before falling still. He was pronounced dead a few minutes later.

Of the 27 states that allow the death penalty, only five — Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah — permit the use of firing squads under certain circumstances. A bill under consideration in Idaho could make it the primary method of execution in the state.