There is a contradiction deep within American capital punishment, driven by the stubborn fact of the Eighth Amendment: It’s licit for the government to kill people—the torture of all tortures—but not to subject them to additional pain, a protection from lesser suffering in service of greater suffering. From this confusion arises the necessity of relatively painless executions. The same people who are holding death-row prisoners captive in claustrophobic cells are the ones responsible for ensuring their comfort en route to their destruction. With that mission in mind, states are now pillaging the past for an execution method that will satisfy legal challenges based on undue suffering while still accomplishing the penalty’s aim.
On Friday, South Carolina executed Brad Sigmon by firing squad; Sigmon had been convicted of the 2001 murder of his ex-girlfriend’s parents. This marked the first use of a firing squad in 15 years, the previous instance having taken place in Utah in 2010. Peculiar and violent methods of execution seem to capture the public’s imagination in a way that the death penalty itself does not: A person may support capital punishment in theory but balk at the means of actually achieving that end, which requires something more visceral than abstract assent. Accordingly, considerable media attention last week was given to the return of the firing squad—the case was thoroughly covered domestically, and even picked up by the BBC—but the next shooting execution won’t garner half as much. Unless the culture changes to reject the death penalty, new techniques, or revived and refurbished old ones, will continue to come and go.
During his execution, Sigmon was strapped into a gray chair in a steel basin with a target fixed over his chest and a hood covering his head. Witnesses watched through an observation window as the gunmen, hidden behind a wall with a cutout for rifle barrels, fired their weapons from 15 feet away and destroyed the target above Sigmon’s heart. A doctor pronounced Sigmon dead at 6:08 p.m.
[Elizabeth Bruenig: What it means to forgive the unforgivable]
As in many executing states, Sigmon was permitted to choose among three execution methods to end his life: lethal injection, electrocution, and the firing squad. He elected to be shot, citing concerns about the past several lethal injections in South Carolina, which were characterized by significant mistakes: Of particular note, a prisoner executed last month was found to have been incorrectly dosed with lethal chemicals, and his lungs were determined upon autopsy to be “massively swollen with blood and fluids,” according to a court filing by Sigmon’s legal team.
Firing-squad executions of civilians have been historically rare—the first took place in the American colonies in 1608, and since then, only 144 people have been executed by shooting. Drawing data-based conclusions about its merits relative to more widely used execution methods is therefore difficult. But Sigmon was probably right that the firing squad represents a faster and more reliable way to die than both the pseudoscientific methods produced in modernity (electrocution, gas, and lethal injection) and more antique methods such as hanging and old-world burning. In her chapter of the 2024 book The Elgar Companion to Capital Punishment and Society, the professor and legal scholar Deborah Denno points out that an electrocardiogram test conducted during a firing-squad execution in 1938 found that the prisoner’s heart stopped within seconds of being shot, and that the prisoner was pronounced dead only two minutes later. Denno adds that in one of the most medically exhaustive analyses of various execution methods, the British scientist Harold Hillman “concluded that execution by firing squad featured among the lowest levels of potential pain.”
Nevertheless, firing-squad executions were eventually superseded by methods thought to be less bloody—namely lethal injection, which arrived in the late 1970s as a medicalized and respectable means of execution analogized by some to putting animals to sleep. But the putative progress of lethal injection belied its propensity for cruel and horrific botches. Consider the 2018 case of Doyle Hamm, whose attempted execution via lethal injection lasted for roughly three hours, during which he was pierced with needles at least 11 times in the legs, feet, and groin; one needle punctured his bladder. As a result, lethal injection has been the subject of fierce litigation, which has culminated in a convincing impeachment of the technique in the public’s mind.
That litigation has also led to a particular legal development involving challenges on the grounds of the executional method: A prisoner protesting a particular method must supply a readily available alternative, which motivates states to develop protocols for additional methods. Thus lethal injection itself may soon be superseded by firing squad or suffocation via nitrogen hypoxia. The churn of old methods and new will continue indefinitely as states fight to continue executions by whatever means necessary.
