The Machinery of Death: Some Death Row Prisoners Can Still Opt for Firing Squad (or Electric Chair, Gas Chamber, or Noose)

The state of Utah is going to allow death row inmate Ronnie Lee Gardner to choose how he dies–as long as he chooses either lethal injection or a firing squad.

Gardner has been on death row since 1985, when he was convicted of killing an attorney during an escape attempt at the Salt Lake Metro Hall of Justice.

Under Utah law, he is one of a handful of longtime death row prisoners who has the right to choose between two execution methods.

The most famous U.S. execution by firing squad in modern times also took place in Utah: In 1977, multiple murderer Gary Gilmore was killed by five men with rifles, while strapped to a chair with a hood over his head and a target pinned over his heart. (Gilmore’s choice had been between firing squad and hanging.) He was the first person to be executed in the United States for nearly ten years, after the Supreme Courts lifted an effective ban on capital punishment.

While firing squads are unique to Utah (or almost–see Oklahoma, below), a number of other states still give condemned prisoners a choice of execution methods. The “primary” or “default” method in all cases is lethal injection.

In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, some prisoners can choose between a lethal injection and the electric chair. In Arizona, California, Maryland, and Missouri, they can opt for the gas chamber. Hanging is still permitted in Washington (if the prisoner requests it) and New Hampshire (if a lethal injection for some reason can’t be given).

Many state laws even designate “backup” methods, just in case the primary method is struck down. Oklahoma, in particular, seems determined not to take any chances. According to the Death Penalty Information Center (which maintains detailed data on execution methods), the state of Oklahoma “authorizes electrocution if lethal injection is ever held to be unconstitutional and firing squad if both lethal injection and electrocution are held unconstitutional.”

There is one way of dying, however, that no state allows its prisoners to choose: Suicide. Last month, an Ohio inmate named Lawrence Reynolds tried to overdose on stockpiled antidepressants two days before his execution date. Prison officials rushed him to the hospital, where he was revived. An investigation by the state concluded that Reynolds, who had been on death row for 16 years, wanted to ”end it” by his own hand, so as to ”not give the state any satisfaction of killing him.” But the state reserved its right to be Reynolds’ executioner: Nine days after his suicide attempt, it put him to death in the lethal injection chamber.

Suicide attempts by death row inmates are not uncommon, though they are rarely successful. (Some advocates have suggested, however, that condemned prisoners who waive their rights to appeal are committing a form of legal suicide). Dr. Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist and expert on the effects of solitary confinement and death row, has stated that “the conditions of confinement are so oppressive, the helplessness endured in the roller coaster of hope and despair so wrenching and exhausting, that ultimately the inmate can no longer bear it,” and choosing to die may be the only way “that he has any sense of control over his fate.”

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Source: solitarywatch, March 7, 2010