DRAPER, Utah — The death penalty re-emerged here, behind the gray stone walls of the Utah State Prison in early 1977, in violence and blood. A murderer named Gary Mark Gilmore, famous even before the books about him, died before a five-man firing squad, ending a national moratorium on capital punishment. The law-and-order era of the 1980s and ’90s — if not quite by calendar, then by symbol and deed — had begun.
Now the firing squad, a Utah way of death that began in pioneer days and lingered after other states that practiced capital punishment had moved on to more sanitized means of killing, is back. The execution of a man named Ronnie Lee Gardner, 49, for murdering a lawyer in an escape attempt, is set for the small hours of Friday morning. If not blocked by the courts, Mr. Gardner will be hooded, strapped to a chair and shot through the heart.
The execution of Mr. Gardner, if carried out, might not be the last by firing squad, but the list of possible cases is dwindling fast. Utah went to lethal injection in 2004, but anyone convicted before that date, as Mr. Gardner was in 1985, could still choose to be shot. Four other death row inmates have indicated that they may take the firing squad option, if and when their time comes. Another murderer, John Albert Taylor, died here by firing squad in 1996, before the law was changed.
While steadfast belief in the death penalty may have eroded for some, the fierce ethos of eye-for-an-eye — whether based on religion or the code of the West — is alive and well.
“In the days of Moses, they’d stone them to death because they didn’t have guns back then,” said Jackson Smith, 68, a retired security guard in Salt Lake. “So it doesn’t make any difference to me how they do it — firing squad, electric chair or whatever.”
No comments:
Post a Comment