Utah's attorney-general tweeted details of leadup to firing squad execution of double murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner.
Ronnie Lee Gardner was undeniably an awful man, a double murderer. He was executed early Friday morning the old-fashioned way: by firing squad.
Yet the way his death and the legal twists and turns leading up to it were announced on Twitter by Utah Attorney-General Mark Shurtleff was anything but old-fashioned.
His first post: "A solemn day. Barring a stay by Sup Ct, & with my final nod, Utah will use most extreme power & execute a killer. Mourn his victims. Justice"
The second: "I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner's execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims."
Finally, "We will be streaming my live press conference as soon as I'm told Gardner is dead."
The last post included the URL for the video link.
The BBC has called it Death by Twitter, and cyberspace is humming with debate over the self-serving tone of Shurtleff's posts, as well as his use of social media.
The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan said. And, announcing an execution on a medium that seems most commonly used for describing what you ate for breakfast, paradoxically, made the news seem both more shocking and yet almost shockingly mundane.
Yet how the message was delivered should not overshadow the barbarous, repugnant and inhumane act of capital punishment itself.
That it happens in the middle of the night ought to be a sign.
Close to midnight Thursday, 49-year-old Gardner was strapped into a chair surrounded by sandbags. A target was pinned on his chest. He'd come from an "observation room." Nobody wanted him to commit suicide before he was shot.
With Shurtleff's "final nod," 5 shooters hidden by a screen and armed with .30-calibre rifles opened fire.
No one will ever know who killed Gardner. One of the bullets was a blank.
There is no saving grace that Gardner had a choice of being shot or receiving a lethal injection. Capital punishment is cruel and unusual, regardless of how it is administered, regardless of the U.S. Supreme Court that has decided it is not.
It's vengeance so horrifying that even some family and friends of Gardner's victims were among those who petitioned for commutation. It made 4 of 5 anonymous shooters murderers.
There is no excusing what Gardner did; no amount of apologizing or even sincere regret could erase what he did.
In 1984 at age 23, an enraged Gardner killed bartender Melvyn Otterstrom. When Gardner went to court the following year, he tried to escape, and during that attempt, he killed lawyer Michael Burdell.
But like so many criminals, Gardner was a product of his upbringing. At age two, he was found in the street alone, wearing only a diaper. By six, he was addicted to gasoline and glue. By 10, he'd "graduated" to LSD and heroin and helping his stepfather during robberies.
Gardner was sent to a mental hospital at 11, not because he was mentally ill, but because child welfare officials thought it a better place for him than his home. He spent 18 months there.
Later, he was sexually abused in a foster home.
The United States remains among a minority of nations along with Iran, China and Saudi Arabia, that continue to have a death penalty.
Only 18 countries carried out executions in 2009. In the United States, 52 prisoners were put to death. It was the highest total in 3 years because in the 2 previous years the Supreme Court stayed all executions while it considered whether lethal injection was cruel, unusual and, therefore, unconstitutional.
Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976. Contrary to predictions, the murder rate didn't rise.
It has fluctuated over the years, but in the past decade it has stabilized at a rate per-capita less than 1/3 of that of the United States.
Source: The Vancouver Sun, June 19, 2010
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