Illustration: Guardian Design / Getty Images / APView image in fullscreen Illustration: Guardian Design / Getty Images / APDeath by firing squad: archaic method on the rise in US as Idaho opens new execution chamberSupporters of the method say it’s foolproof – but forensic experts say it can be ‘excruciating’ amid allegations it’s been intentionally botched
The tangled path of US capital punishment takes a new turn on Wednesday as Idaho becomes the first state to adopt the firing squad as its primary form of execution, embracing the brutal killing technique even as concerns grow that it can inflict excruciating pain and suffering.
The state’s department of corrections (IDOC) says it has met its deadline, set by the legislature, to have its death chamber at a maximum security prison south of Boise retrofitted and open for business by 1 July. It has spent more than $1m in the venture, including $24,000 on a rack of AR-style, .308-caliber, scoped rifles that will be wielded by volunteer marksmen.
The firing squad, long considered archaic and bloody, is on the rise across the US as states seek new approaches to capital punishment. Idaho becomes the seventh state to include it among its roster of execution methods, with a larger number of jurisdictions now allowing judicial killing by gunfire than at any time in US history.
But despite insistence by supporters that the method is foolproof, alarm bells are sounding that the rapidly proliferating technique has the ability to go grotesquely wrong. Of the quartet of firing squad executions carried out in the US since 2010, two appear to have been botched, with bullets veering from their intended target of the left ventricle of the heart and causing prolonged and agonising deaths.
Expert forensic analysts have also raised allegations in US supreme court filings that the blunders may have been intentionally inflicted as a form of retributive punishment. The chilling claim, speculative though it is, has the potential to cast a pall over the entire firing squad project.
View image in fullscreenThe Idaho maximum security institution. Photograph: Sarah A Miller for ProPublica via Getty ImagesUnder Idaho’s new death protocol, the identities of the three shooters who have volunteered to join the firing squad are known only to the state prisons director and deputy. They will be responsible for carrying out court ordered killings of Idaho’s eight death row inmates, one of whom is female.
“The department will be prepared to carry out an execution order after July 1,” IDOC said in a statement. It added that its procedures were designed “to ensure that any execution is conducted in a secure, orderly, and dignified manner”.
Idaho switched procedures after lethal injection, the method most commonly used in modern America, ran into difficulties. In February 2024 the state had to call off, mid-flow, the execution of convicted murderer Thomas Creech after a medical team failed to establish an IV line.
Other states have been similarly plagued by botched lethal injections, exacerbated by an international boycott of medical supplies used in the procedure. Seeking an alternative, Alabama took up nitrogen gas asphyxiation, but earlier this month that ground to a halt, too, when federal courts declared it unconstitutional.
Given the quagmire in which active death penalty states find themselves (11 states carried out executions last year), the firing squad commands an obvious appeal. There is no impediment to acquiring rifles in the US, and the five states that have firing squads among their possible protocols – Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah (plus Florida and Tennessee, which could also theoretically access the firing squad if other methods fail) – claim it is close to flawless.
The condemned prisoner is strapped into a chair to ensure immobility, and a black hood placed over their head. A target is then pinned directly over the left ventricle of the heart, the body’s main circulatory pump which sends blood to the brain.
When a rifle’s bullets eviscerate the left ventricle of the heart, blood stops flowing and the brain shuts down within seconds. Death is instantaneous. The system is foolproof, advocates contend.
View image in fullscreenPeople against the death penalty gather outside of Cator Ruma and Associates, the Boise engineering firm contracted to design Idaho’s new firing squad execution chamber. Photograph: Sarah A Miller/Idaho Statesman via Getty ImagesBut such plaudits are belied by American history, which tells a different story. Though the firing squad has the distinction of being deployed at the first judicial execution, in the Jamestown settlement in 1608, it has been relatively sparsely used since then.
There have been 147 executions of civilian prisoners by the gun since Jamestown, and of those several have fallen short of foolproof. In 1879, Wallace Wilkerson took 27 minutes to die after the marksmen shot him above the heart and in the left arm. “Oh, my God! My God! They have missed,” he screamed as he writhed in the dirt.
Martin Gardner, a law professor writing in the Ohio State Law Journal, examined the first known case in which shooters are thought to have deliberately aimed away from the prisoner’s heart. When Eliseo Mares faced a Utah firing squad in 1951, all four live bullets entered the wrong side of his body.
“It appears the misses were intentional,” Gardner writes. “Whether the riflemen wished to torture the victim or feared to inflict the fatal shot in the heart is unknown.”
A reporter from Salt Lake Tribune who witnessed the event said Mares bled out and “died silently and horribly”.
Over the past 16 years there have been four firing squad executions, two of which have generated concerns. In 2010, Utah put to death Ronnie Lee Gardner, 49, using a team of five anonymous officers.
Gardner, who had spent almost 25 years on death row for murdering an attorney during an attempted courthouse escape, opted for the firing squad. The Salt Lake Tribune gave another first-hand description.
After the bullets slammed into his chest, Gardner clenched his hand into a fist several times in what appeared to be an effort to fight the pain, and his jaw seemed to move. The reporter said the ordeal went on so long he wondered “whether Gardner would require a second volley of bullets”.
It was, the witness said, an “excruciating wait for Gardner to die”.
View image in fullscreenRonnie Lee Gardner in Salt Lake City in 2010. Photograph: Francisco Kjolseth/APLast year opponents of capital punishment, led by Utahns Against the Death Penalty and supported by Gardner’s family, decided to take a closer look at the autopsy findings. They brought on board Dr Jonathan Groner, an emeritus professor of surgery at the Ohio State University who has studied execution practices.
Groner pored over the autopsy photographs, and was disturbed by what he saw. The holes rent in Gardner’s torso were not located over the heart, where Groner expected them to be, but lay further to the left.
Images of Gardner’s back further troubled the professor, as the exit holes appeared way off the anticipated trajectory. “I was concerned that the shooters’ aim was not perfect,” Groner said.
Utah situates the marksmen 21ft from the condemned man and places a target directly over his heart. Groner was puzzled by how such a seemingly foolproof setup could apparently come unstuck.
He told a press conference convened by Gardner’s family that “it seems possible that there is some sort of implicit bias in the execution process. I don’t know anything about Mr Gardner’s history, if he would have done anything that would have upset the guards or made them mad, but you have to at least ask that question.”
The abolitionist group Death Penalty Action ran a billboard campaign on the back of the autopsy review that questioned Utah’s firing squad: “If you’re going to do it, shoot straight!”
Randy Gardner, brother of the executed inmate, said he was still in shock having learnt of Groner’s conclusions months ago. “It’s just disgusting. How from 20ft away could anybody miss a target pinned on my brother’s heart? These are skilled marksmen certified for this stuff, I don’t get how they could have missed.”
The Guardian invited the Utah department of corrections to respond to the allegations of intentional misfiring, but it declined to comment.
Most firing squad executions in America over the past century have been carried out by Utah. But last year, as death penalty states began looking for alternatives, South Carolina convened three firing squads.
The first took the life of Brad Sigmon, 67, and appeared to go as intended. But a month later, in April 2025, a convicted murderer who had killed an off-duty police officer in 2004, Mikal Mahdi, 42, came before the firing squad.
View image in fullscreenMikal Mahdi, at age 40 at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina Photograph: Courtesy of Mikal Mahdi’s attorneysAn Associated Press media witness reported that Mahdi cried out as three volunteer prison employees, standing 15 feet away, emptied their rifles into him. He groaned twice over the next 45 seconds and continued breathing for about 80 seconds before making a last gasp – much longer than the 10 to 15 seconds he was supposed to have remained conscious.
Autopsy results obtained by the Guardian showed that there were only two wounds on Mahdi’s body despite there being three members of the firing squad. The state claimed that two of the three bullets must have entered the same entry hole, but a forensic pathologist recruited by Mahdi’s lawyers called that scenario “extraordinarily uncommon”.
The pathologist, Dr Jonathan Arden, was disturbed by the passage of the bullets, which entered well below the level of the prisoner’s left ventricle and ended up damaging his liver. “The shooters missed the intended target area,” Arden concluded, causing “excruciating conscious pain and suffering” for up to 60 seconds.
Gerald King, a federal public defender involved in representing all three men killed by South Carolina’s firing squad last year, said the evidence showed that the Mahdi shooters had largely missed the prisoner’s heart and that the execution had been botched. “This did not go as the state said it would. The evidence from the autopsy was pretty unequivocal, as is the testimony of those who had to sit in the death chamber and watch Mr Mahdi suffer and struggle.”
A month after Mahdi was executed the supreme court of South Carolina stepped into the fray. The state’s top judges ruled that the process had not been botched.
But in reaching their conclusion, the justices confirmed that the marksmen had indeed failed to strike the critical left ventricle that pumps blood to the brain, and had hit only Mahdi’s pericardial sac and right ventricle.
The ruling about Mahdi’s death was made in a later case: that of Stephen Stanko, 57, a convicted murderer who was attempting to stave off his own ultimate punishment (Stanko eventually lost the battle and succumbed to lethal injection in June 2025). In the course of those proceedings, Stanko’s legal team made an eye-popping allegation in filings to the US supreme court.
Drawing on separate expert opinions from a ballistics forensics scientist and pathologist, Stanko’s attorneys posited a terrifying theory about how Mahdi had been killed. “Those responsible for conducting the Mahdi firing squad intended to miss the direct target,” they wrote, and in the process had caused him to endure “the most extreme pain a human can experience until his death”.
Joseph Perkovich, counsel of record in Stanko’s filing to the US supreme court, said that “they missed entirely the left ventricle, and only glancingly struck the right ventricle. For three marksmen to miss their target 15ft away is effectively impossible – so that leaves us with something very bleak, and that is the intent.”
In his upcoming book on capital punishment, The Hippocratic Paradox, Groner, the professor of surgery, discusses Mahdi’s execution having also examined the autopsy photographs in this case. In it he makes perhaps the grimmest suggestion of all: that the firing squad aimed away from the left ventricle aware that Mahdi, a Black man, was on death row for killing a white police officer.
View image in fullscreenThe sun rises on Idaho’s Maximum Security Institution 18 November 2011, in Boise, Idaho. Photograph: Joe Jaszewski/APGroner ponders whether this was what he calls a “quasi-lynching”. He writes: “Would corrections officers in a southern state intentionally torture a Black man who murdered a police officer? The historical record suggests this is far from out of the question.”
The Guardian put this allegation to the South Carolina department of corrections. A spokesperson pointed to the state supreme court ruling, with its finding of fact that the Mahdi execution had not been botched, and said: “South Carolina categorically denies this purely speculative accusation.”
We are unlikely ever to know the identities of the three volunteers facing Mahdi or what they were thinking as they pointed their precision rifles at him. Given the total secrecy that surrounds executions in South Carolina, as in other death penalty states, there is no way to ascertain who they were, let alone their state of mind.
Doubts though remain. Deborah Denno, an authority on execution protocols at Fordham law school, said she is uneasy about the sudden craze for firing squads that is spreading across the US.
Denno used to see the protocol, with its claim to being “foolproof”, as the “least inhumane readily-available method”.
Now she’s not so sure. “We tend to forget that human beings are conducting this, and human beings have emotions and feelings. Such as wanting to set things right, an eye for an eye, and revenge.”
