It was a punishment for the riot in the colonial era, a way of discouraging dropout during the civil war and a dose of border justice in the old west. In modern times, some consider it a more human alternative to lethal injection. The shooting squad has a long and thorny story in the United States.
South Carolina on Friday is scheduled to put the First person until the death of Floring Squad in the United States in 15 years. Brad SigmonWho was convicted of killing the parents of his ex -girlfriend in 2001, chose him on the other two methods in South Carolina: the electric chair and lethal injection.
Since 1608, at least 144 civil prisoners have been executed for shooting in the United States, almost all of Utah. There have only been three since 1977, when the use of capital punishment resumed after a 10 -year pause. The first of them, Gary GilmoreIt caused a sensation of media partly because he resigned from his appeals and offered as a volunteer to be executed. When his last words were asked, Gilmore replied: “Let’s do it.”
Five states – IdahoMississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah: they authorize the use of farewell squads in certain circumstances.
Here is a look at the story behind the death penalty method.
The earliest registered execution arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1608. Captain George Kendall became suspicious of Motinine, and possibly conspiracy with Spain. Centuries later, in 1996, archaeologists discovered a body full of bullets buried in the walls of the fort that many suspects were Kendall.
In the American Revolution, Public Executions of Floring Squad were sometimes used to punish dropout.
In 1776, then Gen. George Washington saved a Connecticut soldier, Ebenezer Leffingwell, who was sentenced to die after fighting with a superior, the US revolution newspaper story. Leffingwell had been tied, with bandaged eyes and forced to kneel in front of a crowd when a chaplain involved in the procedure announced that he would live.
Mark Smith, professor of history at the University of South Carolina, said the farewell squads were used, often, by both parties during the civil war to create a “public show, a vision of terror” to keep the soldiers online.
“A man could be sitting on his own coffin sometimes or with bandaged eyes, fired by six or seven men, one of whom has a blank,” said the professor. “These were meetings designed to surprise and worked.”
At least 185 men were executed by a shooting squad during the civil war, according to Christopher Q. Cutler in a review of Cleveland State Law article.
The shot squads were mainly used only in Utah, where legislators in 1851 designated three possible punishments for murder: shoot, hang or decapitate. The first execution of the execution squad was carried out in an enclosure of the court, disappointing a crowd that was waiting outside to see it.
Only another state since 1900 has executed someone shooting: Nevada, which in 1913 built a gadget that fired three weapons by pulling strings because he had problems finding volunteers to serve in a shooting squad.
A sentence of 1877 in Utah gave rise to the first case of the Supreme Court of the United States that defies a specific execution method. Wallace Wilkerson, who shot a man shot during a heated chribbage game, challenged the plans of the authorities to kill him to the shooting squad. The Court rejected its appeal, discovering that, unlike other past methods, drawing and watercard, for example, the execution when shooting a squad would not bring the type of “terror, pain and misfortune” that would violate the prohibition of the eighth amendment of a cruel and unusual punishment.
In the end it turned out that Wilkerson’s murder was failed, Cutler said: according to the reports, intoxicated and smoking a cigar, he moved slightly just before the executioners triggered. Seriously injured, he fell to the ground, saying: “My God! They have lost it.” He took a agonizing 15 minutes to die.
Among other famous executions of the Squadron Squadron in Utah was the 1915 death of the Labor activist and composer Joe Hill, who until the end insisted on his innocence in the murder of a shopkeeper and his son.
One of the reasons why the firing squads did not earn much beyond Utah was that people saw them as barbarians, according to Deborah Denno, criminologist of the Fordham Law Faculty.
The bloody reality of these murders, as well as the suspensions and failed electrocutions, which sometimes led people to fight and suffer, led the states in the early 1980s to begin to resort to lethal injection, a procedure seen, at least initially, as more human.
But since then, lethal injection It has become the most commonly failed execution method, according to the death penalty information center. The states have struggled to obtain the required drugs, and some have taken another look at the farewell squads, an old but largely reliable method. The legislators in Idaho are considering a bill that would make the firing squads the main execution method there.
Two people now in the Utah death corridor have requested farewell squads.
Denno urged policy formulators to reconsider the squads in a Review article of the 2016 law. Among those who have expressed similar opinions are the judge of the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote in a 2017 dissent that “in addition to being close to the moment, death due to shooting can also be relatively indolor.”
“Lethal injection has only worsened throughout the decades,” Denno told Associated Press in an interview. “The shooting squad really stands out as a relatively decent execution method.”
In the execution annals in the United States, he said, there have only been two executions of failed shooting squad: Wilkerson and Eliseo Mares in Utah in 1951. It is not clear what happened in the case of seas, but the reports arose decades later that the executors disgusted and intentionally lost their hearts to prolong their suffering.
With greater supervision and expert shooters, those problems would not be repeated today, Denno said.
In South Carolina, Sigmon, 67, chose to die at the shots squad because the alternatives seemed worse, his lawyer Gerald “Bo” King wrote in a statement.
Some aspects of their execution are modern; For example, bullets are more mortal and weapons are now more precise.
But much of this would have been familiar in Utah more than a century ago: an hooded inmate with a goal about his heart is linked to a chair in a death chamber and can say his final words. Near the volunteer officers wait for the order to shoot.
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Associated Press Reporteros Ed White in Detroit; Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana; and Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, contributed.
