Utah Bill on Firing Squads Passes

Utah lawmakers sent the governor a bill Friday to eliminate firing-squad executions and deny killers the chance to “go out in a blaze of glory.”

However, four death row inmates who already have chosen to die in a hail of bullets will get their way.

The state House gave final approval to the measure, which would change Utah’s method of execution to lethal injection.

Gov. Olene S. Walker said she would sign the bill, saying it was “a sad commentary” that Utah still had the firing squad. “I think we need to make the death penalty as humane as possible,” she said.

Final approval in the House came on a 57-15 vote and without debate. The Senate approved the measure Thursday. Both chambers are overwhelmingly Republican.

During Senate debate, Democratic Sen. Ron Allen said allowing murderers to choose firing squads so they could “go out in a blaze of glory” made heroes of criminals and caused victims’ families more pain.

But Sen. Dave L. Thomas, in opposition to most of his fellow Republicans, argued that media circuses were “exactly what we want” in executions.

“We don’t want these sentences to be carried out in the dead of night so no one knows,” said Thomas, contending that lethal injection is painless and “the easy way out.”

Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, two people in the United States have died by firing squad, both in Utah: Gary Gilmore in 1977 and John Albert Taylor in 1996. Taylor’s execution drew more than 150 TV crews from around the world.

A relic of its territorial days, Utah’s firing squads employ five riflemen, one of whom shoots a blank so that none will know who fires the lethal shots.

Idaho and Oklahoma retain the firing squad on their books but have not used it in modern times.