A Progressive Justice Billed This Method of Execution as “Relatively Quick and Painless.” She Was Wrong.
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The death penalty in the United States is sustained by a fantasy and an illusion. Americans imagine that when the state kills, it can do so in a humane manner.
We've tried many things to turn that conception into a reality. Unlike other countries, which choose a method of execution and stick with it over long periods of time, over the 125 years the United States has used more methods of execution than any other nation .
We have hung people, electrocuted them, put them in the gas chamber, killed them with lethal chemicals, asphyxiated them, and, on occasion, shot them to death. We have put our faith in the development of new technologies for putting people to death and debated whether older methods were just as good.
But, despite these efforts, botched executions continue to occur. An execution is botched if it does not follow standard operating procedure or departures from the requirements of the legal protocol that governs the conduct of executions.
My research found that more than 3 percent of all executions go awry and that lethal injection, the most commonly employed execution method, is the most unreliable.
Last week, we learned another hard lesson about executions, namely that there is no foolproof way of killing someone. This is a lesson that death penalty opponents need to keep in mind before they endorse any execution method or say that it meets the requirements of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
It was driven home when South Carolina released the results of a state-sponsored autopsy in the case of Mikal Mahdi, who it put to death by firing squad last month . The autopsy showed that the “firing squad botched the execution … with shooters missing the target area of the man's heart, causing him to suffer a prolonged death.”
South Carolina had resurrected the firing squad because of difficulties with lethal injection procedures and with obtaining the drugs needed to carry them out. It did so thinking that a firing squad would be a safe, reliable, and humane execution method. Four other states (Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Utah) have also bought into that belief and have the firing squad in their execution menus.
Indeed, praising the firing squad has become quite fashionable even among those who would like to see the death penalty abolished.
For example, in 2015, Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor pointed to evidence that “the firing squad is significantly more reliable than other methods, including lethal injection using the various combinations of drugs thus far developed. … Just as important, there is some reason to think that it is relatively quick and painless.”
“A return to the firing squad,” she wrote, “and the blood and physical violence that comes with it … could conceivably give rise to its own Eighth Amendment concerns. … [But] at least from a condemned inmate's perspective … such visible yet relatively painless violence may be vastly preferable to an excruciatingly painful death hidden behind a veneer of medication.”
Two years later, she returned to this theme, writing, “Some might find this choice regressive, but the available evidence suggests 'that a competently performed shooting may cause nearly instant death.' … [And] may also be comparatively painless … And historically, the firing squad has yielded significantly fewer botched executions.”
In between Sotomayor's two frequently cited endorsements of the firing squad, Professor Deborah Denno, this nation's leading scholar about methods of execution, raised eyebrows when she called the justice's 2015 assessment of the firing squad “compelling because they consider the calculation of the method's cruelty versus visible violence through the eyes of a condemned inmate.”
Denno argued that “More solid evidence suggests that a competently performed shooting may lead to nearly instant death,” while she conceded that “an incompetently performed shooting may well cause acute pain,” she insisted that such instances are “rare.”
But Denno dismissed that concern, writing “such issues would not exist today. … Expert markspersons, situated so closely to the inmate, would be firmly secured and would not miss such a bold target on an inmate's heart unless the miss was deliberate.”
“The consensus of opinion concerning firing squads,” Denno concluded, “behaves with Justice Sotomayor's argument that they are swift and relatively pain free.”
In 2019, Stephanie Moran, writing in the University of Miami Law Review, joined the pro–firing squad chorus. She argued that “Firing squads pose a substantially lower government risk of pain and require materials the already has in abundance. Further, the use of firing squads is more feasible than lethal injection and results in a quicker death, with less risk of cruelty.”
“While firing squads may shock the senses,” Moran observed, “they are in fact the only way to behave with the requirements of the Eighth Amendment.”
Finally, those sentiments were echoed last March when two Arizona legislators introduced a resolution asking that the state's voters be allowed to vote to approve firing squads as the primary manner of execution in the 2026 election. One of the bill's sponsors called death by firing squad “by far the most humane and expeditious way” to carry out an execution.
Mahdi also believed that. So he chose the firing squad over lethal injection, as South Carolina law allowed him to do.
But things did not go as he and many death penalty opponents believed they would. The autopsy revealed that Mahdi “endured pain beyond the '10-to-15 second' window of consciousness that was expected.”
From witness accounts, we already knew that he groaned for roughly 45 seconds and continued to breathe for around 80 seconds. The autopsy suggested that the bullets that killed Mahdi “had a 'downward' trajectory that mostly missed the heart.”
As NPR reports , “none of the bullets hit his heart directly, as is supposed to happen during the execution. Instead, the wounds caused damage to his liver and other internal organs, and allowed his heart to keep beating. Pathologists,” NPR continues, “say that the injuries likely caused the prisoner pain and suffering while he was still conscious.”
It quotes one of them who said “that it took him some time to bleed out.”
What happened to Mahdi should remind death penalty opponents not to play the dangerous game of trying to figure out which method of execution can do the job required by our Constitution. None can.
That is just one reason why it is time to abolish capital punishment.
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