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Utah execution highlights death penalty debate

BY NICHOLAS RICCARDI

DENVER -- Ronnie Lee Gardner, the convicted double-murderer executed by a firing squad in Utah in the predawn hours Friday morning, died in a manner that even the state that killed him no longer wants to use.

Utah, which has been the only state to deploy a firing squad since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1977, banned its use in 2004. It allowed only a handful of inmates already on death row, including Gardner, to opt for the method to avoid further court appeals that could further delay the convicts' executions.

The state did not have any qualms about the legitimacy of the practice when it enacted the ban. "We had come to a point in Utah where execution by firing squad was overshadowing the victim and the crime," said Ron Gordon, who was then director of the state's Sentencing Commission, which recommended the ban. "It attracts a lot of attention. A lot of people talk about how this is the wild, wild West and Utah is shooting people."

Yet several who study the death penalty say that the firing squad may be a more humane way to be executed than the more bloodless method that has replaced it in Utah, lethal injection.

Legal challenges to lethal injection essentially stalled all executions in the U.S. for seven months until the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 issued guidelines on the practice. Problems still persist -- in September, executioners spent two hours unsuccessfully trying to inject lethal drugs into a death penalty inmate, who at one point tried to help medical workers find the right vein. It's unclear whether the courts will allow him to be brought into the death chamber a second time.

Yet the firing squad generates much more revulsion, said Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University who has studied execution techniques over the centuries.

"The anti-death penalty people think it's barbaric, and the pro-death penalty people think it detracts from capital punishment," she said. "But when you think of all the methods, the firing squad would be the most dignified. Someone's standing up and facing their death."

To some, Utah's reluctance to continue using the firing squad highlights the paradox of capital punishment.

"It's this conundrum that U.S. society is faced with -- we want a system of justice that will put people to death, but we want it to be palatable," said Laura Moye of Amnesty International, which campaigns against the death penalty. "If you want a system of justice that takes human life, you can't do it palatably."

Gardner, 49, was killed just past midnight Friday morning after spending his final day reading a spy novel and watching the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. He was strapped to a chair inside a state prison, his head hooded and a target affixed to his chest. Asked if he had any final words, he said: "I do not. No."

Five marksmen fired and Gardner slumped down. Within two minutes, a medical examiner declared him dead.

In 1985, Gardner was facing trial for killing Melvyn Otterstrom, a bartender in Salt Lake City, when a girlfriend slipped him a gun at the courthouse. He shot his way out, wounding a bailiff and killing defense attorney Michael Burdell. He was sentenced to life in prison for the Otterstrom murder and to death for Burdell's.

Gardner's current attorneys argued that his trial lawyers did not present mitigating evidence of his troubling upbringing that could have spared his life. Gardner was physically and sexually abused and learned to sniff glue by age 6. At age 11, he had already spent one year in a state mental hospital, attorney Andrew Parnes said.

Burdell's family pleaded with the state to spare Gardner's life, arguing that his second victim, an ardent pacifist, opposed the death penalty. Four jurors told the state Board of Appeals they would vote to give Gardner life in prison if they had the option today.

But Gardner's pleas for clemency and a new sentence were swiftly denied this week, all the way to the Supreme Court. Now only four other inmates on Utah's death row could be executed by firing squad.

Along with hanging, the firing squad was once the customary way to execute criminals in the U.S., according to Denno. It has persisted in Utah as a vestige of the old Mormon belief of blood atonement for sins, she said, which is why the Beehive State has been the only one to use it since the reinstatement of capital punishment. Killer Gary Gilmore was shot by a firing squad in 1977, made famous in the book "The Executioner's Song," and child killer John Albert Taylor in 1996.

In the rest of the country, Denno said, the firing squad began to be phased out at the start of the 20th century with the introduction of the electric chair, which was viewed as more humane. That method is often frowned upon nowadays, following some high-profile problems -- including a string of cases in Florida in the 1990s, when flames shot out of prisoners' heads as they were executed. Lethal injection is by far the most common form of execution currently.

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The procedures vary from state to state, but generally lethal injection involves a multiple-drug cocktail given to convicts that first numbs them, then stops their heart. "If the protocol is implemented as written, there's no chance that the person can suffer," said Dr. Mark Dershwitz, an anesthesiologist who has testified in support of the method.

Critics contend the technique rarely works as planned. Some death row convicts' veins are damaged by decades of drug abuse, making it hard to properly inject them.

"It's very clinical and it is more acceptable, even though it may be sheer torture," said Dr. Jonathan Groner, a pediatric surgeon and death penalty opponent who has criticized lethal injection. He cited cases where it took so long to properly inject that, in one instance, the inmate was given a bathroom break during his execution.

Groner said that older forms of execution, at their times viewed as humane and now frowned upon, may well be preferable. He cited the firing squad and even the guillotine, invented by a surgeon in the 18th century to improve upon the unreliability of hangings and beheadings.

"The guillotine ... is the quickest way to sever a life that we know of," Groner said. But no one would dare use it today. "As long as it's not messy," he said, "we're OK with it."