A communist insurgent is blindfolded and executed by firing squad, Cuba 1956./Wikipedia
We’ve discussed this before, but now we have a fresh reason. From last week:
COLUMBIA — South Carolina’s death penalty history could be rewritten March 7 if condemned state inmate Brad Sigmon is executed by firing squad, as he has chosen.
Though the firing squad is authorized as an execution method in five states, it has been used only three times since the U.S. reinstated the death penalty in 1976. All three took place in Utah, with the last one in 2010.
Sigmon, 67, has picked a shooting death over electrocution or lethal injection, according to documents he filed Feb. 21.
He was given a death sentence for killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents, Gladys and David Larke, at their home in Taylors in April 2001. Gladys Larke was 59 and her husband 62…
When we’ve talked about firing squads in the past, I’ve brought it up in large part because of people saying how “barbaric” it is. Which, within the context of other such practices in which our state engages, is nonsense. I’ve gone into that before:
Between the lines of the reporting and comments I’m hearing what I perceive as a flavor of “Firing squad? How awful! How barbaric!”
To which I’m going, Yeah, so? My God, who wouldn’t choose that? I know I would. In fact, of all the forms of execution current in this country, the firing squad is by far the least objectionable from the point of view of the condemned. It’s quicker and more certain than hanging.
And to me, lethal injection is by far the worst, the most blood-chillingly terrifying, the most cruel and unusual way to take a man’s life.
It’s so cold, so sterile, so deliberate, so clinical, so pseudo-nonviolent and therefore most morally chilling. Like, we’re going to kill you, casually and dispassionately, in a staged setting that makes a mockery of the healing process.
This, of course, is related to my fear of giving blood, which I overcome every time I go to the Red Cross. It’s the cold, clinical, deliberateness of that that has always chilled me. What if the point of slipping that needle into my vein was to kill me, deliberately and legally, with all due ceremony?
Maybe it doesn’t strike you that way, but it seems the most evil, Room 101 thing you could do to another human being.
But a firing squad, the straightforward, quick, honestly retributive violence of it, is to me the most morally defensible form of capital punishment. I don’t believe in ANY form of execution, but if I were king and had to choose for someone else, or if I were given the devil’s own choice of deciding for myself, that’s definitely the way I’d go.
When I started my newspaper career, executions were banned in every state in the union. We had followed other civilized countries (and in the ’70s, this was a civilized country, disco aside) in putting that behind us. Then Gary Gilmore was executed in Utah in 1977 — by firing squad.
You young folks might find it hard to imagine, but it was a huge deal when the country took that big, atavistic step. Norman Mailer wrote a book about it, which was made into a movie starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore. I never read the book or saw the movie. I felt I knew enough about it.
The most vivid memory for me comes from a time in, I believe, 1979, when I went to Death Row in Nashville (at the old state prison that looked like something out of an old movie, or perhaps a nightmare) to interview some of the condemned. After a long interview with one, I paused in front of the cell of another of the condemned and chatted for a moment. He had a picture of Gilmore attached to his cell wall. This prisoner agreed to my taking a picture of him. It’s pretty creepy, and if I run across that image, I’ll share it with you. The guy I was talking to was standing in exactly the same position in his cell as Gilmore was in the picture on the wall.
Oh, by the way, before you folks who think it’s A-OK for the state to kill people by the numbers cry that I’m “romanticizing” the condemned or ignoring what they did to their innocent victims, you’re wrong. Those two guys I just mentioned were as bad as anyone I’ve ever met. The guy posing like Gilmore wanted his wife dead, and had hired the guy I interviewed at length to kill her — which he and an accomplice did, in a particularly brutal and inept manner. She was still barely alive when, after raping and choking her, they stuffed her into the trunk of a car and left the car in the parking lot of the main Memphis public library, where she was found dead days later.
They both got the chair for it, and if ever anyone deserved it, they did. But whatever anyone deserves, the state has no business degrading itself to their level by killing them — not when they’re safely locked away, and present no danger to the public.
But if the state is going to do it, the firing squad is the way. At least that way, we all know what it is we’re doing, and no one can pretend it’s “humane.”
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“…and Jesus don’t like killin’ no matter what the reason for.”
By the way, I saw this from Jeffrey Collins with the AP:
So I checked with Jeffrey to make this killing is still scheduled. He replied, “Yes. What is likely Sigmon’s last appeal was rejected late Tuesday by the SC Supreme Court.”
As you see above, Jeffrey will be there to see it. I don’t envy him, but I’m glad he’ll be there to witness.
I almost added one more line to this post: “In fact, I think these spectacles should be public, perhaps on the State House grounds. Then no one can deny what we’re really doing.”
But I didn’t. Ten years ago I might have said that. But not now. Not after the way I’ve seen my country go stark, raving mad. In a country that could elect Donald Trump as president of the United States AGAiN — after the four previous years, the two impeachments, the civil and criminal convictions, and the WORSENING personal and public behavior, which everyone would have to know would be completely uninhibited this time….
In a country like that, public executions might become as thrillingly popular among the masses as Gamecock football…
I’m told the shooting will happen at 6 p.m. on Friday.