Violent and sudden. What a firing squad execution looked like through my eyes

This was a well-written article, I appreciate the simple journalism on display. A reporter dedicating themselves to an area, showing up faithfully and reporting their observations without bias or personal commentary. What else could we ask for? I read it on the AP app and appreciated still having a source for this kind of thing.

There's always the unresolved concern of the state killing people amid the uncertainty of a criminal conviction process.

There's also an element of incompetence and cruelty to consider when executions cannot be done mercifully, ideally instantly and painlessly as a goal. Seems we stray pretty far from any such ideal though:

"In its annual report on the use of capital punishment in the country, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) said on Friday that seven of the 20 attempted executions by US states in 2022 were “visibly problematic”." https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/16/us-botched-executi...

The same policy group estimates a 3% failure rate for executions from 1890-2010, with lethal injection at more than twice that, at 7%. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/botched-executions

The state/federal definitions of botched executions might be more conservative than more detailed analyses done by advocacy groups like Reprieve, so what the rates are might be higher depending on the exact definition of a botched execution.

It's not clear that firing squad 'fixes' this or is more merciful in terms of having less botched execution, but maybe that's not the point since the condemned prisoner opted for it. Does that matter?

Worse still, there are pop groups that have apparently have significantly worse outcomes in US executions, reasons unknown. It's pretty horrible to look at an overall botched-execution rate when it belies horrible outcomes for specific groups:

"One of the most significant findings to emerge from the regression analysis is that Black people had 220% higher odds of suffering a botched execution than white people, accounting for gender and age.

Analysis of the lethal injection executions conducted in the modern era of capital punishment found that 8% of executions of Black people were botched (37 executions out of a total of 465 executions), compared to 4% of executions of white people in the same time period (28 out of a total of 780 executions)." https://reprieve.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/04/2024...

>where the three prison system volunteer shooters were

It's strange to me that this isn't simply automated, although personally I don't think any state should be in the business of killing anyone outside of war and similar circumstances. I don't think states are capable of making these sorts of decisions accurately enough.

Great, short article -- thanks for posting.

  I saw Richard Moore die Nov. 1, looking serenely at the ceiling as his lawyer, who became close to him while fighting for his life over a decade, wept...
  Also etched in my mind: Sigmon talking or mouthing toward his lawyer, trying to let him know he was OK before the hood went on.

It literally sickens me that we've come so far yet have successfully seemed to extract the violence from capital punishment -- superficially, of course. There are certainly philosophical & political arguments for granting the state permission to murder captives, but I feel we should at the very least agree to not hide it; for our own sakes and those of our descendants, if nothing else. In this view, the firing squad is something of a macabre improvement.

Really, it's the same way I feel about carnism: I'm not prepared to personally chastise someone for drawing a different line on when human pleasure outweighs the moral rights of animals, but you must acknowledge what you're doing. Again: failing to speak clearly about our moral choices is a dangerous, dangerous road.