Eleven months after Idaho failed to execute a prisoner for the first time ever using lethal injection, a Republican lawmaker introduced a bill that would adopt a firing squad as the state’s primary execution method—which would make Idaho the only U.S. state to give preference to a firing squad, if passed.
Fordham Law Professor Deborah W. Denno, death penalty expert and founding director of the Neuroscience and Law Center, explains to The Spokesman-Review why Idaho adopting a firing squad as its primary execution method “would be a move in a positive direction.”
Utah from 1980 to 1982 had the firing squad as its primary execution method, according to Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University in New York City and one of the foremost death penalty experts in the country. She cited a growing history of failed and botched executions by lethal injection across the U.S., which a Department of Justice report last week said evidence shows is a method in where “significant uncertainty” remains about whether it causes unnecessary pain and suffering, which may violate the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“I think this would be a move in a positive direction for the state of Idaho,” Denno told the Idaho Statesman by phone Tuesday, “because it’s the least inhumane method that we currently have in the United States.”
