As Arizona prepares for its first execution in three years next month, Fordham Law Professor Deborah Denno, death penalty expert and founding director of Fordham Law’s Neuroscience and Law Center, spoke with 12News about whether an execution meets Eighth Amendment standards.
Firing squads have been used since 1608 in colonial America, more than four centuries ago.
“We’re the only country in the world that has six methods,” said Fordham University Law Professor Deborah Denno, one of the country’s leading experts on execution methods.
“We’re always experimenting.”
Lethal injection has fallen out of favor amid problems obtaining injection drugs and botched executions.
“Different states use the method differently, depending on where they’re getting their chemicals, and it can be quite frightening where they’re getting their chemicals,” Denno said.
“After 40-something years, it’s certainly never been worse than it has been. So maybe it’s time to try to move on to (a) new method.”
Firing squads, Denno said, are a “known method.”
“Death is certain and it’s relatively quick,” she said. “In other words, we know it. It’s been used since 1608.”
Is the firing squad more humane than other methods, such as lethal injection or the gas chamber?
“To me, at least, it’s the least inhumane is probably the way to put it,” Denno said.
“It fills the kind of criteria that the Supreme Court has proffered to determine whether an execution meets Eighth Amendment standards,” Denno added. The Eighth Amendment is a prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.