In this Slate article, Fordham Law Professor Deborah Denno, death penalty expert and founding director of Fordham Law’s Neuroscience and Law Center, sheds light on one of the reasons why firing squads did not gain much use beyond Utah—where most executions by shooting have taken place in the United States since 1608.
In addition, firing squads “did not gain much use,” law professor Deborah Denno explains, because even when they went as planned, people “viewed them as barbaric” and were offended by their “bloody reality.”
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Borrowing from what Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested in 2017, we can’t know whether his death was “comparatively painless” or whether, as Denno says, South Carolina’s firing squad delivered a “swift and certain death.”
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Whether Sotomayor, Denno, Antognini, or Gardner is correct seems to me a bit beside the point. Although the suffering of the condemned is crucial to determine the cruelty of an execution, how we punish is also about those who impose it.
Read “We’re Really Doing Execution by Firing Squad Again?” on Slate.