In this Slate article, Fordham Law Professor Deborah Denno, death penalty expert and founding director of Fordham Law’s Neuroscience and Law Center, comments on Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s 2015 endorsement for execution by firing squad.
In between Sotomayor’s two frequently cited endorsements of the firing squad, Professor Deborah Denno, this nation’s leading scholar about methods of execution, raised eyebrows when she called the justice’s 2015 assessment of the firing squad “compelling because they consider the calculation of the method’s cruelty versus visible violence through the eyes of a condemned inmate.”
Denno argued that “More solid evidence suggests that a competently performed shooting may lead to nearly instant death,” while she conceded that “an incompetently performed shooting may well cause acute pain,” she insisted that such instances are “rare.”
But Denno dismissed that concern, writing “such issues would not exist today. … Expert markspersons, situated so closely to the inmate, would be firmly secured and would not miss such a bold target on an inmate’s heart unless the miss was deliberate.”
“The consensus of opinion concerning firing squads,” Denno concluded, “comports with Justice Sotomayor’s argument that they are swift and relatively pain free.”