As he sat strapped tight to a chair with a black hood placed over his head, it was difficult to tell whether Ronnie Lee Gardner was alive or dead when four bullets ripped into his chest though a white cloth target pinned over his heart.
But precisely two minutes later, with blood seeping through his navy blue prison jumpsuit, he was indeed declared dead.
Half an hour after that, media witnesses to this grim event – in June 2010, the last time a convicted US criminal was executed by firing squad – were allowed to inspect the execution chamber at Utah State Prison in Draper.
Apart from a few bullet marks in the woodwork behind the chair, and the telltale stench of bleach indicating prison staff had been cleaning up the blood, there was no evidence that a man had just been put to death.
‘It was all extremely clinical,’ recalled journalist Jennifer Dobner, who was given the daunting task of recording 49-year-old Gardner’s final moments.
She told the Daily Mail that details from that night – including Gardner’s refusal to say any final words, the unnerving sight of his arm moving up and down after he was shot, and that stink of bleach in the execution chamber – remain fixed in her memory even 15 years later.
‘You don’t ever forget that,’ she said.
The execution chamber at the Utah State Prison after Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by firing squad June 18, 2010. The bullet holes are visible in the wood panel behind the chair
‘It was all extremely clinical,’ recalled reporter Jennifer Dobner, who was given the daunting task of recording 49-year-old Gardner’s final moments
Americans might be bombarded with images of gun violence – both on screen and even in real life – but this was entirely different, she said.
‘It’s a very deliberate and purposeful act on the part of the state and it was a very clinical situation, carried out with precision by the Department of Corrections and the five executioners.’
What happened that night is once again being revisited because another Death Row inmate has rejected lethal injection and the electric chair, and decided that he too wants to die – if he must be executed at all – by firing squad.
This outlandish punishment – derided by critics as barbaric, archaic and ‘a little bit gruesome’ (in the words of Utah’s former governor Gary Herbert) – has actually only been used three times in America since 1976, and always in the same southwestern state.
This time, however, it will be used on the other side of the country, after it was announced last month that condemned South Carolina killer Brad Sigmon has chosen it as his preferred method of execution.
Sigmon was convicted of beating to death his estranged girlfriend’s parents in 2001.
Just like Ronnie Lee Gardner, Sigmon, 67, who threatened to sue the state if he wasn’t given a firing squad, will be strapped to a chair and have a hood placed over his head and a target placed over his heart in the death chamber.
Three volunteers (rather than the five-man firing squad in Utah) will shoot at him with rifles through a small opening in a wall about 15 feet away.
Journalist Jennifer Dobner, pictured, was allowed to sit in the chair and to examine the four bullet marks in the wood
His execution is scheduled for March 7 as South Carolina ramps up the pace of judicial killings in the past six months after a 13-year pause.
Sigmon didn’t pick the electric chair because it would ‘burn and cook him alive’, his attorney Gerald King wrote in a statement.
‘But the alternative is just as monstrous,’ said King. ‘If he chose lethal injection, he risked the prolonged death suffered by all three of the men South Carolina has executed since September.’
Many regard the mere concept of the US still putting someone in front of a firing squad as ‘monstrous’, whatever its humanitarian advantages over the other options.
For critics, it smacks of the Wild West and of summary military justice (it’s been a punishment for desertion for centuries). Of death by the bullet in a country unhealthily wedded to the gun.
Those points were certainly made when Utah allowed Gardner to die that way 15 years ago. However, America’s capital punishment system has faced years of controversy and fierce argument over the lethal injection, supposedly the perfect solution to the US constitution’s injunction against ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment.
A string of botched executions – some of which have reportedly involved the condemned writhing around in ‘excruciating pain’, occasionally for hours – have seriously undermined the credibility of the method.
Other alternatives – namely the electric chair and suffocation with nitrogen gas – have also been condemned for being too prone to foul-ups that would inflict unacceptably high levels of pain.
As Justice John Few put it when South Carolina Supreme Court decided last year to allow prisoners to choose between lethal injection, electrocution and the firing squad: ‘We start by acknowledging the reality that there is simply no elegant way to kill a man.’
Idaho has also advanced a new bill to make the firing squad the state’s principal method of execution ahead of quadruple murder suspect Bryan Kohberger’s trial for the brutal slaying of four college students in 2022.
Firing squads have very occasionally gone wrong, too, but you have to go back to 1879 for a really heinous example, when a Utah firing squad missed murderer Wallace Wilkerson’s heart entirely. He hadn’t been tied down and when he stiffened at the last moment he dislodged the target over his heart.
Wilkerson reportedly leapt up screaming: ‘Oh my God! They’ve missed it!’ and took 27 minutes to die. Anti-death penalty campaigners claimed the shooters missed his heart on purpose to prolong his agony.
There were no mistakes in the execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner.
At precisely midnight local time he was awoken from a nap and, a minute later, Gardner – who’d been in and out of the justice system since he was around eight-years-old – was escorted from his cell for his final walk, down dimly-lit corridors to the execution room almost 100ft away. He was wearing white socks but no shoes and didn’t struggle.
Brad Sigmon, pictured during his trial in July 2002, was convicted of beating his estranged girlfriend’s parents to death
Ronnie Lee Gardner, pictured above at the Matheson Courthouse in Salt Lake City, was sentenced to death for the 1985 shooting of attorney Michael Burdell
Meanwhile official witnesses – including Jennifer Dobner, then a reporter for the wire service Associated Press, as well as other journalists, relatives of victims and lawyers – took their seats in a viewing room that was separated from the execution chamber by thick bulletproof, one-way glass that prevented Gardner seeing them.
Twice convicted of murder, Gardner had been sentenced to death for the 1985 shooting of an attorney, Michael Burdell, during a botched courthouse escape attempt. Gardner, already on trial for the 1984 fatal shooting of a bartender, shot Burdell in the face.
On the day of his execution, Gardner spent his last few hours watching the Lord of the Rings movies and drinking Coca-Cola, hoping for a last-minute reprieve that never came.
He’d rejected his right to have his own relatives watch the execution, the double killer claiming he didn’t want them to witness such a ‘violent act’.
Prison staff strapped him to a black, straight-backed metal chair which sat on a platform containing a metal tray to catch his blood.
His head was secured by a strap across his forehead and his chest was also immobilized with harness-liked straps. His shins and arms were also secured so he could barely move.
Sandbags were stacked around the chair and wooden boards erected behind it to prevent the bullets from ricocheting around the white cinderblock room. The inmate was starkly illuminated by ceiling track lights that glared in his face.
Lurking out of sight of the witnesses, and some 25ft in front of Gardner behind a wall cut with a gunport, were his five executioners – police officers who’d volunteered for the task.
They took their places shortly after midnight. Each was given an identical .30-30-caliber Winchester rifle of which one had been randomly loaded with a wax round so none would know if they actually fired the fatal shot.
(That, at least, is the theory – although experienced shooters insist they can tell the difference with a live round by the amount of recoil a bullet produces. Given its smaller size, the three-man firing squad due to shoot Sigmon on March 7 will all be issued live rounds.)
A beige curtain covering the witness room’s viewing window was pulled back only when preparations were completed and the warden entered the chamber to ask the prisoner if he had any last remarks.
Unlike Utah killer Gary Gilmore, who famously said ‘Let’s do it’ before he was shot by a firing squad in the same prison in 1977 (Gilmore’s words inspired the creator of the Nike slogan ‘Just do it’), Gardner told the warden: ‘I do not, no.’
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He visibly tensed as a small black hood was slipped over his bald head and a white cloth square, bearing a black target, was attached over his heart with Velcro.
Meanwhile, he wouldn’t have been able to see the firing squad leader walk down the line of marksmen, tapping each on the shoulder and getting a thumbs-up reply that indicated they were ready.
The warden left the room and the condemned man was entirely alone.
Jennifer Dobner and the other official witnesses couldn’t hear through the reinforced wall the 5 to 1 countdown that was given, the marksmen opening fire on ‘two’.
But she did hear the shots, in fact two loud bangs in quick succession (because it appears one rifleman fired a split-second before or after the others) which rang out at 12.15am.
Just after the shots, Dobner and her colleagues saw, to their alarm, signs that Garner was still moving – one fist clenching and unclenching, and his arm moving up and down.
She admits that moment shocked her most at the time, though added that experts are unable to say for certain whether these were an ‘involuntary response’ or if he was still alive.
‘I was expecting to flinch but I didn’t,’ she said of the gunfire that took her by surprise. ‘It was so quick that for a split-second I wondered if it had actually happened.’
For her, that was one of the few shocks. Colleagues who’d witnessed an earlier firing squad had warned her not to expect much drama.
There was no blood splattered across the wall and, with his head – and so much else of his body – attached to the chair, Gardner remained bold upright. However, a wet stain did appear at the waist of his dark prison suit that was clearly blood.
Just over two minutes later, any doubt over whether he was still alive was removed when a medical examiner entered the room with the warden and checked Gardne’s pulse at his neck, pulling back his hood to reveal an ashen face as the medic shone a flashlight to his pupils. His head was tilted back, his mouth slightly open.
He was declared dead at 12.17am and the curtain closed.
It was drawn back again around an hour later and the nine reporters, who’d been waiting in another part of the prison, were allowed to inspect the chamber. The body had gone and any blood had been cleaned up.
‘It was so clean it was if nothing had happened,’ Dobner recalled.
The journalists were allowed to sit in the chair and to examine the four bullet marks in the wood. Dobner sat in the chair.
‘I’m not really sure why I did it, but I just did it,’ she said. ‘I don’t typically tie myself up in emotions but certainly the room had an eerie feel to it.’
Condemned South Carolina killer Sigmon has chosen death by firing squad over lethal injection and electric chair as his preferred method of execution
Other alternatives – namely the electric chair and suffocation with nitrogen gas – have also been condemned for being too prone to foul-ups that would inflict unacceptably high levels of pain. (Pictured: an electric chair in South Carolina)
Dobner would rather not say if she – like Gardner and Sigmon – would choose to be shot over other execution methods, although she believes that, given the quickness of the death she witnessed, it wouldn’t amount to unconstitutional ‘cruel and unusual punishment’.
And experts would tend to agree. In 2010, Fordham University Law School professor Deborah Denno, who’d studied the various execution methods, called the firing squad a ‘dignified execution’ which might even be ‘the most humane’ for all the ‘baggage of its brutal image and roots’.
Four years later, a Court of Appeals judge, Alex Kozinski, echoed that view. While the guillotine was ‘probably best’ as an execution method, it was ‘inconsistent with our national ethos’, he wrote.
‘The firing squad strikes me as the most promising,’ he continued. ‘Eight or ten large-caliber rifle bullets fired at close range can inflict massive damage, causing instant death every time. There are plenty of people employed by the state who can pull the trigger and have the training to aim true.’
If Brad Sigmon gets his preferred death, America may soon get another opportunity to see if the gun really is the solution to its capital punishment conundrum.