Utah’s willing executioner

An anonymous gunman appears to relish the prospect of shooting Ronnie Lee Gardner this Friday.

It isn’t easy being part of a firing squad. For one thing, you need a good sense of timing: all five gunmen must fire simultaneously. Then there’s the lingering sense of guilt - although admittedly one of the bullets is traditionally a blank, so no one knows who’s fired the fatal shot.

Yet one anonymous gunman, interviewed in Salt Lake City by a CNN reporter last week, is undeniably enthusiastic about his career.  A member of the firing squad which executed John Albert Taylor in 1996, he has now volunteered to shoot Utah prisoner Ronnie Lee Gardner this Friday, describing death by firing squad as “100 percent justice”, adding, “I’ve shot squirrels I’ve felt worse about.”

Of course, not every work day is all it’s cracked up to be. Describing Taylor’s execution, the gunman sounds positively disappointed at the lack of gore: “It was anti-climactic. Another day at the office.”  But, concerned not to bore the interviewer, he brought with him photos from the autopsy – including one of Taylor’s heart blown into three pieces.

Nor could the executioner be accused of a lack of conviction.

 “There are just some people we need to kick off the planet,” he muses, rejecting the idea of life without parole on the basis that if the death penalty was abolished, ‘natural life’ sentences would be subjected to the same criticisms as capital punishment – in particular, that it is imposed with disproportionate frequency upon poor and non-white defendants – as if such a critique would be a bad thing.

He reminds us that no executed prisoner has ever re-offended: “[The death penalty] seems to be quite effective. Nobody’s heard from Gary Gilmore,” referring to the first person executed in the US after the ban on executions was lifted in 1976 – an attitude which could be described as facetious at best.

Asked about his thoughts on wrongful convictions, the officer says he doubts there have been innocent people executed since 1976, convinced as he is of the infallibility of the trial and appeals process. The executioner’s faith in his employer is, unfortunately, entirely misguided: since 1989, 254 people have been exonerated post-conviction using DNA testing, and studies indicate that between 2.3 – 5% of all prisoners in the US are innocent (40,000 to 70,000 people). Indeed, US Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Thomas held that there was nothing unconstitutional about executing innocent people.

Mistakes don’t seem to concern this executioner, however; he views the appeals process as little more than an irritating obstacle which gets in the way of him doing his job: “Get it done in a couple of years and move on.” He sees his role as something akin to a quality control service for the Almighty: “The death penalty is nothing more than sending a defective product back to the manufacturer. Let him fix it.”

Nothing like killing people for a bit of job satisfaction. Let’s hope that the parole board sees fit to give him a day off on Friday.