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Barring a last-minute reprieve, this morning Ronnie Lee Gardner, a convicted murderer, will be strapped into a chair in the Utah State Prison in Draper. He will be hooded, have a target placed over his heart and, after he has said his last words, shot to death by five unidentified law enforcement officers. One of the .30-calibre rifles used will have a blank inserted instead of a bullet, thus allowing each of the executioners to feel that their shot may not have been a real one.
Gardner was convicted in 1985 of the murder of a barman. He was on trial for this in Salt Lake City when he tried to escape from the courthouse and, in so attempting, shot and killed his defence lawyer and a bailiff who died later from his injuries.
If the execution goes ahead, it will be the first in Utah for over a decade and only the third time since the death penalty was restored in 1976. Utah is now the only US state to use the firing squad for executions which Gardner selected after he was given the opportunity of death by lethal injection.
It is not Gardner’s story or the fact that he has chosen death by firing squad. What is interesting is that it has taken 24 years for him to arrive at this point having been sentenced to death in 1985 and gone through a lengthy series of appeals.
Surely, a man who has been on Death Row for so long has already endured his own punishment of sorts? And doesn’t that qualify for him to be kept in prison for the rest of his life and not shot?
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Barring a last-minute reprieve, this morning Ronnie Lee Gardner, a convicted murderer, will be strapped into a chair in the Utah State Prison in Draper. He will be hooded, have a target placed over his heart and, after he has said his last words, shot to death by five unidentified law enforcement officers. One of the .30-calibre rifles used will have a blank inserted instead of a bullet, thus allowing each of the executioners to feel that their shot may not have been a real one.
Gardner was convicted in 1985 of the murder of a barman. He was on trial for this in Salt Lake City when he tried to escape from the courthouse and, in so attempting, shot and killed his defence lawyer and a bailiff who died later from his injuries.
If the execution goes ahead, it will be the first in Utah for over a decade and only the third time since the death penalty was restored in 1976. Utah is now the only US state to use the firing squad for executions which Gardner selected after he was given the opportunity of death by lethal injection.
It is not Gardner’s story or the fact that he has chosen death by firing squad. What is interesting is that it has taken 24 years for him to arrive at this point having been sentenced to death in 1985 and gone through a lengthy series of appeals.
Surely, a man who has been on Death Row for so long has already endured his own punishment of sorts? And doesn’t that qualify for him to be kept in prison for the rest of his life and not shot?
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