The truth about Trump’s plan to bring back execution by firing squad

The US Department of Justice announced Friday that it plans to revive the firing squad as a method of killing in federal capital cases. In a 52-page memo, the department expanded the ways it can apply the death penalty to include using a group of executioners to simultaneously shoot at a condemned person. Taking action to strengthen the federal death penalty, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote, “is our highest duty as public servants.” 

Only five states currently allow executions by firing squad. The execution of Mikal Mahdi in South Carolina last year was only the fifth such killing since 1976; his lawyers later said the bullets mostly missed Mahdi’s heart, leaving him to die in a manner that violated the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. 

Jim Craig, a lawyer with the MacArthur Justice Center, has represented men and women on death row in the Deep South since 1986. I spoke with Craig about the dangers of executions carried out with guns, the 40 years he’s spent witnessing how governments condemn people to die, and what people should know about his clients.

What’s your reaction to the news that Trump is bringing back the federal firing squad? 

This proposal by the Trump Justice Department is characterized by their attraction to brutality. It’s characterized by their affection for causing visible harm to people. You see it in their foreign policy. You see it in their policing. The firing squad is very physical and visceral in the damage that it does to the person being executed. That’s why they like it. We should not mince words about this. It has nothing to do with the Eighth Amendment. It has nothing to do with the supply of drugs, or anything else. They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context of this administration’s barbarism. 

The Department of Justice report suggests that the firing squad “does not offend the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments.” Is that true? 

The pitch that is made by proponents of the firing squad is that it destroys the consciousness of the condemned person within 10 to 15 seconds. This is not the case. In the execution of Mikal Mahdi in South Carolina last year…the three shooters were positioned 15 feet away from Mr. Mahdi. There was a target pinned on him. The folks that were witnessing his execution noticed that he cried out as the bullets hit him, that he groaned two times about 45 seconds after that, and that he continued to breathe for another 80 seconds before he appeared to take a final gasp. 

There were two wounds—not three—even though there were three shooters. The entry point for the bullets was downward through the liver, the pancreas, and the left lower lung lobe, before crashing into his spine and ribs.

He did bleed, he did die, but an expert pathologist who studied the state’s autopsy report said that Mr. Mahdi’s ventricles were not disrupted. He was conscious for a lot longer than the state had suggested. You’re causing multiple multiple fractures of the ribs and sternum, and obviously also piercing flesh and internal organs. And that is extraordinarily painful. If it doesn’t cause an immediate lack of consciousness, which it clearly did not in Mr. Mahdi’s case, then it is torture. Mr. Mahdi was sentenced to death. He was not sentenced to be tortured. 

[The firing squad] relies on human actors to perform the execution in a way that, according to them, would cause a loss of consciousness in 15 seconds, to shoot to kill in the most accurate way, so as to essentially vaporize the heart. They clearly did not vaporize Mr. Mahdi’s heart. 

It comes back to my point about brutality. It’s just one of many, many provisions of the Constitution that they choose to ignore to focus on on their brutality trip.

You’ve spent decades representing people on death row. Who are those people? 

The men and women who are on death row in the United States are basically the losers in a lottery. They have not committed the most cruel crimes in the United States compared to other incarcerated people, or to people who are not incarcerated, but maybe should be. 

If you broaden the focus, the people who are responsible for 500,000 deaths of children because they cut funding to USAID are much more mass murderers than anybody who is on death row in the United States. But even if we’re just restricting ourselves to this 19th-century concept of “you do a bad thing on the street and we’re going to punish you,” I think it’s also true. 

The death penalty is fraught with all kinds of discretionary choices by prosecutors, judges, and juries on the basis of skewed evidence, usually litigating at the trial level with attorneys who are poorly-resourced, sometimes poorly-qualified, and in many cases giving horrifically poor performances. 

The clients that I’ve had over the years in Mississippi and Louisiana are there because the prosecutor in their jurisdiction decided to seek the death penalty, and the defense lawyer in their jurisdiction wasn’t able to match what the prosecution was able to put up, and because all the courts afterwards decided it was good enough. They don’t want to be called soft on crime. 

The overwhelming majority of the people I’ve represented who are on death row are in the far-lower percentiles of income in the United States, overwhelmingly Black or Brown, disproportionately suffering from intellectual disabilities or mental illness. A disproportionate number are combat veterans. 

These are not monsters. These are not people possessed by evil. These are people who were living under extremely precarious circumstances, some of whom committed acts of violence that caused the death of other people. And most of those folks accept that they have responsibility for that—and that the death penalty has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than vengeance and brutal retribution to make people feel better. And that’s not a good enough reason to torture people.