Idaho’s Firing Squad: Quick Death Or Torture?

Person in orange jumpsuit sitting behind bars, handcuffed.

The modern American firing squad is sold to the public as a precise, clinical mechanism for “quick and certain” death, yet the strongest evidence we have shows just how easy it is to miss the heart—and turn that promise into prolonged, agonizing dying.

Key Points

Idaho has made the firing squad its primary execution method, with a remarkably detailed protocol and trained law enforcement volunteers.
South Carolina’s recent firing squad case showed bullets missing the heart, leaving the prisoner conscious and in extreme pain for up to a minute, undermining claims of “instant” death.
Across execution methods, “botched” procedures are common; lethal injection fails more often, but firing squads are not immune and carry uniquely graphic, psychological, and ethical burdens.
Confidentiality rules, cost claims, and the lack of independent medical and ballistic studies mean Idaho’s assurances of a humane, foolproof process rest on theory, not proven performance.

Idaho’s Bet on the Firing Squad: How the New System Is Supposed to Work

Idaho is the first state to move the firing squad from backup option to primary execution method. House Bill 37, signed by Governor Brad Little in March 2025, flips the traditional sequence: lethal injection becomes secondary; firing squad comes first. The Idaho Department of Correction (IDOC) then produced a 36‑page protocol that reads more like a military operations manual than a criminal justice policy, specifying everything from shooter qualifications to rifle caliber and the inmate’s posture at the moment of death.

Under IDOC Form 283090, three shooters—all volunteers—must be Idaho law enforcement officers with at least three years of POST (Peace Officer Standards and Training) certification, a clean recent disciplinary record, and successful completion of a marksmanship test at seven yards on a target matching execution dimensions. Each uses a.308‑caliber rifle loaded with 110‑grain TAP rounds at a distance of roughly ten yards, aiming at a target placed over the condemned person’s heart. The shooters fire simultaneously, with alternates standing by in the same room and a team leader managing weapons and commands.

On the condemned side of the equation, the protocol offers what supporters call humane safeguards. The inmate may receive a mild sedative the night before and within four hours of the execution, is strapped into a chair to prevent movement, and can choose whether to have their eyes covered. A medical professional affixes the heart target and later confirms death, while the director and coroner complete official pronouncements. Participation by corrections staff is voluntary, with the ability to withdraw at any time; three alternates are trained to replace shooters to avoid pressure on any single individual.

Behind that process is significant infrastructure. Idaho has invested roughly $1 million to retrofit a maximum‑security prison unit into a dedicated firing squad chamber, plus tens of thousands of dollars for AR‑style rifles and associated equipment. For advocates, the up‑front cost is a one‑time investment that will be offset by easier access to ammunition compared with increasingly scarce and expensive lethal injection drugs. For critics, it is a tangible sign of institutional commitment to a method whose humane credentials remain unproven.

The Case for “Quick and Certain” Death—and Where It Breaks Down

Supporters in Idaho and nationally build their case around reliability. Representative Bruce Skaug, a co‑sponsor of the firing squad legislation, argues that firing squads are “humane because it is sudden, it is quick, and it is certain,” framing the method as a solution to repeated lethal injection failures, including Idaho’s abortive attempt to execute Thomas Creech when staff could not establish IV access after eight tries. The U.S. Department of Justice has echoed that logic in its 2025 report proposing firing squad, electrocution, and nitrogen gas for federal executions, describing firing squads as historically accepted and technically straightforward.

There is some empirical support for the idea that firing squads, in general, have lower recorded rates of “botched” procedures than lethal injection. A major analysis of executions from 1890 to 2010 found that about 7% of lethal injections were botched under state protocols, while documented firing squad executions showed zero such cases—though the total number of modern firing squad executions was tiny. Lethal injection, meanwhile, has generated a trail of visibly prolonged deaths, failed drug administrations, and survivors, with one advocacy analysis concluding that lethal injection “goes wrong more often than any other execution method.”

However, those aggregate numbers conceal the critical point: a firing squad can be botched, and recent evidence shows how. The pathway to unconsciousness in a properly executed firing squad is straightforward. A volley that destroys the heart or major vessels produces rapid loss of blood pressure; cerebral perfusion collapses; consciousness goes within seconds. If the heart is missed, the mechanism changes entirely. The prisoner bleeds to death more slowly, remaining conscious long enough to experience intense pain, respiratory distress, and psychological terror.

That is not hypothetical. In South Carolina, where three shooters armed with live rounds carry out firing squad executions, the autopsy of executed prisoner Mikal Mahdi revealed that only two bullets struck his body, and neither hit the heart. They damaged the ventricle, diaphragm, liver, and pancreas, with no exit wounds. A pathologist retained by Mahdi’s attorneys, Dr. Jonathan Arden, concluded that Mahdi remained conscious and in extreme pain for 30–60 seconds as he bled internally. The South Carolina Supreme Court later described the firing squad as inflicting “torture, a possibly lingering death, and pain beyond that necessary for the mere extinguishment of life,” and found the method unconstitutional under the state’s prohibition on mutilating corporal punishment.

Behind that failure lie practice problems. A prison official in South Carolina reportedly said that training targets sometimes ended up with only one or two bullet holes after volleys from three shooters, signaling inconsistent accuracy. That is precisely the risk Idaho’s detailed marksmanship requirements are designed to prevent; but it is not yet clear whether Idaho’s standards will translate into flawless performance in real executions. No independent ballistic or forensic studies address the specific combination Idaho chose—.308 TAP rounds at ten yards against a heart target—nor do we have clinical data on how its sedative protocol shapes the condemned person’s experience of impact and dying.

Humaneness, Transparency, and the Problem of “Botching by Design”

The firing squad debate unfolds in a broader landscape where every new execution method arrives with promises of humanity and efficiency, then runs into the reality of biological variability, human error, and institutional secrecy. Oklahoma turned to nitrogen gas after lethal injection failures; Alabama’s first nitrogen execution was later barred by a federal judge as unreliable. The Department of Justice’s push to expand federal capital methods has been criticized by the Death Penalty Information Center as misrepresenting history and underplaying the risk of suffering.

Lethal injection deserves its reputation for failure. Complex drug protocols, patchwork training for execution staff, and poor venous access in chronically ill prisoners have combined to produce multiple “survivors” of executions and prolonged visibly distressing deaths. Yet the firing squad does not escape the core problem. Its humane status depends not just on ballistics but on institutional choices: who shoots, what they are told, how they train, and how much the public is allowed to see.

Idaho’s law and protocol push toward opacity. The identities of firing squad members are confidential by statute, known only to the prison director and deputy chief. The legislation shields significant information about the death penalty process from public review and discovery, limiting the ability of outside experts, journalists, or citizens to assess whether executions proceed as advertised. Media access is restricted to a small number of vetted witnesses; recording devices are prohibited; and official narratives flow from post‑execution briefings rather than real‑time observation.[Valuetainment transcript; 1]

Critics argue that this secrecy invites both distrust and the possibility of intentional deviation from the protocol. Robin Maher of the Death Penalty Information Center warns that Idaho residents are being asked to accept decisions they “are not allowed to understand in a meaningful way,” noting that every supposedly more humane method has arrived “with broken promises.” When shooter accuracy is hidden, ballistic details are controlled by the executing agency, and independent medical review is absent, it becomes difficult to distinguish honest error from what some ethicists call “botching by design”—systemic toleration of suffering as long as death ultimately occurs.

The shooters themselves sit at the center of that ethical knot. Idaho’s use of POST‑certified law enforcement volunteers recognizes that trained marksmen are less likely to miss the heart. At the same time, the volunteers bring their own biases and motivations into the chamber. Experts interviewed in national coverage have raised concerns that execution teams, consciously or not, may include members with revenge motives, racial bias, or psychological profiles that make precise, dispassionate killing less likely—and sadistic lingering harm more so.[Philip DeFranco transcript] Idaho’s protocol does not contemplate a shooter deliberately aiming away from the heart; but in practice, the line between incompetence and intent is hard to police once the curtain comes down.

Graphic Reality, Public Opinion, and the Future of Execution Methods

Historically, the firing squad fell out of favor in the United States in part because of its graphic nature: visible blood loss, bodily destruction, and the unmistakable spectacle of state gunfire. Lethal injection’s ascendancy in the late 20th century was not primarily driven by superior reliability; it was a public‑relations solution, wrapping death in medical symbolism and procedural quiet. As lethal injections have visibly failed and drug supplies have dried up, states have revisited methods once labeled barbaric—firing squads, electrocution, gas—framing them as engineering fixes to a procurement problem.

Idaho’s move fits squarely within that pattern. PBS reporting notes that five states—Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah, and South Carolina—now authorize firing squads, and that Idaho stands out for making them the primary method after a specific failed execution attempt. The Trump‑era Justice Department report treating firing squads as a legitimate federal option reflects a broader institutional willingness to treat the means of killing as interchangeable hardware choices rather than moral distinctives. At the same time, national support for the death penalty has steadily eroded, driven by concerns about wrongful convictions, racial disparities, and visible suffering.

What changes with the firing squad is not the basic moral question—whether the state should kill—but the level of public exposure to the mechanics of killing. A badly administered lethal injection can look peaceful from the gallery, even if the prisoner is internally suffocating; a missed heart in a firing squad produces visible bleeding and bodily collapse. That graphic reality may, paradoxically, be more honest: citizens see what the state is doing, not what a medical veneer suggests it is doing. But honesty cuts both ways. South Carolina’s failures and the state supreme court’s condemnation have already shown that when the firing squad’s promise of “quick and certain” death collides with the visual record, the method’s legitimacy can unravel.

Idaho’s new regime thus arrives in a moment of tension. On paper, its protocol is more detailed than any firing squad guidance the federal government has yet released, and more explicit than those in several peer states. On the ground, there is no state‑specific forensic validation that its chosen combination of rifles, ammunition, distance, and training will consistently destroy the heart and spare prisoners prolonged suffering. Until independent ballistic and medical studies are conducted—and until real execution data are released with meaningful transparency—claims that Idaho has engineered away the risk of botched firing squad deaths remain aspirational.

What Evidence Still Needs to Be Gathered

For an honest evaluation of Idaho’s system, several lines of evidence are indispensable. First, ballistic analysis: forensic labs or academic centers should test.308 110‑grain TAP rounds at ten yards against human or high‑fidelity surrogate tissue to confirm whether the target size and placement used in the chamber reliably produce cardiac destruction. Second, shooter performance: anonymized data on marksmanship test scores and live‑fire practice outcomes would show whether theoretical proficiency translates into consistent heart hits, or whether South Carolina‑style variability appears.

Third, clinical data: after Idaho’s first firing squad executions, detailed medical reports—time from volley to loss of consciousness, total time to cardiac arrest, evidence of reactive movement or vocalization—should be released, subject to privacy protections but with enough rigor to let independent physicians assess suffering. Fourth, psychological research: longitudinal studies of volunteer shooters could illuminate how participation affects mental health, decision‑making, and future attitudes about punishment. Finally, legal and ethical audit: comparing Idaho’s shield laws and transparency boundaries to those of other states would clarify whether the state’s citizens have less capacity than their peers elsewhere to assess what their justice system is doing in their name.

Without that evidence, the question at the heart of Idaho’s policy—whether firing squads deliver humane, quick, and certain death—cannot be honestly answered. What we do know, from South Carolina’s botched execution, the state supreme court’s language of torture, and the broader record of failed “new” methods, is that precision in death is harder to achieve than legislators and agency protocols suggest. In that light, any system that depends on perfect aim at a small anatomical target, carried out by human volunteers behind institutional secrecy, is one that carries a built‑in risk of intentional or unintentional botching—not despite the design, but because of it.

Idaho is making a major change to how it carries out executions.

The state is now the first in the nation to designate the firing squad as its primary method, following years of challenges with other approaches.

The move has reignited conversations about capital punishment…

— 1080 KRLD (@KRLD) July 2, 2026