Wyoming Is the Latest State to Consider Bringing Back Firing Squads

Wyoming has only executed one person in the last 50 years, but some of the state's lawmakers are determined to pass measures that would allow death by firing squad to return to the state as a back-up option to lethal injection.

Elected officials in the country's least-populous state introduced the legislation in response to a shortage of common lethal injections drugs across the country that has forced prisons to use experimental drugs, resulting in several gruesome and botched executions.

The state wants to bring back firing squads if lethal injections are deemed unconstitutional or are unable to be performed. Currently, the fallback option for inmates is death by lethal gas, but Wyoming already nixed the idea of using its gas chambers long ago.

A firing squad bill passed the state senate this month, but the proposal is still being deliberated in the house, where it is expected to encounter more opposition. Supporters of the bills say firing squads are more efficient and cheaper than electric chairs, gas chambers, the gallows, guillotines, and other methods.

"I tried to put myself in the position of someone who was going to be executed. That was actually the way I would prefer to go," said Republican Senator Bruce Burns, who is a leading adherent of the legislation, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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Lethal injections have attracted media and public scrutiny in recent months as lawmakers scrambled to find alternative ways to kill inmates after many drug companies stopped supplying US prisons and corrections facilities with the most commonly used drugs.

Last year, a series of highly publicized executions involving largely untested toxins forced 32 states to reexamine their capital punishment procedures.

In Oklahoma, the April 29 execution of inmate Clayton Lockett — who moaned and gasped for 43 minutes after being injected with an experimental cocktail of Midazolam, Vecuronium bromide, and potassium chloride — forced the state to halt its executions temporarily and alter its procedures.

That incident and others, including the July death of an Arizona death row inmate, who gasped and snorted for an hour and 40 minutes after he was injected with a new drug combination, even prompted an Oklahoma lawmaker to propose a new form of execution by nitrogen asphyxiation as an alternative.

This week, the Supreme Court agreed to take on a case brought by three Oklahoma death row inmates claiming the state's lethal injection protocols violate the constitutional rights of prisoners against the use of cruel and unusual punishment. The case was fronted by four inmates originally, but one was executed last week after the high court decided to let the state proceed with the execution — the first in Oklahoma since Lockett's death.

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Last month, Ohio also attempted to sidestep the drug shortage by passing a controversial and secretive execution law that allows prisons to shield the identities of pharmaceutical companies that supply lethal injection drugs. The state also withholds the names of medical staff and others present in the death chamber. Executions in Ohio had been halted since the bungled execution of another inmate, Dennis McGuire, who took 26 minutes to die after he was injected with an experimental cocktail of drugs.

Meanwhile, Alabama State Representative Lynn Greer is proposing to bring the state's electric chair — dubbed "yellow mama" — out of storage if prison officials can't get their hands on enough lethal drugs.

"Those on death row today may be there for many, many more years, because if we're using the lethal injection drugs and we don't have the drugs then we have no way of carrying out the process." Greer told WSFA Alabama.

Wyoming's bill follows similar legislation approved in Utah last year that established death by firing squad as a backup to lethal injection.

"This bill just says we have a backup," Utah Representative Paul Ray, who introduced the legislation to the House committee after a 10-year ban on the execution method, said at the time. "Hopefully, we never have to use it."

Ray said firing squads are the most humane method of capital punishment since they bring about "instant death."

"A lot of these folks are dead before they even hear the gun," he said.

But anti-death penalty advocates are not so sure.

"We don't believe there's a humane way to execute anyone," Jean Hill, government liaison for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, said at the time the Utah bill was being debated. "Putting people behind a wall to shoot someone is not humane."

There were 35 executions performed across the country in 2014, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), which provides facts and figures on capital punishment in America and is anti-death penalty. Of the 50 executions scheduled for 2015, none are in Wyoming, which has only carried out one execution since 1976.

Utah could soon revive death by firing squad. Read more here.

Follow Liz Fields on Twitter:@lianzifields