Condemned double murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner has made his final choice.
He does not want to end his days with a lethal injection, like most inmates on America’s death rows, but rather with the crack of a firing squad.
The execution of Gardner – who was convicted in 1985 of killing a lawyer while trying to escape custody during his trial in a Salt Lake City court house – will pile fresh scrutiny on the US death penalty at home and abroad.
His lawyers will keep appealing for clemency, but Gardner’s best chance of evading death vanished yesterday when the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole announced it was upholding the execution sentence after listening to testimony from both sides at commutation hearings.
And so just after midnight on Friday, the 49-year-old is due to be seated in the death chamber at Utah State Prison to face the five sharp shooters.
Utah is the only state to allow firing squads, widely seen as an unnecessarily brutal and archaic means of execution. Since 1976, when capital punishment was reinstated by the US Supreme Court, the state has sent two men to their deaths this way – Gary Gilmore in 1977, whose demise inspired Norman Mailer’s novel The Executioner’s Song, and John Albert Taylor in 1996.
A change in state law means that only those sentenced to death before 2004 have the right to choose how it happens.
It could be, therefore, that Gardner’s execution will be the last by firing squad. But it is a moment that death penalty opponents will seize upon.
“This is clearly a throwback to an earlier time, and people wonder, `How can we still be doing that?”‘, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre in Washington. “For the country, we do need to talk about this. We’re gonna kill somebody. And we do that pretty regularly … every week somebody’s being executed in the United States.”
The day he shot the lawyer, Gardner was on trial for the murder of a Salt Lake City bar tender, Melvyn Otterstrom. He was convicted of that murder also.
While his defence admitted to the Pardons Board last week that his record for 20 years had been “absolutely horrendous”, they stressed he was now a changed man who wanted to use his own experiences to counsel troubled children to stay out of strife.
“He’s acknowledged the harm that he’s caused. He’s expressed to you the remorse that he feels,” defence lawyer Andrew Parnes told a commutation hearing last Friday. Gardner’s case began to garner headlines in April, when a date for his execution was set.
Asked by the judge to choose between lethal injection – the more common method in Utah – or the firing squad, Gardner was quick in his response. “I would like the firing squad, please.”
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