Ronnie Lee Gardner - "I would like the firing squad please"

25 years ago, Utah inmate Ronnie Lee Gardner killed an attorney during a failed escape attempt and was sentenced to death. A judge has signed a warrant for his death four times since then. The fourth attempt is scheduled for June 18th - and Gardner has been granted death by firing squad.

Utah is the only US state which still uses the firing squad as a method of execution (Oklahoma technically has it on the books if lethal injection is deemed unconstitutional, but they've never used it). For decades, Utah's death row inmates were allowed to choose the method of their death and, though that option was removed in 2004 when lethal injection was made default, inmates sentenced before that date still get the choice. Thus was the case of Gardner. When given the choice between death by lethal injection or by a 5-man firing squad, Gardner (49) replied "I would like the firing squad, please."

If Gardner is executed in June, he will be Utah's first executionee since 1999. Since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, Utah has executed 2 men by firing squad - most famously Gary Gilmore in 1977 whose final statement was "Let's do it". Gardner will be the third.

Gardner was convicted for the murder of attorney Michael J. Burdell on April 2nd, 1985. After somehow aquiring a gun from a female accomplice (whilst under guard and handcuffed) he shot the attorney in the head as well as wounding the court bailiff in the old Metropolitan Hall of Justice in Salt Lake City. A firing squad is poetic justice, some may say. But both Burdell's father and 1985 girlfriend, Donna Nu, testified at the recent hearing that Burdell would not have wanted Gardner to be put to death. "He would have not wanted Ronnie Lee's execution. He didn't believe in that," Nu said tearfully, when referring to pacifist Burdell.

To me, this begs a simple question: who does the death penalty actually benefit? Countless parents/spouses/siblings of murder victim's protest that their loved one would not want to see the killer put to death. So why do we insist on doing it anyway? Is society's bloodlust so great that we can't listen to reason? Are we so intent on watching men suffer and die that we forget about what the real victim's would have wanted?

If this is the case, perhaps we need to re-evaluate the death penalty's place in our society. My normal procedure for expensive dangerous things is to get rid of them as quickly as possible. But the death penalty remains an ugly blip in our apparently civilised nations.

And if we're still putting men against brick walls and shooting them, perhaps we need to remember that - yes - we do live in a civilsed nation.

Not the old West.