Wyoming Considering Firing Squad as Death-Row Backup

Problems with the supply of lethal-injection drugs have spurred Wyoming lawmakers to consider a backup method of executing death-row inmates: the firing squad.

Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead said he is open to signing 
the firing-squad measure. Photo: AP

Legislation that passed the state Senate this month on a 17-12 vote would authorize a firing squad in Wyoming if lethal injection can’t be performed in a timely manner, or if it is deemed unconstitutional.

“If we are going to continue to have the death penalty, then we are going to have to have an available secondary form of execution,” said state Sen. Bruce Burns, a Republican who is one of the bill’s leading proponents.

A 2010 file photo shows the firing squad execution chamber 
at the Utah State Prison in Draper, where an inmate 
was executed that year. Photo: AP

Wyoming, the nation’s least-populous state, has no one on death row and has executed only one person since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. But the issue has emerged in other states in recent years as pharmaceutical companies uncomfortable with being linked to the death penalty have stopped selling the drugs traditionally used in executions.

That, in turn, has led states to seek the necessary narcotics from so-called compounding pharmacies, or to use combinations of new and untested drugs to put inmates to death. But inmates and their lawyers have challenged whether the drugs adequately anesthetize people being executed and prevent them from undue suffering.

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The U.S. Supreme Court entered the fray on Friday, when it agreed to consider a case brought by three death-row inmates in Oklahoma who have challenged whether a drug protocol being used by the state for executions violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. A fourth inmate who was originally part of the suit was recently put to death using the drug combination after the high court declined to delay his execution.

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