Firing squads make a comeback, stripping away the 'veneer of medical theater'

 Maurice Chammah writing for The Marshall Project: 

There is no tidy way to kill someone. But for the last century, Americans have searched for a way to carry out the death penalty that minimizes suffering while lessening trauma for executioners and witnesses. Those efforts have gone so poorly that we’re returning to a visceral execution method from the past.

Last month, the Justice Department encouraged federal prison officials to consider execution by firing squad amid a nationwide struggle to secure lethal injection drugs. South Carolina has already used firing squads three times recently, placing hoods over the prisoner’s head and firing rifles at a red bull’s-eye placed over the heart. Four other states have authorized the method, and Idaho is renovating its execution chamber to accommodate firing squads.

This article was published in partnership with The New York Times.

There is no question that killing a person in this manner is brutal. Witnesses have described the crack of rifles and the eerie silence as blood spills from the condemned person’s chest. It is a testament to the brutality of our execution system that firing squads may also be more effective and reliable than lethal injection, which is the most widely used execution method. Dr. James Williams, an emergency room physician and a firearms expert who has testified about firing squad executions in courtrooms across the country, told me last year that “there is a lot of evidence that the near-instant loss of blood pressure means no blood gets to the brainstem, and there is a rapid loss of consciousness.”

Williams is largely opposed to capital punishment, and he believes in minimizing suffering for executions that do occur. He told me an even faster method would be to fire a bullet into the brainstem, leading to death in milliseconds. As horrifying as that sounds, it shows how much we’ve shrouded the inevitable violence of the death penalty with syringes and barbiturates. Autopsies have indicated that many prisoners who looked peaceful as they were dying were actually paralyzed and may have felt as if they were drowning.

Firing squad executions strip away the veneer of medical theater.

Some Americans point to the horrific nature of the crimes being punished in death penalty cases and say: The more violent the execution, the better. But support for capital punishment, which is legal in 27 states, has been declining for decades. Polling shows that just over half of Americans support it, down from 80 percent in 1994. There are many reasons for this drop, among them high-profile botched executions. A wave of bloody spectacles, in multiple states and at the federal level, would be a clearer test of how deep support for the death penalty actually runs.

Before the early 20th century, the United States did not have much trouble accepting the gruesome sights, sounds and smells of executions. At the country’s founding, the violence of firing squads was part of the point; deserters were executed this way during the Revolutionary War and Civil War to deter other soldiers from absconding. In 1936, around 20,000 people attended the country’s last public hanging, an event that newspapers later decried as a “carnival of sadism.”

Firing squads and hangings mostly disappeared in the early 20th century, as public officials moved executions behind closed doors. There was a concern that public executions looked too much like the lynchings they were supposed to supplant.

Firing squad and gas executions resurface in U.S.

While reporting for a book on the death penalty a few years ago, I learned that we turned away from more brutal methods like firing squads and hangings because of the country’s growing uneasiness about the death penalty itself.

Over time, lawmakers gave voice to the public’s collective queasiness as they tried to move away from lurid spectacles. “We’ve gone from stoning to crucifixion, to quartering, to burning people at the stake, to hanging,” a Texas state legislator, Ben Z. Grant, told his colleagues in a 1977 hearing. He worried that the latest method, the electric chair, had “become a circus sideshow.” Prison officials had to place masks on prisoners to spare witnesses from having to see their eyes pop out.

Grant proposed that Texas move to lethal injection — which had proven effective in veterinary medicine — as a more modern and humane method, and many states followed suit. But the effort to improve executions eventually had the opposite effect: In recent years, a significant number of people have convulsed on the death chamber gurney. (Firing squad executions are less likely to be botched, although last year South Carolina executioners missed a condemned man’s heart, according to a study of his autopsy.)

These botched lethal injections are an indirect consequence of wariness from the medical industry, as some doctors and nurses, citing ethical concerns, refuse to play a role in setting intravenous lines or administering drugs, leaving those with less training to do their best. Most drug companies have refused to let their products play a role in killing people, which has forced prison officials to turn to less reputable manufacturers and use more experimental drug cocktails.

During this period, some states abolished the death penalty and a few governors paused executions, often citing issues with lethal injection protocols. Many leaders also looked to more transparently harsh methods. Alabama started pumping nitrogen gas through face masks. Arizona refurbished a chamber to fill with cyanide gas, a method so similar to the gas chambers in Auschwitz that a Jewish community group sued the state, saying they were being asked “to subsidize and relive unnecessarily the same form of cruelty used in World War II atrocities.”

The firing squad was available all this time. The most logical explanations for avoiding it have to do with the upsetting visuals, the feeling that it’s old-fashioned and the possible effect on executioners. But people who participate in lethal injections routinely suffer psychologically in the long term. In 2022, Chiara Eisner at NPR interviewed over two dozen people who were involved in executions. Many were so affected by the experience that they suffered insomnia, anxiety and sui­ci­dal thoughts.

President Donald Trump oversaw 13 executions in his first term, all carried out by lethal injection. President Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of most of the people on federal death row, so it’s not clear whether Trump will have anyone to execute this term.

But someday federal prison officials may train rifles on someone like Dylann Roof or Robert Bowers, both of whom committed high-profile mass shootings at places of worship. Americans will then finally have to decide what we can tolerate, after decades in which we have been able to pretend that we can kill people without a cost — to our executioners and to our own sense of ourselves.

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After two trips to the Supreme Court former death row inmate Richard Glossip is out on bond

Oklahoma District Judge Natalie Mai ordered former death row inmate Richard Glossip to be released from prison while awaiting a retrial, after 29 years behind bars. During these 29 years, Glossip famously faced several execution dates and ate his “last meal” three times, reported Juristnews.

Mai set the bail at $500,000, with release contingent upon Glossip complying with certain conditions, such as wearing an electronic monitoring device, observing a curfew, remaining within the state of Oklahoma, and refraining from speaking to any witnesses.

The order cited a letter written by the attorney general in April 2023 to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, which stated that the record does not support that Glossip is guilty of first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt. Under the Oklahoma Constitution, bail must be granted unless there is clear and convincing evidence of guilt, leading the court to conclude that it could not reasonably deny bail.

The case stems from a murder-for-hire plot targeting Glossip’s former boss, Barry Van Treese, in 1997. Purported co-conspirator Justin Sneed confessed at trial to beating Van Treese to death, and claimed Glossip offered him money to do so. Glossip maintained his innocence throughout his defense, denying that he had any involvement with the murder.

While Glossip was imprisoned, his case faced a series of legal challenges surrounding his right to a fair trial, eventually culminating in the February 2025 decision by the US Supreme Court to overturn his conviction and order a new trial. The court’s 5-3 ruling was largely based on the prosecution’s failure to consider evidence that Sneed’s testimony was false.

Following the decision, the prosecution indicated its intent to retry Glossip on the existing first-degree murder charges, but not to pursue the death penalty.

Glossip’s attorney, Don Knight, stated that he is grateful that Judge Mai granted bond:

In doing so, she rejected the State’s claim that there is a strong case for guilt. For the first time in 29 years of being incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, during which he faced 9 execution dates and at 3 last meals, Mr. Glossip now has the chance to taste freedom while his defense team continues to pursue justice on his behalf against a system that the United States Supreme Court has found to be guilty of serious misconduct by state prosecutors.

In the bond order, Mai stated that “the Court hopes that a new trial, free of error, will provide all interested parties, and the citizens of Oklahoma, the closure they deserve.”

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Politics or training, why the increase in questionable prosecutions?

Excerpts from Shaun Ossei-Owusu’s, professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, article at Bloomberg Law:

In the past year, several high-profile federal investigations and prosecutions under Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department have dissolved as soon as they came under basic scrutiny. Those failures reportedly contributed to her removal.

As a law professor who teaches criminal law and legal ethics, I often hear a version of the same question from students and non-lawyer friends: “How could anyone prosecute that case?”

Commentators often note political motivations, but those explanations are incomplete. The confusion underlying that question points to a deeper feature of lawyering which extends beyond any particular administration and is easy to miss when the focus stays on politics.

At its core, legal training teaches lawyers to take a set of facts and construct a legally plausible argument, even when the underlying claim may be weak. Beginning in law school, students are given hypotheticals—sometimes far-fetched—and asked to frame legal claims in ways that make a weak position seem plausible. Over time, this becomes a professional habit.

The ability to stretch an argument serves an important function in the adversarial system. It ensures that competing positions are tested and that even unpopular views can be heard. But as I note in my recent book on lawyers and inequality, that elasticity has a less comfortable implication: It can stretch the boundaries of what prosecutors pursue, even when the case itself is thin.

Of course, individual resistance matters, as in the cases where prosecutors in both Trump terms were reassigned, stepped down, or were fired rather than having to push forward a case they didn’t believe served justice. Still, it doesn’t eliminate the underlying dynamic. As long as a case can be framed in legal terms and meets the minimal burden required by the grand jury, often someone within the system can be found to carry it forward.

And this is to say nothing of the less visible parts of the system. Every day, prosecutors across the country bring charges that raise similar questions about the strength of the case and basic fairness. The system allows government lawyers to turn contested facts into legal claims in ways that can produce real inequality.

This is especially true in the more common criminal prosecutions where defendants are not high-profile targets. They are not like Comey, James, Powell, or Cook—all of whom are well-connected, white-collar professionals with advanced degrees and the resources to defend themselves in court. In everyday cases, judges and jurors often aren’t viewing these low-profile defendants with the same skepticism brought to overtly political cases, making weak cases more likely to succeed. The media and the public aren’t closely scrutinizing these cases, but they reflect the same dynamic.

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DOJ sues DC Bar Association over ethics enforcement alleging 'blatantly partisan arm of leftist cause'

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the District of Columbia Bar over its efforts to discipline Trump administration lawyers, escalating the department’s feud with legal ethics authorities, reported The New York Times.

The lawsuit defends Jeffrey Clark, a government lawyer in the first Trump administration who sought to undo the results of the 2020 presidential race, and Ed Martin, a current senior Justice Department official. The suit was filed by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, and Stanley E. Woodward Jr., the No. 3 official at the Justice Department.

In accompanying statements, Mr. Blanche accused the D.C. Bar of acting as a “blatantly partisan arm of leftist causes.” Mr. Woodward said that the bar would “no longer be permitted to probe sensitive executive branch deliberations,” adding that lawyers in the federal government must “be free to share their candid legal advice with their bosses and colleagues.”

That position — that lawyers at the Justice Department or other federal agencies are above scrutiny by legal ethics officials — is likely to be challenged by a host of legal profession entities.

The lawsuit centers on the long-running battle over the D.C. Bar’s effort to disbar Mr. Clark, an environmental lawyer who had no formal role in investigating elections, over his push to promote Mr. Trump’s baseless assertions of fraud in Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory in 2020.

While the lawsuit is focused on Mr. Clark, Justice Department leaders in the suit also argued in defense of Mr. Martin. Two months ago, the D.C. Bar filed disciplinary charges against Mr. Martin over what it cast as his misconduct in seeking to punish Georgetown University’s law school.

Mr. Martin has spearheaded efforts by President Trump to use the Justice Department to pursue the president’s perceived enemies — what the administration claims are corrective measures intended to end “weaponization” of law enforcement by Democrats.

Increasingly, the Trump administration has clashed with state and local bars, as interest groups and some lawyers argue that unethical conduct by government lawyers acting on behalf of the Trump administration should be investigated and potentially punished.

The Justice Department is pushing forward a proposal to try to stall or delay state and city bars from conducting ethics investigations of its lawyers, and the new lawsuit argues that the D.C. Bar is among the entities that has shown partisan bias.

To back up that claim, the lawsuit points to how the D.C. Bar handled the case of Kevin E. Clinesmith, a former F.B.I. lawyer who pleaded guilty to making a false statement when he altered an email to try to justify court-ordered surveillance of a former 2016 Trump campaign adviser. After his plea, Mr. Clinesmith had his bar license suspended for a year.

The suit called Mr. Clinesmith’s punishment a “slap on the wrist” for suborning unlawful surveillance in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and compared it to the effort to disbar Mr. Clark for “attempting to tell a lie” about the 2020 election.

The lawsuit also invokes the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision granting partial immunity to presidents, suggesting that if a president has immunity, lawyers working for him in the government are also protected from ethical discipline.

“The president’s constitutionally required immunity would provide little protection if executive branch attorneys could be targeted for internal executive branch deliberations,” the lawsuit argued.

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'Murdaugh murders' will have a redo in South Carolina

South Carolina’s top court undid the murder convictions against Alex Murdaugh, the lawyer a jury had found guilty of murdering his wife and one of his sons in a trial that captivated the country, reported The New York Times.

In a unanimous opinion, the State Supreme Court said that “shocking jury interference” by a court clerk who oversaw jurors during the 2023 trial meant that Mr. Murdaugh’s convictions and life sentence must be overturned.

Mr. Murdaugh, 57, will remain in prison because he is also serving decades-long prison sentences after pleading guilty to stealing millions of dollars from his law firm and his former clients. While he has admitted to embezzlement, he has long maintained — including during testimony at his trial — that he did not kill his wife, Maggie, 52, and their younger son, Paul, 22.

The South Carolina attorney general's office, which prosecuted the case, will retry Mr. Murdaugh for the killings.

The surprise reversal of Mr. Murdaugh’s murder convictions followed nearly five years of whirlwind drama that began in one of South Carolina’s least populous counties and grew to capture global attention. In the end, the trial — one of the highest profile in the state — was upended by a small-town clerk who could not resist injecting herself into the spectacle.

Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyers hailed the decision, Alex has said from Day 1 that he did not kill his wife and son,” the lawyers, Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin, said in a statement. “We look forward to a new trial conducted consistent with the Constitution.”

The Murdaugh murders, as they came to be known, took place in June 2021 on the Murdaugh family’s hunting estate, in a rural part of South Carolina’s Lowcountry.

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CREATORS: One of the Worst Court Decisions in History

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
May 12, 2026

The U.S. government detained and deported 25-year-old Brian Jose Morales Garcia to Mexico in April. That doesn't sound like breaking news in 2026, except Garcia was born in Denver.

Garcia told The Texas Tribune that he explained to police and immigration agents that he was a U.S. citizen and that he had a copy of his birth certificate and his Social Security card at his home in Austin, Texas. It didn't matter; he was shipped to Mexico.

Garcia's name may not long be remembered, but the government's disregard for individual rights and contempt for human rights will not soon be forgotten.

Some would like to pretend, or maybe don't know, that this conduct is not unprecedented. There was a time in this country when the government incarcerated thousands and thousands of American citizens who were not accused of a crime with the imprimatur of the highest court in the land.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan on Dec. 7, 1941, former President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the U.S. military to remove over 120,000 people of Japanese descent, the majority of whom were American citizens, from their homes and force them into American prison camps throughout the United States.

After Pearl Harbor, Japanese American Fred Korematsu tried to join the military and was turned away because of his ancestry. He was later fired from his job for the same reason.

Korematsu was arrested for failing to evacuate to a prison camp. He was convicted and Korematsu and his family were interned in Topaz, Utah, where the government had set up one of 10 prison camps.

Korematsu appealed his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Supreme Court found "That there were members of the group who retained loyalties to Japan has been confirmed by investigations made subsequent to the exclusion. Approximately five thousand American citizens of Japanese ancestry refused to swear unqualified allegiance to the United States and to renounce allegiance to the Japanese Emperor and several thousand evacuees requested repatriation to Japan."

As a result, in December 1944, the high court ruled 6 to 3 against Korematsu, declaring that the incarceration was not caused by racism — it was justified as a "military necessity."

Justice Robert Jackson, who would later prosecute war criminals in Nuremberg, Germany, complained about the lack of any evidence to justify the incarceration, writing: "the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination ... The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."

It turns out that Justice Jackson was right. It wasn't just that the government didn't have evidence; the evidence that was presented was knowingly false and misleading. The real evidence was hidden from Korematsu, his lawyers and the Supreme Court.

According to the Fred T. Korematsu Institute, as the Department of Justice began searching for evidence to support the Army's claims that Japanese Americans were a threat, they "found precisely the opposite — that J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, the FCC, the Office of Naval Intelligence and other authoritative intelligence agencies categorically denied that Japanese Americans had committed any wrongdoing. These official reports were never presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, having been intentionally suppressed."

Ultimately, after nearly 50 years, Korematsu's conviction was overturned based on the misconduct of the government's attorneys. In a statement as important today as it was in 1942, Korematsu told the court after his conviction was overturned, "According to the Supreme Court decision regarding my case, being an American citizen was not enough. They say you have to look like one ... I thought that this decision was wrong and I still feel that way. As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without a trial or a hearing."

The Korematsu decision was the law of the land for 64 years. The decision was generally considered one of the worst decisions in American history. The decision was formally overturned in 2018.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book, "The Executioner's Toll," 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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NYPD no longer reviewing all stop and frisk encounters as required by court order

More than a decade ago, a federal court found that the New York City Police Department had been unconstitutionally stopping and frisking Black and Hispanic residents. The ruling laid out required fixes, including something quite basic: The NYPD would review officers’ stops to make sure they were legal.

But for most of the past three years the nation’s largest police department failed to do that for a key part of an aggressive and politically connected unit as it stopped New Yorkers, reported ProPublica.

The lack of court-required review was recently discovered and disclosed by the NYPD’s federal monitor, which oversees the department’s compliance with the 2013 stop-and-frisk decision.

In all, more than 2,000 stops weren’t properly reviewed, according to data from the monitor.

The failure involved the Community Response Team, or CRT. A ProPublica investigation last year found that the unit had often sidestepped oversight as it went after so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorbikes and ATVs. The team’s tactics, including high-speed car chases, and its opaque operations disturbed some NYPD officials, but the unit expanded significantly amid the support of then-Mayor Eric Adams.

The lack of reviews is part of a pattern of the NYPD failing to deliver on its obligations under the long-standing court order. Officers across the department, for instance, have often not documented stops.

The importance of reviews is particularly critical for aggressive teams like the CRT, which has a record of unconstitutional stops. It has also drawn hundreds of civilian complaints since it was created three years ago. More than half of the officers assigned to the team have been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of board data last year. That compares with just a small fraction of NYPD officers overall.

Prior to its latest discovery, the federal monitor had raised alarms about the unit’s behavior. A report last year said that only 59% of stops, searches and frisks by CRT officers were lawful, a far worse rate than the NYPD’s patrol units. Nearly all of the stops involved Black or Hispanic residents.

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