Are Firing Squad Executions Seeing a Revival in the U.S.?
· Time
Lethal injection has long been the prevailing method for carrying out the death penalty in the U.S. But supply-chain issues and a series of high-profile botched executions are increasingly causing officials around the country to weigh alternative options—including one that, until recently, had been all but entirely left in the past.
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Following the failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee last week—the second botched execution in the state this year using lethal injection—several Tennessee lawmakers have publicly called for the state to turn to other methods.
“If we’re having this much trouble with this particular means of execution, we need to take it off the table and go to something that’s far more reliable and predictable,” Tennessee Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson said while speaking on a local radio show on Monday. Republican Rep. Tim Burchett, who represents Tennessee's second congressional district in the House, similarly told local station WVLT last Friday that Tennessee should abandon lethal injection in favor of other methods that have “very little room for mistakes.” Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton told The Associated Press in an interview published on Monday that “I don’t think there’s any method that’s off the table at this point.”
Among the potential alternatives named by both Johnson and Burchett was execution by firing squad. The method has been used exceedingly rarely in the U.S.: between 1976 and 2024, just three people were put to death by firing squad in the country, all of them in Utah.
But the Tennessee lawmakers aren’t the only ones who have recently suggested reviving the practice—and some state officials and President Donald Trump have already made moves to do just that.
Trump on Monday approved the U.S. Army’s first execution of a soldier via firing squad since World War II, greenlighting the use of the method to put to death Nidal Hasan, a former U.S. Army major and psychiatrist who was convicted of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, following a recommendation by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hasan’s execution is scheduled to take place on Dec. 3 at Fort Hood and, Hegseth has announced, to be livestreamed.
The approval comes months after Trump authorized the use of firing squads in federal executions in April.
Both South Carolina and Idaho have also taken steps in recent months to either enable the use of firing squad executions or to carry them out.
Last year, in the wake of a failed 2024 execution attempt using lethal injection in the state, South Carolina put three people to death by firing squad—doubling the number of such executions that had been carried out in the entire U.S. over the prior half-century.
Idaho, meanwhile, enacted a law earlier this year that established the firing squad as the state’s primary method for carrying out the death penalty. That move, too, followed a high-profile botched execution via lethal injection in the state in 2024.
How does a firing squad execution work?
The specific procedure for execution by firing squad varies across different states, but the general method remains the same, according to Austin Sarat, a professor of law and political science at Amherst College and the author of Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty,.
He explains that traditionally, a person is strapped to a chair, a hood is placed over their head and a target is put on their heart, to highlight where the shooters should aim.
Then, between three and five people with high-powered rifles will fire at the target. In some states, one rifle will be loaded with a blank bullet, so that the shooters do not know who fired the fatal shots. “When the signal is given, they shoot into the heart of the condemned,” Sarat says.
Which states allow execution by firing squad?
Firing squad executions are currently permitted in just five states: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah.
Idaho, under its recently enacted law, is the only state that uses the firing squad as its default method.
The other states have designated execution by firing squad to be used as a fallback method if they are unable to carry out the death penalty by lethal injection, or as one of several methods that can be chosen by either corrections officials or inmates themselves to perform an execution.
Utah in 2015 designated the firing squad as the alternative method to turn to if the state cannot, for instance, obtain the necessary drugs to perform an execution by lethal injection. Oklahoma permitted firing squads in 2011 as a method of last resort.
Mississippi in 2022 gave discretion to corrections officials to choose among four methods, including the firing squad.
And in South Carolina, the firing squad has since 2021 been one of multiple methods that death row inmates can choose for their means of execution, along with electrocution and lethal injection. If they do not choose a method, electrocution is used.
Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit organization that provides analysis and research on capital punishment, tells TIME that at least one inmate appears to have opted for the firing squad in the state last year due to a lack of information provided regarding what other forms of capital punishment entail.
“Prisoners who asked for information about the other two methods of execution, namely the electric chair and lethal injection, were not given complete answers to understand how those methods would be used, and so at least in one of those cases, the prisoners felt like the firing squad was the only method of execution they knew enough about to choose,” Maher says.
Lethal injection issues prompt a search for solutions
Oklahoma became the first state to authorize lethal injection in 1977, as it sought more humane methods for capital punishment. From the late 1970s on, lethal injection was performed in Oklahoma and, later, other states using a three-drug protocol, explains Richard Levy, an anesthesiologist at Columbia University: one drug, sodium thiopental, to induce unconsciousness; a second paralytic drug to stop breathing; and potassium chloride to stop the heart from beating.
In 2011, the company which manufactured sodium thiopental, Hospira, stopped manufacturing the drug, leaving states to revise their protocols for lethal injection.
“Each state basically has adopted some variation on the theme,” Levy says in reference to the original three-drug protocol. He explains that the majority of states have since “gone to a single-drug approach,” a method he describes as “flawed and problematic.”
Many states use a single dose of pentobarbital, which depresses the central nervous system. Levy explains that compared to thiopentol, pentobarbital doesn’t as effectively induce unconsciousness, “and probably doesn't reliably stop one from breathing.” Pike was given two doses of pentobarbital in her failed execution attempt before she was hospitalized; she complained that her arms were burning as the pentobarbital was administered, after several needles were unsuccessfully used to access a vein.
Following the botched attempt, her lawyers believed she was brain dead on Monday, before she woke up on Tuesday. As of Thursday, Pike was “up and walking,” according to her lawyer.
States have also struggled to obtain lethal injection drugs as a result of pharmaceutical companies’ opposition to supplying their products for executions. As a result, many states have substituted different drugs or opted for alternative execution methods.
In South Carolina for instance, the state was unable to carry out executions for more than a decade after struggling to obtain lethal injection drugs, until 2021, when the state authorized firing squads and made electrocution its default method.
In 2023, the governor’s office revealed that it had reached out to more than 1,300 contacts for execution drugs before finally obtaining pentobarbital. The state then resumed executions by lethal injection, but in March of 2025, a death row inmate chose to be executed by firing squad over fears of prolonged suffering related to lethal injection, becoming the first person to be executed by a firing squad in the state’s history.
After it was unable to obtain sodium thiopental or pentobarbital, Oklahoma in 2014 switched to using midazolam, which has since been used in multiple executions that were considered botched. One Oklahoma execution using midazolam that year lasted 45 minutes.
Republican Utah state Rep. Paul Ray, who sponsored the bill that reinstated firing squads in his state, cited difficulty obtaining the necessary drugs as a reason for the move when speaking with The Los Angeles Times in 2015. “We found out last year that there we had no ability to purchase more drugs. So looking down the road, we had to come up with a backup plan,” Ray told the outlet. “We decided to make it automatic to go to the firing squad.”
Federal officials have given voice to similar reasoning. Before Trump authorized the use of firing squads for federal executions, the Department of Justice released a report in April which said that switching to “manners of execution that are currently provided for by the law of certain states … will help ensure the Department is prepared to carry out lawful executions even if a specific drug is unavailable.” The report also acknowledged “supply chain challenges that limit the availability of lethal injection drugs.”
As those issues have complicated efforts to carry out lethal injection executions in recent years, botched attempts like the one in Pike’s case have also contributed to officials’ decisions to shift toward alternative methods.
Lethal injection, by far the most common method of the death penalty in the U.S, also comes with the highest rate of botched attempts, according to research performed by Sarat, the Amherst college professor. In one comprehensive study that examined executions between 1890 and 2010, Sarat found that just over 7% of executions by lethal injection were botched. In a subsequent study looking at executions performed between 2010 and 2020, he found that the rate was over 8%.
“It is certain. It is quick. And it brings justice for the victims and their families in a more expeditious manner than other types,” said Idaho state Rep. Bruce Skaug, who sponsored the bill that established the firing squad as the state’s default method.
Historically, in the scant instances when firing squad executions have been carried out in the U.S, they’ve rarely—if ever—been botched, according to Sarat’s study. Out of 34 executions by firing squad between 1890 and 2010, he found, not one went significantly awry.
In one of the three firing squad executions performed in South Carolina last year, though, an autopsy report concluded that the firing squad missed the heart of the victim, indicating that he did not immediately die and may have endured suffering.
Sarat argues that firing squads, though involved in far fewer botched executions, remain a “brutal” form of capital punishment that “was abandoned because it didn't meet the evolving standards of decency of the society.”
“Since the end of the 19th century, the United States has been on a quest to find a method of execution that would be safe, reliable, and humane. The firing squad has never played a big role in that story,” Sarat tells TIME. “It hasn't played a big role in that story because it is a brutal way to kill someone, and its brutality is very obvious.”
Other forms of capital punishment have also received consideration in recent years in the search for potential alternatives to lethal injection. The DOJ’s report from April directed federal prisons to expand their methods of execution to include, along with firing squads, gas asphyxiation and electrocution. Alabama in 2024 became the first state to execute a death row inmate using nitrogen gas, and four other states have adopted the practice since. In 2025, 19 bills in 14 states were introduced to alter or augment execution methods, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Despite the moves to revive largely bygone execution methods or implement new ones, however, Sarat emphasizes that capital punishment is overall trending down.
The death penalty is currently outlawed in 23 states, while 10 others have not carried out an execution in the last decade, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. An additional four states have not had an execution in the last five years.
“The United States is on the road to abolition … The death penalty is dying,” Sarat says. “I don't think that either what Trump has done about the firing squad or Christa Pike's failed execution, in and of itself, is going to make a huge dent in America's death penalty.”