When Gary Gilmore said the words “Let’s do it” he restarted the American execution industry. It was just after 8 a.m. on January 17, 1977 and Gilmore was hooded, strapped into a chair, and facing a firing squad.
“Let’s do it” was his reply when asked if he had any last words before his execution. The BBC described his death: “A target attached to his t-shirt, and the five-man firing squad took aim and shot from behind a screen. So that none of his executioners could be sure they had fired a mortal round, one of the rifles was loaded with a blank.”
Gilmore refused all attempts to appeal his death sentence for murder and when offered the choice of hanging or shooting he said “I’d rather be shot.”
The story of Gilmore’s life is told at crimeandinvestigation.co as when as in Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize winning book The Executioner’s Song.
Death Penalty Reinstated in America
Gilmore’s execution was the first in the United States since capital punishment had been brought back in 1976 after a four-year moratorium. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the legality of capital punishment as being unconstitutional.
If individual states wanted to enact legislation to bring back execution within their jurisdictions they were free to do so and 37 of the 50 did just that. Since 1976, and up to mid-October 2009 more than 1,100 people have been executed in the United States.
Firing Squad rarely used with Civilians
Capitalpunishment.uk writes that “In most countries, up until the 20th century, shooting was reserved for military personnel with civilians being executed by other methods, mostly hanging. For some reason, shooting was considered a more honourable death for soldiers than hanging.” Of course, the military also had all the equipment and expertise necessary to carry out the sentence.
It doesn’t always go as planned. Nervous marksmen could easily miss the heart and merely wound. In such cases, the officer in charge of the firing squad would finish the subject off with a pistol shot to the head.
Civilians frequently faced the firing squad in Communist countries and still do today in some spots around the world.
The website deathrowspeaks.info quotes a report from Gulf Daily News (December 13, 2006) on a firing squad execution in Bahrain: A Bangladeshi “woman executed for the murder of a Bahraini housewife bled to death for 10 minutes after she was shot in the chest by a firing squad on Monday.”
China Executes more People than any other Nation
Capital punishment is carried out in China more frequently than in any other country. According to the Australian newspaper, The Age (March 13, 2003), “Chinese authorities keep execution numbers a secret, but Western human rights monitors believe it is about 15,000 a year, more than the rest of the world's judicial executions combined.”
Until recently, almost all these executions were carried out by shooting. The shackled person is made to kneel on the ground, held on either side by police officers. The executioner approaches from behind and places the muzzle of a pistol near the back of the head. At this point the assistants lean away to avoid catching some of the splatter that is an inevitable side effect.
Executions are usually carried out within minutes of the sentence being passed and often in public. If family members wish to claim the body they must pay for the bullet, otherwise the organs are quickly removed for transplanting.
China understands the public relations disaster that public execution by shooting creates in the rest of the world and is moving towards using lethal injections. However, execution by shooting is still widely used and is seen as a way of keeping the general public docile.
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