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OPINION: When America Chooses to Kill with a Gun Rather Than a Syringe

Jacques Pj Provost

2026-06-20 17:11:01

A Face on Death Row

Marcus Johnson—name changed to protect the identity of his loved ones—has been waiting in a cell at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, for twenty-two years. He is 41 years old. He was sent to death row at age 19. He knows the smell of cold concrete in the morning, the metallic clang of the doors at 6:15 a.m., the sound of meal carts on the grooved floor. He learned to draw in prison. His drawings are bad, his guards say. His guards are not art critics. Since January 27, 2025, he has known that the method by which he might be executed has changed. He was told. The regulations require it.

There are currently 40 inmates on the U.S. federal death row. Forty men—almost exclusively men—whose cases date back, in some instances, more than twenty-five years. Twenty-five years of waiting for someone to come and kill them. Twenty-five years of legal challenges, appeals, hopes raised and dashed, dates set and then postponed. And now, for some of them, a new variable: perhaps not a needle, perhaps a bullet. Uncertainty is not a mere detail. Uncertainty is a form of torture authorized by decree.

Forty men. I’m counting them. I don’t know their crimes. Some have committed acts I don’t even want to imagine. And yet, this morning, I’m thinking of them—not of what they’ve done, but of what we’re about to do to them. There are two distinct questions here, and we must not confuse them: Do they deserve to die? And if so, does the state have the right to shoot them? These are two different questions. The American debate refuses to separate them.

The victims’ families: the silence that goes unheard

The favorite argument of supporters of the federal death penalty is that of the victims’ families. “They need closure.” “They’ve waited too long.” ” “Justice must be served.” These are real statements, spoken by real people who have lost children, spouses, and parents to real crimes. Their pain is not an abstraction. It is documented, dated, and permanent. I’m not going to deny it.

And yet—and yet—studies conducted over several decades by researchers at the University of Minnesota and the University of California, Davis, show that the death penalty does not bring the psychological peace that its advocates promise to victims’ families. Robert Renny Cushing, founder of the organization “Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation,” lost his father in a brutal murder in 1988. He has spent his life opposing the death penalty. “We’re being used as justification,” he says. “We’re not asked what we really want. We’re held up as proof.” Victims’ families do not speak with one voice. We only hear from some of them—the ones who fit the narrative.

The Firing Squad in American History

Ronnie Lee Gardner, June 18, 2010, at 12:17 p.m.

The last firing squad execution in the United States took place on June 18, 2010, at 12:17 p.m., at the Utah State Penitentiary. The condemned man’s name was Ronnie Lee Gardner. He was 49 years old. He was strapped to a chair. Four masked shooters stood behind a wall with slits in it, seven meters away. One of them had a blank round in his magazine—standard protocol so that each shooter could believe he had not fired the fatal shot. Gardner himself had requested a firing squad rather than lethal injection. Utah had given him the choice. He died within forty seconds. Witnesses described a heavy silence in the observation room.

Before Gardner, there had been Gary Gilmore, in 1977, in the same state of Utah. Gilmore, too, had chosen the rifles. Gilmore had told the shooters, “Let’s do it.” Norman Mailer wrote a book about it, The Executioner’s Song, 1,072 pages. America has a long tradition of turning its executions into literature. That’s not a compliment. It’s a clinical observation about a country that views its own violence with a fascination it dresses up as art.

Gary Gilmore had said, “Let’s do it.” And Utah had done it. And Norman Mailer had written about it. And the book had won the Pulitzer Prize. Something about this chain of events has bothered me for years: the execution of a man was turned into an award-winning work of literature. I’m not saying Mailer was wrong to write it. I’m saying that this fascination—this American capacity to aestheticize its own brutality—is one of the invisible cogs that keep the machine turning.

Utah, Mississippi, South Carolina: The Pioneers of Regression

Utah has never abolished the firing squad. It is the only state to have maintained this method without interruption. Since 2015, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Idaho have reinstated or authorized it. South Carolina executed Brad Sigmon by firing squad on March 7, 2025—he became the first person executed by firing squad in that state since 1879. 1879. A gap of 146 years. Closed in a single morning. Sigmon was 67 years old. He had killed his in-laws with a sledgehammer at the age of 43. Three shooters. Three bullets to the heart. He died quickly, officials said—as if speed were a guarantee of humanity.

These states are no accident. They represent a trend. Since 2020, faced with supply shortages of lethal drugs, several state legislatures have voted to reinstate abandoned methods. The Trump executive order is part of this trend—it did not create it, but it federalized it. What was once a regional aberration is now national policy. The difference is not merely one of degree. It is one of nature.

What the Numbers Say—and What They Hide

55% of Americans in Favor: The Geography of Support

According to the October 2024 Gallup Poll, 55% of Americans say they support the death penalty for people convicted of murder. This figure is down—it was 80% in 1994—but it remains a majority. Fifty-five percent. Three out of five Americans, sitting in a train car, approve of the idea that the state kills citizens on their behalf. It’s not an overwhelming majority. It’s a majority sufficient to govern.

And yet—and yet—that same Gallup poll, in a follow-up question, shows that when presented with the alternative “life in prison without parole,” support for the death penalty drops to 46%. The majority vanishes as soon as a real alternative is offered. What Americans support may not be so much death as certainty. They want to be sure we’ll never let them off the hook. They want the final lock. The bullet and the syringe are merely instruments—it is irrevocability that they desire.

46% versus 55%. A nine-point difference depending on how the question is phrased. Nine points that mean a majority of Americans prefer the death penalty not because they want death, but because they haven’t been offered any other credible alternative. Trump’s policy does not address what people really want. It addresses what they say they want when they aren’t asked the right question.

One hundred eighty-two innocent people executed since 1973

Since 1973, 195 death row inmates have been exonerated in the United States after spending years—sometimes decades—on death row. One hundred eighty-five. This figure represents documented exonerations—that is, cases where innocence could be proven. Experts at the Innocence Project estimate that the rate of miscarriages of justice in capital cases is approximately 4.1%. Four point one percent. Applied to the 1,572 executions carried out in the United States since 1976, this means that the U.S. government has statistically executed between 60 and 90 innocent people since executions resumed following the 1972 moratorium.

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Texas on February 17, 2004. He was 36 years old. He was accused of starting the fire that killed his three daughters—Karmon, Kameron, and Amber, aged 2 and 1 (the latter two were twins). After his execution, four independent experts concluded that the forensic evidence used to convict him was scientifically invalid. The fire was likely not arson. Cameron Todd Willingham likely died for nothing. Likely. That’s the word that haunts us. Do we have the right to take a life when “likely” hangs in the balance?

The Deterrence Argument—and Why It Doesn't Hold Water

Thirty-four states, two policies, the same homicide rate

In 2012, the U.S. National Research Council published a 362-page report concluding that the death penalty has no measurable deterrent effect on homicide rates. Not “a limited effect.” Not “an effect that is difficult to measure.” No effect at all. The report recommends that this argument “no longer be used to inform criminal justice policy decisions.” It has been ignored. It has been ignored since 2012. It will be ignored tomorrow.

U.S. states without the death penalty have a lower per-capita homicide rate than those that impose it. In 2023, according to the Murder Policy Institute, the homicide rate in states without the death penalty was 3.4 per 100,000 residents. In states with the death penalty: 6.5 per 100,000. Almost double. This is not a trivial correlation—it is the exact opposite of what deterrence theory predicts. When the facts contradict the theory to this extent, the theory must be changed. Or we must admit that the death penalty has never been a criminal justice policy. That it has always been a symbolic policy.

A symbolic policy. I choose my words carefully. It means: we kill people to send a message. We kill people so that others may feel reassured, avenged, protected. We kill people—human beings, at the end of a hallway, in a windowless room—for the political satisfaction of those who will never be in that room. If that’s what it is, then it’s no longer justice. It’s sacrifice.

Trump’s argument: “the worst criminals”

Since January 27, 2025, White House communications have framed the reinstatement of the firing squad as a response to “the worst criminals”—serial killers, terrorists, and child abusers. The executive order specifically cites crimes against children and acts of terrorism. It’s clever rhetoric: it makes any direct opposition difficult, because it forces one to appear to be defending the indefensible. Who wants to be seen as siding with child killers?

And yet—and yet—not all 40 inmates on federal death row are Dylann Roofs or Timothy McVeighs. Some were convicted on the basis of disputed eyewitness testimony, circumstantial evidence, and court proceedings in counties where public defenders dozed off during hearings. In 1984, Calvin Burdine, who had been sentenced to death in Texas, discovered that his lawyer had dozed off during part of the trial. A federal court ruled in 2001 that “sleeping during a capital trial is tantamount to having no lawyer.” He had been sentenced to death. The system that produces these convictions is not reliable enough to be irrevocable.

Race, Class, Hallway

42% of those on death row are Black in a country where 13% of the population is Black

As of January 1, 2025, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 42% of the 2,185 death row inmates in U.S. prisons—federal and state combined—are Black men. The African American population accounts for 13.6% of the total U.S. population. This disparity is not a statistical coincidence. It is the result of a systemic pattern. Researchers at Cornell University demonstrated in 2019 that the probability of receiving a death sentence for the murder of a white victim is 3.5 times higher than that for the murder of a Black victim. In the context of the U.S. death penalty, the life of a white victim is worth 3.5 lives of Black victims. This is the system that Trump is reinforcing.

Social class follows the same pattern. Brendan Dassey, sentenced to 16 years (the “Making a Murderer” case), did not have access to a competent attorney. In the United States, you have the right to a public defender. You do not have the right to a good attorney. Stephen Bright, director emeritus of the Southern Center for Human Rights, has been saying the same thing since 1982: “The quality of your legal representation depends on your ability to pay, not on your innocence.” Death row, in its current form, resembles less a system of justice than a map of American poverty superimposed on a map of racial marginalization.

3.5 times. I’ve been re-reading this statistic for years. In the eyes of the court that decides who deserves to die, the life of a white victim is worth 3.5 times that of a Black victim. No one has said this explicitly. No judge has laid down this rule. And yet that is what the data show, case after case, county after county, decade after decade. The death penalty is not blind. It has very precise eyes.

Taxpayer Money in the Syringe and the Gun

Contrary to popular belief, the death penalty costs the state more than life in prison. A 2011 study by the University of California, Kansas, estimated the additional cost of a capital case compared to a life-imprisonment case at an average of $470,000, due to mandatory appeal procedures, specialized legal teams, security protocols, and the costs of constructing isolation units. In California, a 2011 study by the RAND Corporation estimated that the system cost $184 million more per year than it would if the maximum sentence were life imprisonment. We pay more to kill than to keep someone alive. This financial reality does not appear to be reflected in the January 27 executive order.

The American taxpayer funds every bullet fired by the firing squad. They fund the salaries of the shooters—federal correctional officers trained and paid to do this. They fund the restraint chair, the straps, and the red target sewn onto the condemned person’s shirt—a standard target, standard protocol, and standard cost in the federal prison budget. You pay for this. We watch from afar. But someone is paying.

Europe is watching—and this is what it sees

Growing Isolation Within the International Community

The United States is one of the few Western countries to retain the death penalty. All member states of the European Union have abolished it—it is a condition of membership. Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976 for common-law crimes and permanently in 1998. Australia did so in 1984. New Zealand followed suit in 1989. Washington’s closest allies view this executive order with a mixture of astonishment and resignation. Resignation prevails: they have already realized that this administration does not seek their input.

Amnesty International reported in 2024 that 112 countries had abolished the death penalty in law or in practice. The United States now finds itself in the same category as Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, and North Korea among the countries that still carry out executions. This ranking is not an automatic argument—truth is not decided by a majority of nations. But it does say something about the direction this executive order is taking: not forward, not toward a stronger America, but toward a group that Washington itself, in other contexts, describes as authoritarian regimes.

Iran. Saudi Arabia. China. North Korea. And the United States of America. I am not writing this to shock. I am writing it because this is the actual ranking, the actual list, the actual neighbors that this executive order aligns itself with. Trump talks about making America great again. What greatness emerges from this list?

The Specific Case of Executed Foreign Nationals

Between 1976 and 2020, the United States executed at least 17 foreign nationals without allowing them to contact the consulate of their country of origin—in direct violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, ratified by Washington in 1969. The International Court of Justice has ruled against the United States on several occasions for these violations: in the LaGrand case (Germany v. United States, 2001) and in the Avena case (Mexico v. United States, 2004). The United States has ignored these rulings. It has executed the condemned prisoners in question. A state that ignores the rulings of the International Court of Justice while demanding that other states respect international law is wearing a mask that is beginning to slip.

José Ernesto Medellín, a Mexican national, was executed in Texas on August 5, 2008, despite an ICJ ruling ordering a retrial. George W. Bush had initially ordered the retrial. The U.S. Supreme Court had overturned that order in 2008, ruling that the international ruling was not directly applicable under U.S. law. Medellín died shortly after midnight. He was 33 years old. The ICJ had said no. Texas had said yes. Texas had the means.

What Trump Isn't Saying

The Silence on Post-Mortem Exemptions

There is no mention of the 195 exonerations in the decree of January 27, 2025. None. Not a single line on appeal procedures. Not a single line on the risk of miscarriage of justice. The text speaks of “justice for victims,” “protection of society,” and “appropriate means of execution.” It does not speak of possible innocence because it cannot—because that subject would destroy the rhetorical framework in less than a sentence.

In 2014, Joseph Wood’s execution in Arizona lasted 1 hour and 57 minutes. Wood was injected at 1:52 p.m. The doctors present counted 660 labored breaths before his death at 3:49 p.m. Governor Jan Brewer said the execution had been “carried out humanely.” One hour and fifty-seven minutes of agony certified as “humane.” It is to this story—these images, these minutes—that Trump’s executive order responds by proposing a firing squad. Not by questioning the death penalty itself. By changing the method. As if the problem were the duration and not the principle.

One hour and fifty-seven minutes. I force myself to count to seventeen minutes in my head to get a sense of what that represents. I can’t even make it to ten. No one should have to make it to ten. And yet men in uniform watched their watches for another one hundred and seventeen minutes. And the governor said: humane.

The Real Political Message Behind the Gun

This executive order is not a criminal justice policy. It is a communications strategy. Trump knows—his advisors know—that the federal death penalty is extremely rare: since its reinstatement in 1988, only a handful of federal executions have taken place. The vast majority of death sentences are state-level, not federal. This executive order directly affects only a tiny fraction of the 2,500 people currently on death row. But it sends a signal to all of conservative America: I am not one to apologize for being tough. I am one who stands by it.

This has been Trump’s trademark since 2015: turning unapologetic brutality into a sign of strength. The separation of families at the border. The cages for children. The Muslim Ban. And now the firing squad. Each measure is chosen as much for its ability to outrage the left as for its actual substance. The opposition’s outrage is proof of the regime’s virility. The more NGOs protest, the more the base feels represented. The firing squad is as much a message to political opponents as it is to death row inmates.

This is the part I find hardest to write: the idea that men may be shot to death not because it’s necessary, not because it protects anyone, but because the image of the firing squad generates exactly the level of outrage needed to consolidate an electoral base. Death as a tool of political marketing. I don’t know how anyone can live with that.

The Voices That Resist—and Those We Don't Hear

Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative’s 30th Anniversary

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, has been working since 1989 to free wrongfully convicted death row inmates. He has secured the release or commutation of sentences for more than 140 death row inmates. His book Just Mercy, published in 2014, has sold more than 2 million copies. Stevenson, 64, is not a podium activist. He is a lawyer who spends his days in Alabama prisons poring over case files under dim fluorescent lights. Since January 27, 2025, he has described this executive order as “a declaration of war on the constitutional rights of death row inmates.” Not a metaphor. A legal assessment.

The American Bar Association—the national bar association—has officially opposed the death penalty since 1997. Not left-wing organizations, not activist groups: the bar association itself. Their official position: the system cannot be administered fairly and equitably. Twenty-eight years of official opposition. Twenty-eight years of being ignored. When lawyers say that the legal system is too flawed to be a matter of life and death, and the response is to sign an order sending someone to the firing squad, something has broken down in our democratic dialogue.

Bryan Stevenson said something I’ve held onto for years: “Every person is worth more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.” I don’t know if that’s true for everyone. I know it’s not what this decree believes. This decree believes that some people can be reduced to their actions. And that once reduced, they can be killed cleanly.

The guards, the executioners, the witnesses

We rarely talk about those who carry out executions. Correctional officers who participate in executions—whether by lethal injection, gas chamber, or firing squad—develop significantly higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder than their colleagues who are not involved. A 2010 study published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences showed that 28% of officers who had participated in at least one execution exhibited clinical symptoms of PTSD within the following five years. Twenty-eight percent. They did what the law required of them. They bear the scars of it in their nights.

Jerry Givens executed 62 death row inmates in Virginia between 1982 and 1999—by gas chamber, electrocution, and lethal injection. After retiring, he became an activist against the death penalty. He says, “I was doing my job. I was trying to sleep. Over time, I wasn’t sure anymore if I’d done the right thing.” Givens died in May 2020 of COVID-19 at the age of 67, after spending his final years speaking out against the system he had served. The Trump executive order makes no mention of Jerry Givens. The Trump executive order does not consider Jerry Givens. The Trump executive order considers the 40 inmates on federal death row—and not those who will have to pull the trigger.

Jerry Givens. I keep coming back to that name. A man who legally killed sixty-two people and died because of it—not physically on the day of the execution, but slowly, over twenty years, in his sleepless nights and doubts. The state told him: it’s just. The state was wrong. The state doesn’t pay the therapist’s bills.

Conclusion: The Ball and the Mirror

What We Choose When We Stand Idly By

Trump’s executive order on the firing squad is not just U.S. policy. It’s a question posed to each and every one of us, on this side of the Atlantic and the other. What do we do when the world’s most powerful ally decides to execute its condemned prisoners by firing squad? We protest for two days. Then we move on. We scroll past it. And death row in Terre Haute, Indiana, continues to exist—with its 40 men, its three-by-two-meter cells, its smell of concrete and antiseptic, its 23-hour nights of solitary confinement.

The death penalty isn’t an American problem. It’s a problem of what we call civilization. Either we believe that the state has the right to kill its citizens in a deliberate, planned, and scheduled manner—and in that case, we must accept all the consequences of that belief, including the 195 exonerations, the 60 likely innocent people, the 42% of Black convicts, and the Jerry Givens. Or we do not believe it. But in either case, we must choose. Neutrality regarding organized killing is not a position. It is an abdication.

I think of Marcus, 41, in his cell in Terre Haute. I don’t know if he’s guilty. I know he’s a poor artist. I know he learned to draw in prison. I know he now knows he could be shot to death. And I know that neither he nor I had a say in the matter on January 27, 2025, when Donald Trump signed that executive order with a pen and filed it in the federal register the way one deposits a check.

The Last Image—The One That Remains

On March 7, 2025, at the prison in Columbia, South Carolina, Brad Sigmon was seated in a wooden chair at 6:08 p.m. Sixty-seven years old. Straps around his wrists, ankles, and chest. A red target sewn onto his shirt, in the center of his chest. Three shooters behind a wall. Three slits. Three rifles. The room smelled of wood and machine oil. At 6:12 p.m., the prison warden gave the order. Three sharp, almost simultaneous gunshots. Sigmon died within seconds, witnesses say. The red target had done its job. Someone had sewn it there. Someone had taken a needle and thread and sewn a red circle onto a man’s chest so the bullets would hit the right spot.

I don’t know the name of the person who sews the targets. I’ll probably never know. But someone, somewhere, this morning, has that job. And since January 27, 2025, that job is a federal one.

Signed, Maxime Marquette, columnist