Richard C. Dieter [Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center]: "Ronnie Lee Gardner [BBC Backgrounder] was executed in a hail of bullets as he sat strapped to a chair in a Utah prison a few nights ago. Gardner got the kind of execution he wanted–death by firing squad–and Utah finally got what it wanted–retribution for the murder Gardner had committed twenty-five years ago. We the people (and in this case, there was a worldwide audience) probably scratched our heads wondering what that was all about.

Even though the U.S. is averaging one execution per week, no one pays much attention to such events because they are not news. They are not the first or the last, the most or the least of anything. Gardner's execution was news because it was the first use of the firing squad in 14 years and probably one of the last such executions in U.S. history. We just don't do things like that any more. The firing squad, like the electric chair, the gas chamber, and the gallows, is more appropriately found in museums and old movies, not in modern civilized society. We don't shoot or hang people because such actions are repulsive to our sensibilities, demeaning to human life, and accomplish nothing worthwhile.

But while the firing squad is clearly on the way out, executions by lethal injection continue under a cloak of antiseptic obscurity. The death penalty is winding down, as overwhelming evidence in this country and around the world demonstrates. Death sentences, executions, and the number of states with the death penalty have dropped sharply in the past decade. The U.S. is now one of a very small number of countries to carry out executions annually. The strong stream of progress in human rights implies that capital punishment itself will eventually be relegated to the same history as slavery, apartheid, and torture. Even as vestiges of these practices remain, they are clearly condemned in the world community. We continue to execute people in this country not because such actions are necessary but because we have not yet figured out how to extricate ourselves from this practice. In the meantime, people like Ronnie Gardner are chosen from among thousands on death row and killed because their number has come up. Occasionally they "go out in a blaze of glory," but as retiring Justice John Paul Stevens recently concluded, it is the pointless and needless extinction of life."