How to execute people in the 21st century

Some states dabbled in other methods when replacing hanging. Utah kept the firing squad as an option, but few inmates chose it. The last death by firing squad took place in 2010 when inmate Ronnie Lee Gardner requested it instead of lethal injection. After Gardner’s execution, guards who participated received commemorative coins. Nevada pioneered the use of gas in the 1920s, whereby the condemned would be locked within a stone or steel vault that would fill with clouds of hydrogen cyanide. A handful of other states also adopted it before switching to lethal injection.

Lethal injection enjoyed tremendous popularity for two reasons. First, it produced an unparalleled record of seemingly painless deaths under the standard three-drug cocktail of sodium thiopental, vercuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. New drug cocktails have since negated this advantage. Second, and perhaps more importantly, lethal injection strongly resembled a medical procedure, thereby projecting our preconceived notions about modern medicine—its competence, its efficacy, and its reliability—onto the capital-punishment system. But such associations cut both ways. As states revert to earlier methods of execution—techniques once abandoned as backward and flawed—they run the risk that the death penalty itself will be seen in the same terms.