And then there are firing squads. Utah took a similar tack to South Carolina in 2015, moving to allow the squads as a backup execution method. Firing squads are also permissible in Mississippi and Oklahoma. Utah has carried out all of the nation's three executions by firing squad since the 1970s, with the most recent in 2010. In Utah, it happens this way: A squad of sharpshooters — volunteers solicited from corrections employees or law enforcement – carry out the execution. "The prisoner is strapped into a chair, has a hood put over his or her face and a target placed on his or her chest above the heart. There are sandbags around the chair in case there are either stray bullets or ricochet. Done properly, the sharpshooters should be able to hit the target. And if there are five sharp shooters, four have live ammunition, one has a blank," Dunham says. "The idea is that that provides them with psychological deniability so that they don't have assurance that they actually killed somebody." But that deniability may be imperfect, he says: "If you ask anyone who handles a rifle, they will tell you that when they fire it, they can tell the difference between live ammunition and a blank."