Who was Ronnie Lee Gardner? Twice-convicted Utah killer was last person executed by firing squad in US
Amid a shortage of lethal injection drugs, the South Carolina House of Representatives voted on Wednesday, May 5, to add death by firing squad to the state's execution methods. This came as an effort to resume executions in a state that was once known to have the busiest death row in the nation.
The last time a condemned inmate was executed by a firing squad was in 2010 when Ronnie Lee Gardner was sentenced to death by the state of Utah for fatally shooting an attorney during a failed escape attempt from a courthouse in Salt Lake City.
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Gardner received his death sentence in 1985, and so he was able to opt for the archaic execution method despite the state abandoning the firing squad only in 2004. He was originally facing a murder charge in the 1984 shooting death of a bartender named Melvyn Otterstrom.
On April 2, 1985, Gardner attempted to escape from custody by pulling out a revolver smuggled into the Metropolitan Hall of Justice at Salt Lake City. He fatally shot Michael Burdell in the face while the latter was hiding behind a door.
"There was a female friend of his that apparently was in on his escape attempt and when he was being escorted through the hallway, she passed him and handed him the weapon," KSL reporter Sandra Yi, of Salt Lake City, told ABC News in 2010.
Gardner could choose how he would die while on death row, and he chose the firing squad. "This is the quote he said when he opted for that firing squad. He said, 'I lived by the gun, I murdered by the gun, so I will die by the gun,'" Yi said.
KTVX reporter Marcos Ortiz was in the viewing room at Utah State Prison on the fateful night of June 18, 2010. Yi was also present.
"He was shackled, he had his head restrained, but I remember his eyes looking around the room and trying to see who was there," she said of Gardner. "I know he couldn't see through the windows, but I remember that struck me quite a bit."
"There was a hood placed over him, and a target placed over his heart," Yi continued. "That was where they were going to shoot," Ortiz added. "There were five marksmen: They're all volunteers and they're police officer trained."
One of the five rifles was loaded with blanks so that no one knew for sure who fired the bullets that killed him. "And so you're just waiting there," Ortiz noted. "And then all of a sudden there was this, 'boom-boom-boom-boom.'"
A barrage of bullets tore into Garnder's chest, precisely hitting the target pinned over his heart. The twice-convicted killer was pronounced dead about two minutes later, at 12.15 am, as blood emerged in his dark blue prison jumpsuit. "It happened pretty quickly. I think a lot of us were not prepared for when it did actually happen," Yi noted.
At least 40 out of 49 executions carried out in Utah since the 1850s were by firing squad. Before Gardner, John Albert Taylor was executed on January 26, 1996, for raping and strangling an 11-year-old girl, the Daily Herald reported.