Ronnie Lee Gardner
Friday 7th March 2025 will mark for the first time since 2010 that someone was executed by firing squad in the United State of America. The execution will happen in South Carolina to a murderer named Brad Sigmon who killed his ex-girlfriend’s parents with a baseball bat for which he was sentenced in 2001 and there is a lot of controversy regarding the state’s use of the death penalty. Especially since the rest of the US had death by firing squad abolished back in 2004 but not without Ronnie Lee Gardner deciding that how he wanted to go out. Ronnie was a criminal as he committed such crimes like robbery, burglary, escape, murder of a man and capital murder. He had a rough upbringing that really shouldn’t be used to excuse his behaviour but rather explain it like for the fact that his parents got divorced when he was very young, his dad was an alcoholic and experienced inappropriate behaviour from from some of his siblings.
This culminated in illegal substance issues, burglarising any home he could break into and eventually robbery in 1980. Ronnie later escaped from being held at Utah State Prison’s maximum security unit in 1981 and almost died from a gunshot wound in the neck by someone who he thought was behaving inappropriately towards his wife and ended up behind bars again. 1983 saw him being identified as a ringleader in an incident that saw prisoners set fire to a cell block and barricaded it and in 1984 he faked being sick with a vomiting bug so he could escape from the hospital he was brought to.
This led to him robbing a tavern while under the influence of illegal substances and killing the bartender, shooting him in the face. During the trial the following year, Ronnie Lee Gardner attempted to escape from the courthouse and shot an attorney again in the face. He was sent back to prison for these crimes and amid hefty death penalty debates throughout the last 25 years of his life, Ronnie Lee Gardner was sentenced to death by firing squad. Amid the abolition of death by firing squad in the State of Utah in 2004, convicts who were sentenced prior to that date like Ronnie Lee Gardner could still choose it and that how Ronnie went out on 18 June 2010, the same day that Toy Story 3 was released in American cinemas. Death by firing squad was also how most of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed (except for Countess Constance Markievicz and Eamon De Valera who were exempted on the grounds of gender (Markievicz) and the possession of an American passport (De Valera)).
On the day of his execution, Gardner was led into a death chamber where he was strapped to a metal chair. He was dressed in regular prison clothes and a hood was placed over his head with a small aim point placed over his heart. Three members of the firing squad were armed with rifles containing bullets that expand and fragment upon impact, thus causing an instantaneous death. The firing squad aimed and fired at Ronnie Lee Gardner through a rectangular opening in the wall around 15 feet away. Witnesses like the media, a solicitor, law enforcement agencies, family members of the victims and the individual spiritual advisor and attorney will be witnesses alongside the firing squad of the execution though Ronnie’s family were witnesses to the execution from the outer walls of the prison.
This is how Brad Sigmon will go out and much like Ronnie Lee Gardner, he was given three options for execution method with the other two being lethal injection or electric chair but he chose firing squad and that’s how he will die, nearly 15 years after the last American to be executed by firing squad.