On April 2, 1985 Ronnie Lee Gardner, armed with a gun smuggled to him by a girlfriend, attempted to escape from a Salt Lake City, Utah courthouse. In the process he killed a local attorney and wounded a court bailiff before being recaptured on the courthouse lawn. Gardner tried to escape from a 5-year-to-life sentence he had received following a guilty plea in connection with the 1985 murder of a man in a Salt Lake City bar. He was in court in 1985 for a hearing on the 1984 conviction when he tried to escape. He was convicted of the murder/escape attempted and sentenced to death.

            Two decades later, on April 23, 2010, Gardner once again appeared in the Salt Lake City courthouse. This time to have his death warrant signed and an execution date set. Judge Robin Reese set June 18 as Gardner’s execution. The condemned killer surprised everyone when he politely informed Judge Reese: “I would like the firing squad, please.”

            Those few words sparked immediate international attention on Gardner’s impending execution.

            “It’s so unusual and harks back to a whole other era,” Richard Dieter, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told the media. “This is a spectacle in a sense.”

            It indeed harkens back to the January 17, 1977 execution of Gary Gilmore before a Utah firing squad. The Gilmore execution immortalized the condemned killer’s final words, “Let’s do it.”

            Utah is one of two states that authorizes the firing squad as a method of execution—the other being Oklahoma. And the only condemned prisoners who can request the firing squad in Utah as their preferred method of execution are those who were convicted before May 3, 2004—the date Utah adopted lethal injection as its sole method of execution.

            Last week Garner’s attorney, Andrew Parnes, went before the Utah Supreme Court arguing that had certain mitigating evidence been presented at Gardner’s trial, the jury probably would have returned a life sentence verdict.

            “Finality [of the case] is not the be-all and end-all,” Parnes told the court. “It’s fairness.”

            The death penalty system and courts hearing capital cases on appeal rarely ever invoke what’s called “fundamental fairness” guaranteed by the due process provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment.

            The justices on the Utah Supreme Court asked Parnes straight out why he thought evidence about Gardner’s organic brain damage and dysfunctional childhood, which have already been rejected at the federal court level, would result in a different outcome before another jury.

            “We believe there is a high probability that at least one juror could weigh this evidence differently,” Parnes replied.

            The justices will deny Gardner’s last appeal. He will be executed by firing squad on June 18. The moment the condemned inmate told the judge, “I would like the firing squad, please,” he effectively sealed his own fate. The national and international media attention the “firing squad” angle has already generated is enough alone to ensure his execution.

            While the State of Utah has some history of botched firing squad executions, it is certainly not a bad way to be put to death. A .30-.30 caliber bullet through the heart can produce an instant, painless death. It is certainly a more dignified method of execution than lethal injection. Gardner’s last steps to the chair into which he will be strapped will at least have a measure of control. He knows what is immediately ahead. He chose the fate. Lethal injection is so controlled, so antiseptic. It has a bad smell to it. It is almost fitting that the first lethal injection carried out in this country was just two years before George Orwell’s infamous “1984.”

            And for Gardner it is probably a preferred choice. He is already serving a life sentence and another would only ensure that he would definitely spend the rest of his natural life in a Utah prison. His June 18 execution will end that prospect, and for the first time generate a little more public interest in the death penalty. Lethal injections have become so routine that society is actually bored with them. A firing squad execution will snap the public back awake to this deadly business.