House OKs end to firing squad

Death row inmates will die only by lethal injection after Utah lawmakers voted Friday to end the use of firing squads.

The House of Representatives approved HB180 in a 54-12 vote Friday after signing off on a Senate amendment to retain the method as legal option in case lethal injection is ruled unconstitutional or otherwise impractical.

Gov. Olene Walker is expected to sign the bill.

Utah has used the method twice — with Gary Gilmore in 1977 and with John Albert Taylor in 1996 — since the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling reinstated the use of capital punishment.

But even with the passage of HB180, the practice will not immediately cease.

Four of 10 men currently on Utah's death row have selected the method and the bill is not retroactive. Lawmakers had considered that but feared opening new avenues for appeal that would further delay those executions.

"I think this is long overdue in Utah," sponsoring Rep. Sheryl Allen, R-Bountiful said after Friday's vote.

Allen failed to pass a similar bill in 1996. At the time, legislative leadership was not supportive of the idea, she said.

There was no debate of the bill in the House Friday, but Thursday, Sen. David Thomas, R-South Weber, said that elimination of the firing squad was a "watering down" of Utah's death penalty. The Senate passed the bill Thursday, 16-9.

Rep. Mike Morley, R-Spanish Fork, also voted against the bill. Morley would have preferred keeping the method on the books and giving judges or juries the authority to select the method by which the condemned would die. In that scenario, the method could be used in cases where the crime was particularly heinous, he said.

"I just think it's not great public policy to eliminate the options of the state" Morley said.

Two other states, Idaho and Oklahoma, retain the use of the firing squad under the circumstances approved by Utah lawmakers. Legal scholars have said the use of firing squads in Utah is rooted in a Mormon pioneer-era belief that justice was not done until a murderer's blood had been shed.

But The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has never officially adopted such a belief and has publicly said it did not oppose HB180.

Lawmakers have also approved a companion bill, SB80, that bans executions on Sundays, Mondays or holidays as a cost-saving measure because holding executions on those days cost the state up to $45,000 in overtime and extra expenses.

By law, executions occur at five minutes past midnight on a date ordered by the courts. Judges are required to set the date of an execution 30 to 60 days from the date a death warrant is signed. Under SB80, the courts will now have to consider the day of the week on which the 60th day falls and schedule the execution for the nearest weekday.

---

E-mail: jdobner@desnews.com