Utah legislators have voted to reintroduce firing squads for carrying out a death penalty if there is a shortage of execution drugs.
State prison authorities are facing an increasingly difficult task of getting hold of the cocktail of drugs used in lethal injections.
Pharmaceutical firms, mainly from Europe, have stopped supplying the drugs for use in executions, forcing a search for alternatives.
However recent botched lethal injections using new formulas have reignited the debate over whether it is a “cruel and unusal” punishment, which is unconstitutional.
Paul Ray, the Republican representative who put forward the bill, argued that using a team of trained marksmen was faster and more humane.
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The bill gives Utah options, he said. “We would love to get the lethal injection worked out so we can continue with that but if not, now we have a back-up plan.”
Opponents of the bill said firing squads were a cruel hangover from the state’s Wild West days and would earn Utah international condemnation.
“I think Utah took a giant step backward,” said Ralph Dellapiana, the director of Utahns for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. He called firing squads “a relic of a more barbaric past”.
Utah is one of several states to seek out new forms of capital punishment after a botched Oklahoma lethal injection last year and one in Arizona that took nearly two hours for the condemned man to die. Legislation to allow firing squads has been introduced in Arkansas this year.
Utah politicians stopped offering inmates the choice of a death by firing squad in 2004. They said execution by firing squad attracted excessive media attention and took attention away from victims and put it on murderers instead.
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A handful of inmates on Utah’s death row were sentenced before the law changed and still have the option of going before a firing squad once their court appeals are exhausted.
Utah’s last execution was by a firing squad in 2010, when Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by five police officers with .30-caliber Winchester rifles. The state has carried out three such executions since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
The first US inmate executed after that ruling was the convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, who was killed by firing squad in early 1977 in Utah.