Last month, the US executed its first prisoner by firing squad in 15 years.
Double murderer Brad Sigmon, 67, died in a hail of bullets just after 6pm on Friday, March 7.
It was only the fourth time the firing squad had been used since the death penalty resumed 49 years ago. But it's unlikely to be the last.
Because, while the eighth amendment states that prisoners should not be subjected to 'cruel and unusual punishment', botched executions continue to happen with gut-wrenching regularity.
Reports include prisoners writhing in agony, taking up to an hour to die, and even blood 'squirting' everywhere when a doctor accidently cut an artery in an inmate's groin.
A new book examines the ongoing controversy - told through the lens of one death row inmate who begged the authorities to end his life - and explains why the black market in lethal drugs has led many states to revert to ancient, but more reliable modes of killing their most dangerous criminals.
'An Alabama man, John Louis Evans, endured three jolts of electricity over 14 minutes,' writesGianna Toboni in The Volunteer: The Failure of the Death Penalty in America and One Inmate's Quest to Die with Dignity.
'Only after his body caught fire and witnesses smelled burning flesh did his heart stop.'
A terrifying botched execution scene on the electric chair, from the Tom Hanks movie The Green Mile
Brad Sigmon's (left) execution by firing squad was only the fourth time the method had been used since the death penalty resumed 49 years ago. His victimsDavid and Gladys Larke (right)
That was back in 1983. Then, in 1994, with the electric chair proving unreliable, David Lawson became the first person in 30 years to die by lethal gas.
Writes Toboni: '[He] screamed and thrashed as 'cyanide gas rose about him' in North Carolina's death chamber, pleading with witnesses, 'I'm human! I'm human! Don't kill me!'
So when death by injection was signed into law in 1977, it was quickly adopted by most states as their preferred method of execution.
It was supposed to be quick and clean: a three-drug protocol that begins by inducing anesthesia and rendering the person unconscious, the second freezes the muscles, and the third causes cardiac arrest.
However, it didn't prove to be as clean as corrections departments hoped.There was at least one botched execution every year for the next eight years; four in 1990; and in 2022, there were a reported seven deaths that didn't go according to plan, leading to it being dubbed the 'year of the botched execution'.
In fact, of all methods of execution, lethal injection still has the highest rate of things going wrong.
As recently as February 2024, killer Thomas Creech - the longest-serving prisoner on Idaho's death row - had his execution called off after doctors tried for more than an hour to find a usable vein.
Creech's case was raised by mass murder suspect Bryan Kohberger's attorneysin November, as a reason he should not face the death penalty.
Trouble finding a vein is actually a fairly common occurrence, but in April 2014, it led to what one observer described as a scene straight out of a horror movie.
Asprisoner Clayton Lockett was strapped to a gurney in Oklahoma's death chamber, a phlebotomist attempted to find a vein, but without success.
'The doctor then tried to set the line into Lockett's groin,' writes Toboni. 'Instantly blood 'squirted' from Lockett's body, according to a witness.
Gianna Toboni's book examines the ongoing controversy surrounding the death penalty
While electrocution, hanging, the firing squad, and the gas chamber may sound more brutal than lethal injection, the data demonstrates the opposite may be true
Arizona's refurbished gas chamber, where inmates will be killed using hydrogen cyanide, the same deadly gas used at Auschwitz
'A paramedic said to the doctor setting the IV: 'You've got the artery. We've got blood everywhere.'
After this distressing initial setback, the execution went ahead. But, as the final two drugs were administered, Lockett regained consciousness.
One witness described what she saw: 'He starts moving and he was literally raising his head up, trying to get off the gurney and turning his head from side to side and talking.'
As Lockett violently thrashed around, wardens lowered the curtain to shield witnesses from the unfolding nightmare and waited it out.
It took Lockett a full 43 minutes to die.
Toboni writes what many others may be thinking: 'Right as I started to feel my sympathy swell for this man, I read up on his crime. Lockett drove a mentally disabled teenage girl to a rural area, raped her friend, shot the teenage girl, and buried her alive. My sympathy began to deflate.'
She adds: 'I had to remind myself, though, that the Eighth Amendment was not designed to discriminate; it was designed to protect all people from cruel and unusual punishment at the hands of the state, no matter how despicable their crimes.'
A shortage of the drugs required to perform executions has added to the complications, causing some states to resort to what can only be described as underhand tactics to get their hands on them, according to Toboni.
Clayton Lockett's botched execution was described as like a scene out of a horror movie
Just as Toboni started to feel sympathy for Lockett, she thought of his victim - 19-year-old Stephanie Neiman
'I was calling all around the world, to the back streets of the Indian subcontinent,' Oklahoma's Department of Corrections director Joe Allbaugh saidin a 2018 press conference, adding that his quest led him to deal with several 'seedy individuals.'
From unregulated basement pharma labs to past-their-use-by-date drugs, an underground supply system has quietly propped up death rows across the nation for years.
And in 2012, the Idaho Department of Corrections was accused of buying their drugs with a suitcase full of cash in a Walmart parking lot.
'States,' writes Toboni, 'struggling to acquire drugs and having to deal with legal challenges, have decided to return to those methods of the past: the electric chairs, gas chambers, and firing squads that had felt too archaic for modern-day America.
She adds: 'While electrocution, hanging, the firing squad, and the gas chamber may sound more brutal than lethal injection, the data demonstrates the opposite may be true.
'More than 7 percent of executions by lethal injection are botched, by far the highest of any method. But when it comes to the firing squad, that number is effectively zero.'
Former Utah state representative Paul Ray argued - and succeeded - in bringing back the firing squad in his state, and he's convinced it makes logical sense.
Responding to criticisms that the method is too brutal, he tells Toboni: 'See what they did to their victims and then let's talk about being brutal.
'The fact is these guys are monsters. They're not here because they sing too loud in the choir on Sunday. They're here because they brutalized people.
'The whole situation of taking a life is not pretty. If you have the death penalty, you gotta find a way to pull it off and understand that you can't window-dress it, which is what they've tried to do with lethal injections, or you get rid of it.'
Another expert Toboni interviewed, Joel Zivot, a prominent anesthesiologist at Emory University, told her: 'If you want to kill people, shoot them, do whatever you want. But nothing in science or medicine can be appropriated for killing.
'Medicine doesn't kill. that's what bullets are made for.'
The author concludes: 'The fact is, the firing squad is a bullet in the heart. And you don't need a doctor or expensive and hard-to-access drugs. You need a cowboy and a bullet. Both are easy to come by in this country.'
The Volunteer: The Failure of the Death Penalty in America and One Inmate's Quest to Die with Dignity by Gianna Toboni is published by Atria Books
