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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 18, 2010 2:07:08 GMT 12
Gardner's date with firing squad revives talk of Mormon blood atonementWild West? — Gardner's date with firing squad revives talk of a Mormon ‘teaching’ that refuses to die.By PEGGY FLETCHER STACK - The Salt Lake Tribune | 4:41PM MDT - Friday, May 21, 2010 This is an undated file photo, circa 1850, showing John D. Lee, the man
convicted for the Mountain Meadows Massacre north of St. George.
Mormon settlers and Indians, led by Lee, killed 120 people from
Arkansas in a wagon train that was passing through on their way
to California. — Associated Press Photo/Utah Historical Society.After convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner announced last month his intention to be executed by firing squad, national and international reporters suggested it was a throwback to the wild, wild West.
Some Utahns, though, had a different explanation for why such an anachronistic execution technique remained an option in the 21st century: blood atonement.
The term refers to an arcane LDS belief that a murderer must shed his own blood — literally — to be forgiven by God. Since Mormon pioneers first entered the valley in 1847 until today, most of Utah's formal executions (until recent decades) have been by firing squad, which is a lot bloodier than hanging or lethal injection.
When Rep. Sheryl Allen, R-Bountiful, began proposing elimination of the firing-squad option in the late 1990s, the LDS Church itself did not object. Yet talk of blood atonement percolated “in quiet, backroom discussions,” she recalls. “A couple of people in prominent positions said to me, ‘We've got to have blood atonement’.”
By 2004, Allen says, all mention of the Mormon concept “just went away” and the measure passed.
The LDS Church disavows any connection to blood atonement, says spokesman Scott Trotter. “[It] is not a doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We believe in and teach the infinite and all-encompassing atonement of Jesus Christ, which makes forgiveness of sin and salvation possible for all people.”
The firing-squad option soon may be history, thanks to the Allen-led ban, but the mythic appeal of a bloody death as payment for sin persists in some Mormon quarters.
Even Gardner, who still could choose the firing squad for his scheduled June 18 execution because his original sentencing preceded the law change, told the Deseret News in 1996 that he would sue for the right to die that way.
“I guess it's my Mormon heritage,” he told the paper.
Blood atonement has played a role in books about the 1977 execution of Gary Gilmore, in Jon Krakauer's look at Mormonism and violence, in discussions of the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, even in this year's finale of HBO's Big Love.
Just two years ago, defense attorneys for accused murderer Floyd Maestas, who is not LDS, asked prospective jurors if they were familiar with blood atonement and, if so, what it meant to them. The issue never came up at trial, and Maestas was convicted and sentenced to die by lethal injection.
If the LDS Church doesn't preach blood atonement and the firing squad is virtually finished, why, then, does the notion linger in public and private conversations across the state and on the screen?
The answer may lie in history, symbolism and salvation.
Out of the past
As a young Mormon in Salt Lake City, legal scholar Martin R. Gardner heard adults attribute their support of capital punishment to this idea of blood atonement. As an LDS missionary in England in the late 1960s, he had a pamphlet, penned by the future Mormon prophet Joseph Fielding Smith, that described and defended the teaching.
“It was always around in the popular consciousness,” Gardner says in a phone interview from the University of Nebraska Law School, where he teaches criminal law.
In a 1979 article in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Gardner traced the teaching to Brigham Young, who believed even Christ's atoning sacrifice for humanity could not cover some sins, including murder, apostasy and egregious sexual misbehavior.
“There are transgressors,” Young said in an 1856 sermon, “who, if they knew themselves, and the only condition upon which they can obtain forgiveness, would beg of their brethren to shed their blood, that the smoke thereof might ascend to God as an offering to appease the wrath that is kindled against them.”
Those sentiments were replayed often by the Mormon prophet and his two counselors in the governing First Presidency, Jedediah M. Grant and Heber C. Kimball, during the 1850s, "a period of intense Mormon revivalism bordering on fanaticism," Gardner wrote in Dialogue .
The three also were key players in creating Utah's first capital-punishment law in 1851, which offered killers the choice of being shot, hanged or beheaded (another blood-shedding option).
Perhaps the most famous execution was that of LDS Bishop John D. Lee, shot by firing squad in 1877 for his involvement in the 1857 slaughter of 120 men, women and children known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Lee, who clearly believed in blood atonement, according to historian Ronald W. Walker, sat on his coffin and said to the sharp shooters, “Center my heart, boys. Don't mangle my body.” John D. Lee, seated at left in top file photo, poses next to his coffin prior
to his execution in 1877. The bottom illustration is from Frank Leslie's
“Illustrated Newspaper” showing the execution of Lee. John D. Lee was
convicted for the Mountain Meadows Massacre in which 120 travellers
from Arkansas were killed by Mormons and Indians.
— Associated Press Photo/Utah Historical Society/File.In 1888, the Utah Territorial Legislature eliminated beheading but adopted similar language that remained state law until 1980, when lethal injection replaced hanging.
The firing squad remained.
Modern times
In one of Utah's most notorious murder cases, Mormon Mark Hofmann forged dozens of LDS documents and, fearing discovery, killed two people with homemade pipe bombs in 1985.
Before Hofmann confessed, his father suggested that if guilty, his son would have to pay with his blood. Hofmann escaped the death penalty by pleading guilty to lesser charges and remains in prison.
Several years later, convicted child-killer Arthur Gary Bishop, who had been an Eagle Scout and Mormon missionary, worried about the state of his soul and whether salvation required his blood be spilled. Bishop consulted Gordon B. Hinckley, then a counselor in the LDS First Presidency and later the church president, who assured him that the method of execution made no difference to his place in the hereafter.
Hinckley said that blood atonement ended with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, according to sociologist L. Kay Gillespie, who described the exchange in The Unforgiven, a history of Utah's executions.
Still, Bishop said in a letter written before his June 10 death by lethal injection that his refusal to fight his execution was a “necessary requirement because of my past heinous crimes.”
In 1994, attorneys for condemned child-killer James Edward Wood in Pocatello, Idaho, argued that his defense was undermined by a visit from local LDS leaders who talked to him about shedding his own blood. Wood, a Mormon, was sentenced to death after pleading guilty to abducting, murdering and then later sexually molesting and dismembering 11-year-old Jaralee Underwood.
In response to the defense's allegations, the LDS First Presidency filed a document in an Idaho court denying the doctrine as it has been popularized. The church's affidavit included a copy of a 1978 letter from LDS apostle Bruce R. McConkie to University of Utah law student Thomas McAfee, outlining the church's position.
The Utah-based church supported capital punishment, the apostle wrote, but denied that blood atonement had anything to do with it.
Early church leaders' statements about blood atonement “pertain to a theoretical principle that has been neither revealed to nor practiced by us," wrote McConkie, who died in 1985. "I have never in over 60 years of regular church attendance heard a single sermon on the subject or even a discussion in any church class.”
Today, the LDS Church is neutral on the death penalty.
In the Mormon psyche
The symbolism of blood atonement mirrors the Christian story of Jesus' death on the cross as a ransom for all humanity.
The 19th-century Mormon pioneers added an emphasis on self-sacrifice for sin as a way to appease an angry God, says Levi Peterson, a Mormon novelist and retired Weber State University professor of English. It may have particularly appealed to the settlers, who were coping with a bloody and death-filled era.
Mormon doctrine was “full of promised blessings for the obedient, blessings which were not forthcoming as the Saints were driven from pillar to post,” says Peterson, who now lives in Issaquah, Wash. “An obverse logic took over: The Saints were obviously remiss in their duties; they deserved to suffer; the quickest way back to divine favor was to inflict more suffering on themselves.”
Their approach, he says, would be similar to that of Roman Catholics during the Middle Ages in the aftermath of the plague, which decimated Europe. Religious orders in which members would flog themselves as penance “arose to deal with the psychological effect of the terrible scourge.”
The idea of self-punishing was central to the “guilt I inherited or felt in the people around me,” says Peterson, who was reared in a small Mormon community in northern Arizona. “We believed in a severe God who didn't forgive easily. You had to pay with some kind of pain.”
Blood atonement also figured in Peterson's novel The Backslider, when one character's throat is cut to atone for his homosexual behavior and the protagonist considers killing himself for his continued sexual sins.
In 2010, these ideas may seem foreign to most members of the nearly 14 million-member LDS Church as it has moved far from its rural Utah roots, says Gardner, the Nebraska law professor and a member of his LDS stake's high council. “I just don't think people are aware of [blood atonement] anymore.”www.sltrib.com/ci_15126927
Ronnie Lee Gardner: Life and (impending) death of a double murdererInmate will ask state Thursday to spare his life so he can help start organic farm for troubled youths.By NATE CARLISLE - The Salt Lake Tribune | 6:31AM MDT - Monday, June 07, 2010 Ronnie Lee Gardner in 1985.A letter carrier opens a mailbox. Inside, he finds a pair of socks, which he unfolds to reveal a .38-caliber pistol and a wallet.
“Sorry,” reads a note pinned to the socks. “Here's the gun and wallet taken from the guard at the hospital. I don't want to hurt no one else. I just want to be free.”
Ronnie Lee Gardner wrote that note, discovered on August 11, 1984.
Days earlier, the athletic redhead, who would become one of Utah's most notorious criminals, had stolen both items while escaping from a prison guard at Salt Lake City's University Hospital.
Sorry or not, Gardner would go on to murder twice.
Thursday, he will plead with the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole to spare his life, just eight days before he's set to become the first American in 14 years to die by firing squad.
If the execution proceeds, it will end a life of crime that began with petty theft as a child, escalated to prostitution, robbery and assault, and culminated in the 1985 courthouse escape attempt that put a fatal bullet in attorney Michael Burdell's skull and critically wounded bailiff Nick Kirk.
As his scrawled note — and other acts — plainly stated, Gardner meant to be free. But what if someone got hurt? Gardner never considered that.
As one Utah Department of Corrections investigator put it in 1984: “He always does these horrendous things and then several days later wonders why everyone is so mad at him.”
Painful upbringing
When Gardner testifies Thursday, he'll speak of helping children avoid turning out like him, sharing a plan to start a Box Elder County farm where troubled youths can learn organic gardening.
“He thinks good, clean living chemical free, that's what kids need,” said Tyler Ayres, an attorney helping Gardner and his family finance the farm.
The plan may come off as a ploy to help Gardner avoid the death chamber, but few dispute Gardner knows something about troubled children.
Born on January 16, 1961, in Salt Lake City, he was one of nine children born to Ruth Lucas, a petite woman who drank while pregnant and lived to go out dancing when she wasn't.
Ruth and husband Dan Gardner, a heavy drinker who had trouble keeping a job, split when Ronnie was a toddler, leaving the boy to be mostly reared by a sister eight years older who took over for days at a time while their mother went out partying.
When Dan Gardner was around, he'd tell Ronnie he wasn't his son.
“He hit you. He was just awful,” a half sibling once testified.
The family moved around Salt Lake City but always seemed to live in squalor. At age 4, Gardner contracted meningitis. Lawyers and medical experts over the years have argued whether that illness damaged Gardner's brain.
His siblings were a problem, too. Gardner has said an older brother molested him. By the time he was 6, the boy's siblings had taught him to huff gas and glue. At age 10, police investigated a report Gardner had traded a BB gun for marijuana.
Teachers judged Gardner to be hyperactive and said he needed special classes.
“He couldn't learn or he felt like he couldn't learn or he wasn't as smart as the other kids,” a brother once testified. “He would get made fun of because he was in remedial classes and he got in a lot of fights over that.”
Gardner shoplifted. He prowled for cars to burglarize.
As he got older, his drug use escalated to include methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin. Gardner once told a psychiatrist he would get into a cold tub before injecting meth to mitigate his reaction to the drugs so he could take more.
“I probably injected heroin 200 times,” Gardner said, “maybe more.”
Already familiar with life in state custody as young as age 9, by his early teens, Gardner had spent time at the Utah State Hospital in Provo and the State Industrial School in Ogden, then Utah's primary juvenile corrections facility.
And, of course, he tried to escape.
He jumped over fences and swam canals to flee the school, hiding with friends or family before police apprehended him and sent him back.
“I wouldn't stay anywhere — anywhere where I had to be told what to do,” Gardner has said. “If somebody let me stay at their place and didn't really boss me around and stuff, we got along fine, but as soon as the rules started coming ... I would run away.”
Industrial school staffers nonetheless found Gardner to be charming and bright. Worker Stephen DeVries once testified he wanted to open a fruit stand in Jackson, Wyo., and asked Gardner to manage it.
“I had enough trust and faith in him,” DeVries said.
But the plan fell through.
Father issues
The few men a young Gardner viewed as role models only encouraged his criminal tendencies.
Siblings said he idolized his mother's subsequent husband Bill Lucas, serving as a lookout while the man burglarized homes from Parleys Canyon to Wyoming.
Lucas stole mercury from gas meters to sell and brought it home in Mason jars. Gardner and his siblings played with the toxic gray balls, rolling them along the dirty floor.
Lucas spent 1968 in the Wyoming State Penitentiary for grand larceny.
Later, when Gardner was a young teen, a brother met Jack Statt at a bus stop and agreed to perform oral sex for $25. The brother, and eventually Gardner, ended up living with Statt, who even became Gardner's official foster parent for a few months in 1975.
Statt performed sex acts on the boys. Gardner also later admitted to psychologists that he worked as a prostitute while living with the man. Those psychologists called Statt a pedophile, but Gardner has said his time with Statt was the most stable of his life and one of the few times somebody seemed to care about him.
“Jack was a good man, and he tried to help us out,” Gardner said.
New family
Gardner met another who seemed to care for him when he was 15 and briefly out of state custody.
A teenage Debra Bischoff lived in the same Salt Lake City complex as Gardner's mother and found herself drawn to his athletic build, red hair and wide grin.
“He was very nice,” Bischoff said in a telephone interview. “Very caring. He never put me in the rough situations he was in throughout his life. He sheltered me from that stuff.”
Bischoff got pregnant, and in May 1977 gave birth to Gardner's first child, a daughter.
By then Gardner was back in custody, but Bischoff remained committed to him for seven years. They lived together when Gardner was not in the industrial school or in jail.
Finally freed from custody in 1979, Gardner planned a second child with Bischoff. He was there for the February 1980 birth of their son.
The same month the boy was born, Gardner, then 19, entered the Utah State Prison for the first time, convicted of robbery.
“It broke my heart,” Bischoff said. “At that point, I really loved Ronnie.”
Shot in the neck
As a prisoner, Gardner's criminal reputation flourished.
Just months after his incarceration in a minimum security unit, he obtained some amphetamine tablets, got high, and with another inmate, climbed over the Draper prison's fence to escape.
Bischoff had slept with another man while Gardner was in prison and feared Gardner would come looking for her.
He did.
“We had a talk about a few things,” Bischoff said, “and it was an emotional time for us because I told him how I felt when he went to prison. It was the first time I'd ever seen Ronnie cry.”
The next few days would be the last time he would spend with Bischoff and their children outside prison.
Gardner took a gun and went to South Salt Lake to confront the man with whom Bischoff had slept. The man fired a .22-caliber bullet into Gardner's neck.
Police captured Gardner as he tried to hitch a ride away from the scene. He earned more time in prison for the escape and other crimes he'd committed while on the loose.
He tried escaping twice more, getting caught the first time between two security fences, but succeeding on August 06, 1984, after faking an illness and attacking the guard at University Hospital. Gardner punched Don Leavitt hard enough to shatter an eye socket and break his nose in 16 places. Doctors had to wire Leavitt's entire face.
Outside the hospital, Gardner jabbed Leavitt's pistol into medical student Michael Lynch's forehead and ordered Lynch to take him on his Yamaha to an apartment complex, where he stole the student's clothes and tied him up with his own shoelaces.
On the run, Gardner turned to his family for help. His only full-blooded brother put the gun, wallet and note in the mailbox for police to find, not wanting them to think Gardner still had the gun.
First killing
Murder remained about the only crime for which Gardner had not been convicted, but not for long.
High on cocaine on the night of October 09, 1984, he went to Salt Lake City's Cheers Tavern with Darcy McCoy, the sister of a cousin's wife, intent on robbing the place, according to McCoy.
Melvyn Otterstrom, a 37-year-old comptroller tending bar to earn extra money, was on his back behind the bar when Gardner pressed the muzzle against one of his nostrils and fired, killing him.
Gardner has complained Otterstrom fought back when robbed, but investigators found nothing to suggest the larger and special forces-trained Otterstrom put up a fight, said John Johnson, the Salt Lake City police detective who investigated the murder.
“My opinion is, it was an execution,” Johnson said.
Three weeks later, police acting on a tip arrested Gardner at a cousin's home.
Gardner was charged with first-degree murder and other escape-related felonies. Gardner knew he would never be released from prison. He considered his options.
“One was escape,” Gardner testified later. “The other was possible suicide if I had to spend the rest of my life in prison.”
He chose escape. Police ready Ronnie Lee Gardner, 23, for transport to the hospital after he was wounded
April 02, 1985, in a bloody escape attempt at Metropolitan Hall of Justice in Salt Lake City.
Gardner wounded a bailiff and murdered an attorney in the effort.Infamy arrives
Gardner has never divulged his accomplices, but on April 02, 1985, two prison guards escorted Gardner to a hearing at Salt Lake City's Metropolitan Hall of Justice. A woman thrust a gun at him and Gardner turned, pointing the weapon at the guards.
One guard, Luther Hensley, said it appeared Gardner was trying to shoot him but couldn't get the gun to fire. Hensley drew his .38-caliber pistol and fired one bullet into Gardner's upper right chest.
Gardner took cover behind a Coke machine, then retreated a few feet away to the courthouse's archives room. After exiting the room and trying to board an elevator, he fired at Michael Burdell. The bullet pierced the attorney's right eye.
Burdell said, “Oh, my God,” and collapsed. He died at Holy Cross Hospital about 45 minutes later.
Nick Kirk, an unarmed bailiff, ran toward the room worried about the safety of the judge for whom Kirk worked.
Gardner fired another shot, striking Kirk in the lower abdomen. By then, dozens of police officers had converged on the courthouse as Gardner attempted a frenzied escape.
He had made his way to the sidewalk between the street and the complex when they drew their guns and moved toward him.
But Gardner surrendered before they reached him. He threw the revolver away, dropped to his knees and fell face first into the grass.
“Don't shoot,” Gardner yelled. “I don't have a gun.”
‘The crazy bad guy’
Just 24 years old, Gardner's convictions seemed a forgone conclusion. In June 1985, he pleaded guilty to Otterstrom's murder and received life without parole.
On October 22 of that year, a seven-woman, five-man jury deliberated just three hours before convicting him of capital murder in Burdell's death.
Gardner had been smiling and cheerful throughout the trial but grew serious after the verdicts were read.
“He wasn't surprised,” defense attorney Andrew Valdez told reporters that day.
The jury sentenced Gardner to death three days later. His cousin's wife spent eight years in prison as his accomplice in the courthouse escape. Ronnie Lee Gardner in 1985.In the 25 years since, Gardner has been a consistent problem for guards.
On October 28, 1987, Gardner broke a glass partition between inmates and visitors and he and other inmates barricaded the doors. Gardner and his female visitor had sex while other inmates in the room watched and cheered.
On September 25, 1994, Gardner got drunk on alcohol he fermented in his sink. He took a shank made from a pair of metal sunglasses and stabbed a black inmate in the neck, chest, back and arms.
The stabbing occurred two months after a white supremacist stabbed a black inmate to death at the Gunnison prison. Kevin Nitzel, who investigated Gardner's stabbing for the Utah Department of Corrections, thinks Gardner wanted to steal the spotlight.
“Ronnie Lee likes to play up his image of being the crazy bad guy,” he said.
For the stabbing, prosecutors charged Gardner with another capital crime under a little-used Utah law reserved for attacks in prison. But three years after the stabbing, the Utah Supreme Court determined Gardner could not be charged with a capital offense for an attack in which no one died.
‘I am burnt out’
Gardner's behavior has earned him harsher treatment than most of Utah's 10 death-row inmates.
Eight are allowed out of their cells to recreate for up to three hours a day. Gardner and Troy Kell, who was convicted of the fatal stabbing at the Gunnison prison, are allowed out of their cells for one hour every day and live in a different section of the Draper prison.
At least three times, Gardner has said he wants to stop appealing his sentence. He's tired of his near-solitary confinement and the pain from ailments his attorneys have said include rheumatoid arthritis, hepatitis C and leukemia.
“I am burnt out. I can't deal with it anymore,” Gardner said at a hearing on September 17, 1999. “Eventually what is going to happen is the prison is putting me in predicaments where I am going to end up killing somebody else.”
But every time, his lawyers have persuaded him to continue appealing. In this week's hearing, Gardner will ask the board to lessen his sentence to life without parole. If the board refuses, it will take a surprise order from a court to stop the June 18 execution.
Bischoff and their children have maintained contact with Gardner over the years. Gardner has three grandchildren, she said.
He's made other friends over the years, too.
Robert Macri, an attorney who was with Burdell in the courthouse archives room and testified against Gardner in 1985, began visiting Gardner in prison. Marci in 1999 said he taught Gardner grammar, yoga and about King Arthur and chivalry.
A book Gardner read about organic gardening sparked his idea for the farm, which Ayres said would accept children with legal or substance abuse problems.
Gardner's brother acquired the 160-acre lot in north of the Great Salt Lake. It is vacant and undeveloped.
Ayres said Gardner has written to Oprah Winfrey and others asking for donations to start the farm. He doesn't know how Gardner's execution would affect fundraising.
Ayres, who also helped Gardner write his will, said the man is sincere in his wish to help children.
But if ever given the chance, Gardner would try to escape again, Ayres said. “He knows how to look for those opportunities.”• In addition to interviews, sources for this story included transcripts of Ronnie Lee Gardner's 1985 trial, court opinions, appeal proceedings and a deposition Gardner gave in 1999.www.sltrib.com/ci_15228560
Executioners share motives, describe their roles in death by firing squadBy ROBERT KIRBY - The Salt Lake Tribune | 9:34PM MDT - Saturday, June 12, 2010 The wall facing the chair to be used for Ronnie Lee Gardner's execution.
— Photo: Utah State Department of Corrections.Shortly before midnight on Jan. 25, 1996, five men gathered at a table in a darkened room at the Utah State Prison and prepared to kill a sixth.
They watched the clock and waited. In just moments, John Albert Taylor would die for the 1989 murder of Charla Nicole King, an 11-year-old Washington Terrace girl he raped, then strangled with a telephone cord.
Convicted of aggravated murder and sentenced to die, Taylor spent a decade on death row before abruptly ending his appeals and requesting the punishment be carried out. At 12:03 a.m., the five-man squad leaned into their rifles and shot him to death.
In the 14 years since, the men — all police officers — have kept largely silent about their participation in what would be the nation's first firing squad execution since Gary Gilmore's in 1977.
As they did every day, the officers performed their sworn duty to enforce the law even when they found it personally disagreeable or unpopular.
“To me it was just an assignment, nothing more than getting an order to do something like kicking in a door to serve a warrant,” said a member of the squad, one of three who agreed to break their silence as another firing squad execution — only the third in the nation since Gilmore's — looms in Utah.
They want to help people understand.
“I don't think any of us were motivated by a sense of revenge,” another of the trio said. “We took it very seriously and wanted to do it right.”
The Tribune agreed not to identify the three who spoke, all of whom were officers in the same police agency in 1996. One has since retired; the other two are now supervisors in that agency. Married, fathers and religious to one degree or another, all knew the details of King's murder.
How they came to be part of the firing squad is simple: Their police agency designated one of the officers to select the other four.
He said he approached one of the other two interviewed, and his fellow officer didn't hesitate. A death penalty advocate, he felt comfortable carrying out the court's order.
The third officer felt much the same. Proficient with firearms, he was more concerned the legal process may break down.
“I was worried about some lawyer working the courts to have us all charged with homicide,” he said. “That still worries me.”
The officer said he chose members of the squad for their maturity and responsibility. “They were well trained and I knew they wouldn't go around bragging about it. I wanted the best in order to get the job done right.”
In the case of Ronnie Lee Gardner, the shooters will come from the Unified Police Department. Salt Lake County Sheriff Jim Winder has said they must volunteer and then will be selected by a lottery.
Winder has declined to share any other details, so the process the three members of the Taylor squad spelled out may be the only description available of the lead-up to a firing squad execution.
Several weeks before Taylor's death by firing squad, a prison official interviewed the officers and cleared them for participation.
Squad members traveled to the prison to practice. The actual death chamber was replicated in an old warehouse, including the execution chair and a screen with gun ports through which the officers would fire.
“There was a table with sandbags and rifles on it,” one of the officers said. “The chair where Taylor would sit was only 17 feet away.”
They practiced for accuracy and to ensure everyone was familiar with the process so it would go smoothly.
“They wanted a single boom,” one of the officers said. “They didn't want a whole bunch of shots.”
The more they practiced, the more they realized the execution was actually going to take place.
“My wife was worried over possible retaliation from people if they learned I was one of the shooters,” said one officer, who also talked to his ecclesiastical leader. “I wrestled with the morality. I'm not a super-religious or spiritual person. I go to church every Sunday. I did wrestle with ‘thou shall not kill’. But I still felt that it was part of my job.”
Another of the trio was less troubled. He likened Taylor's execution to “returning a defective product to the manufacturer.”
The third officer said he wasn't troubled in the slightest by his involvement and would do it again if asked.
On the evening before the execution, a “blacked out” van picked the officers up and drove them to the prison. They sat in the “gun room” and waited several hours.
Just before midnight, the Winchester Model 94 30.30-caliber rifles were loaded. Four had live rounds. The fifth contained a wax bullet.
A prison official selected each rifle at random from the table and handed them to another sitting out of sight in a small room. The second official loaded the rifle but was unable to see the position it was returned to on the table.
Corrections officers brought Taylor into the execution chamber and strapped him to the chair. He appeared calm and cooperative.
“If I have to give the man anything in this whole process, it's that he walked into the room under his own power and sat down,” one of the officers said.
Everyone watched two phones on the wall, one of which was a line to the attorney general, the other to the governor, both of whom could have authorized a delay.
“By then, I didn't think it would ring,” one of the officers said. “I knew this was actually going to happen.”
When ordered, all five officers got into position behind their rifles. The death chamber was brilliantly lit, with the lights shining directly on Taylor. The barrels of the rifles did not extend through the ports in the wall.
“Then they opened the curtains to the witness area,” one officer said. “I don't remember being able to see who was there, but I knew they couldn't see us.”
The firing squad captain walked down the line and tapped each shooter on the shoulder.
“If you were ready to go, you held up a thumb,” one of the officers said.
The captain called off the cadence: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Everyone fired. The target patch pinned to Taylor's shirt flew off.
“There was one boom,” one of the officers said. “My first thought was ‘holy shit, we missed’.” “From my vantage point there was absolutely no reaction from Taylor. Nothing. I honest to God thought we missed.”
Except for Taylor's head relaxing and dropping forward, none of the officers recalled any visible reaction.
“There was no gore, no real sign of blood,” one of them recalled. “My wife recorded the news accounts at home and there was all this stuff about blood and the smell of death. I got quite upset about that.”
When the drapes to the witness area closed and a Taylor's body was removed, the shooters were allowed to briefly examine the execution chamber. They then were driven back to the drop-off point and released.
“I got home at 3 a.m. and was back in the office by 8 a.m. the following morning,” one said. “By 9 a.m. we were kicking in a door on a narcotics warrant.”
Another said he slept fine that night and has had no negative feelings about his participation. He said he would volunteer again if the opportunity presented itself.
The third of the trio was more circumspect. He has had mixed feelings about his involvement, but has come to terms with them.
After it was over, they were offered counseling.
“I didn't need it,” the third officer said. “On the one hand, I had a good feeling that we had successfully completed the task. But I also felt guilty about volunteering for it. I would have felt better if I had been directly ordered to be on it. Instead, I volunteered. I felt a responsibility to do what I was asking the others to do.”
“I had issues about shooting a guy strapped in a seat, helpless. But the state had ordered us to do this and we had a job to do. I don't regret doing it, but I would never do it again.”www.sltrib.com/news/ci_15279853
Firing squads, lethal injection and the human bodyDeath penalty: Gunshots, if they hit the mark, are the quickest — but are they painless?By KIRSTEN STEWART - The Salt Lake Tribune | 12:43AM MDT - Sunday, June 13, 2010 In this January 17, 1977 file photo, this is the view the five executioners
had for the Gary Gilmore execution at the Utah State Prison, in Point of
the Mountain, Utah. View looks through the slot for the rifle pointed
toward the chair where Gilmore was seated.
— Associated Press Photo/File.Convicted for killing a man over a game of cards, Wallace Wilkerson strode to his execution in a white felt hat, carrying a cigar and refusing to be blindfolded or strapped to a chair. He would die, “like a man,” he said, “looking my executioners right in the eye.”
But at the command to fire, Wilkerson drew up his shoulders, shifting the target fixed to his shirt and misdirecting the shooters. Four slugs tore into his body, missing his heart and pitching him into the dirt screaming, “Oh, my God! My God! They have missed.”
A full 27 minutes later, he was pronounced dead.
Though terribly botched, the 1879 execution was an anomaly. Most firing squads — by choice or default, the most popular means of execution in Utah — have been fast and flawless. Only one other time, in 1951, did shooters miss their mark, leaving the condemned to bleed to death.
If all goes as rehearsed with modern-day law enforcement sharpshooters and the condemned strapped to a chair, the shredding of the heart and lungs by four .30-caliber slugs causes an almost immediate loss of consciousness, said Utah Medical Examiner Todd Grey. Only a shot to the head, rejected for disfiguring the body, would be more lethal, “almost instantaneous,” he said.
Lethal injection, by comparison, is slow and has been more error-prone. It's more expensive, complicated and ethically troublesome for the medical community, leading a pediatrician in Ohio to question the popular assumption that it's more humane.
“I'm personally opposed to capital punishment,” said Jonathan Groner, associate professor of surgery at Ohio State University and the director of Trauma Programs at Ohio's Children's Hospital. But “in terms of duration and dependability, the firing squad wins.”
Utah lawmakers abandoned the firing squad in 2004, responding to the public's growing distaste for an execution method perceived as a bloody throwback to the Wild West.
Some death row inmates, like Ronnie Lee Gardner — sentenced to die June 18 by firing squad — could choose to be grandfathered in. But the method in vogue now, and for the foreseeable future, is lethal injection.
Borrowing from anesthesiology, lethal injection has “medicalized” the process, making it more sterile, distant and publicly palatable, Utah death penalty observer and Weber State University professor Kay Gillespie writes in The Unforgiven: Utah's Executed Men.
“Even the terminology — gurney, solution, IV — sounds more like an operation than an execution, more like a surgical procedure than a sentence of the justice system,” he said.
There are variations, but in Utah, lethal injection involves strapping an inmate onto a gurney and inserting an IV, or intravenous line, into each arm. An anesthetic, sodium thiopental, is given at massive doses to extinguish consciousness. Then flows a paralytic agent, which stops the inmate's breathing, followed by a fatal dose of potassium chloride, which stops the heart.
Dying in “one's sleep” is supposed to be painless and preferable to:
• A gunshot wound.
• Hanging, at best a minutes-long process in which the cervical spine is broken, the diaphragm is paralyzed and the prisoner suffocates.
• Gas chambers, or asphyxiation by cyanide gas.
• Electrocution, which has left prisoners bloodied and burned, with some requiring repeated jolts before they stopped breathing.
But in 2006, a federal judge found evidence that prisoners executed by lethal injection in California had not stopped breathing before technicians gave the paralytic, raising the possibility that prisoners felt pain or were slowly suffocated by the paralytic.
And news accounts detail rare instances of IV lines failing (one kinked, one clogged and another popped out, spraying witnesses with its contents), and more commonly, the prolonged poking and prodding of prisoners for a suitable vein. Lethal injection isn't performed by medically trained professionals since doctors are ethically prohibited from participating.
In Ohio in 2009, Romell Broom's execution was called off after two hours of hunting for an injection site. The convicted murderer, kidnapper and rapist's fate is still being weighed in court as lawyers argue whether it's legal to re-execute someone.
There is no way to objectively compare one person's agony to another's, said Groner. “But would you rather get shot or have someone poke around in your arms for an hour?”
The absence of a medical expert isn't addressed by Ohio's new, simpler one-drug execution method, nor by machines purchased by some states to monitor an inmate's heart rate, oxygen levels and brain waves. Not all inmates are monitored, and there's still ample room for human error, said Groner. “People are being tortured for lack of expertise.”
So where does that leave states looking to upgrade their death machinery?
“There is no humane way to execute, but we pretend there is,” wrote Gillespie, neither a critic nor apologist for the death penalty. “It is as though we have tried to totally camouflage the procedure to avoid any semblance of death. The fact may be that in many subtle ways, lethal injection is more cruel than previous methods.”
Common sense dictates gunshot wounds hurt. How much?
“I wouldn't care to speculate,” said Grey, whose office performs autopsies on the state's executed and issues their death certificates. “It's all killing. I guess it's a matter of personal preference.”______________________________________ FIRING SQUAD FACTS
Number of executions: Utah has conducted 50 executions since 1852, 40 by firing squad.
Time to die: 15.4 seconds to 27 minutes.
Last firing squad: John Albert Taylor in 1996.
Unusual: John W. Deering in 1938 allowed a prison doctor to monitor his heart rate on an electrocardiogram. It went from 72 beats per minute to 180 when he was strapped into chair. His heart stopped beating 15.6 seconds after the bullets entered his body.
Source: “The Unforgiven: Utah's Executed Men” by Weber State University professor L. Kay Gillespie.www.sltrib.com/ci_15279879
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Jun 20, 2010 0:51:44 GMT 12
Gardner executed: 25 years on death row ends in hail of bulletsBy CHRISTOPHER SMART - The Salt Lake Tribune | 6:05AM MDT - Friday, June 18, 2010 Ronnie Lee Gardner listens to proceedings during his commutation hearing at the Utah State Prison in
Draper, Utah, Thursday, June 10, 2010. Next to him at the table is his attorney Andrew Parnes.
— Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune.Ronnie Lee Gardner's quarter-century on death row ended at 12:20 today when a firing squad executed one of Utah's most notorious killers. His death signaled the end of a gut-wrenching saga for the families of the Utah men Gardner murdered or wounded and those who had hoped to spare the killer's life.
Barb Webb, daughter of Gardner victim Nick Kirk, sobbed when news of the execution came.
“I'm so relieved it's all over,” she said, hugging her daughter, Mandi Hull. “I just hope my sister, who just passed away, and my father, and all of the other victims are waiting for his sorry ass. I hope they get to go down after him.”
Just after midnight, Gardner's family members leaned against each other in a tight cluster and sobbed. They played Lynyrd's Skynyrd's ‘Free Bird’, singing along.
“I'm just glad it's over. I'm glad he's free,” said Randy Gardner after his brother's death.
Other Gardner relatives whooped and cheered as they released 24 balloons decorated with messages.
“I love you, Ron!” some of them screamed, falling into each other's arms. Gardner's daughter, Brandie Gardner, put her hands to her face and sobbed.
For the nation, the 49-year-old Salt Laker's death by four bullets marked what could be the last execution of its kind in the country.
Utah is the only state still using a firing squad, and only four men on death row could still choose it — the state switched to lethal injection in 2004.
Gardner's story went global when he told a judge how he preferred to become one of the 50-odd people executed in the United States each year: “I would like the firing squad, please.”
Some hope the attention will highlight problems meting out capital punishment in Utah. Both death penalty opponents and believers decry the nearly 25 years Gardner spent between his conviction and execution for the April 1985 murder of Michael Burdell.
Earlier this month, attorneys for the son of a Provo woman killed in her home during a 1985 robbery by death row inmate Douglas Stewart Carter asked a federal judge to speed up appeals in that 25-year-old case.
“My dad passed away last year. He didn't have any closure,” said Gary Olesen, son of victim Eva Olesen. “I'm hoping Gardner's execution will help. But I'm not sure it will.”
Jani S. Tillery, from the Maryland Crimes Victims' Resource Center, said her client is only asking the court to “move forward.”
Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who has pushed to streamline death row appeals, said the run-up to today's execution may have generated legislative momentum to remake state law.
“I'm hearing from a lot of people, 25 years is just too long,” said Shurtleff. “It's ridiculous.”
Ralph Dellapiana, an attorney affiliated with Utahns for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said he hopes Gardner's death will spark discussion “that this arbitrary process be changed to something else.”
The last two executions in Utah have been of killers who halted their own death-row appeals. John Albert Taylor was executed in 1996 after eight years on death row, while Joseph Mitchell Parsons spent 11 years on death row before his 1999 execution.
Unlike them, Gardner has fought to the bitter end.
Gardner's appellate attorneys have argued unsuccessfully over the years that if his jurors had known about the mitigating facts surrounding his troubled childhood — poverty, drugs, violence and sex abuse — they would have sentenced him to life in prison.
As part of Gardner's bid for commutation before the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole, three of those jurors signed affidavits saying they would have sentenced Gardner to life without parole if that possibility had been available. A fourth said he would have seriously considered it. Life without parole was not possible until 1992 in Utah.
Gardner himself told the parole board last week he was a changed man from the person who shot and killed Melvyn Otterstrom at The Cheers Tavern on October 24, 1984.
Just before an April 02, 1985, court hearing in the Otterstrom case, Gardner killed attorney Michael Burdell and seriously wounded bailiff Nick Kirk in a failed courthouse escape.
Gardner said over the past decade he had become cognizant of the pain he had caused his victims and their families. He told the parole board he had developed a new awareness of why he had been so violent and impulsive.
“I can't even apologize to the victims, and it makes me sad,” said a crying Gardner. “People at that courthouse that didn't even get hurt, I'm sure it traumatized them.”
He told the parole board he wanted to spend the rest of his life counseling young inmates and helping abused children with an organic farm program. Gardner also argued his execution would bring the families of his victims little comfort.
“I know killing me is going to hurt them just as bad,” he said. “I've been on the other side of that gun.”
Yet Gardner was unable to shed his reputation.
Over the past 25 years Gardner has captured headlines numerous times for attacks on other inmates and misbehavior including a standoff at a prison visiting room where he broke down a glass partition, barricaded the door and had sex with his half-brother's wife as officers looked on helplessly.
Members of the victims' families argued both for and against Gardner's death. All said they wanted to end a long nightmare.
“This story must be allowed to slip into history,” said Jason Otterstrom during the commutation hearing. “Our families need peace.”
The parole board unanimously voted against Gardner. A flurry of last-minute appeals to the governor, U.S. Supreme Court, and 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also failed.
A bishop with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints served as Gardner's spiritual adviser at the end of his life, his attorneys said.
Gardner became the 1,213th person nationally and the seventh in Utah to be executed since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
The justices halted executions four years earlier, finding the ultimate punishment was not being applied equally.
Gardner's life and death exemplifies a troubling pattern often seen by psychologists, said Craig Haney, a University of California psychologist who has studied people who commit violent crimes for 30 years.
“We know that abused and neglected children grow up to be impulsive and violent,” Haney told the parole board. “Ronnie Lee Gardner is a perfect model for someone who grows up to commit horrendous crimes.”• Tribune reporters Nate Carlisle, Pamela Manson, Sheena McFarland, and Matthew D. LaPlante contributed to this report.www.sltrib.com/news/ci_15324081
Two loud bangs end 25 years on death row for GardnerThe Salt Lake Tribune | 8:03AM MDT - Friday, June 18, 2010 Utah Department of Corrections Executive Director Tom Patterson
addresses the media early Friday morning following the
execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner by firing squad.
— Photo: Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune.Five shots.
Four bullets.
With two loud bangs in quick succession, Ronnie Lee Gardner's quarter century on Utah's death row ended.
At 17 minutes past midnight Friday, Utah Department of Corrections officials confirmed the death of a man whose life was defined by sex abuse, drug addiction, poverty, criminality and murder.
But in the final hours of his life, friends and family members said, Gardner was at peace.
And in his final minutes, witnesses said, the calm, condemned man exchanged private words with Utah's prison chief before being strapped to the execution chair and asked if he had any final words.
“I do not. No,” he said.
A hood was pulled over his head. An executioner counted back from five. The shots rang out.
Journey to death row
If the man known as one of Utah's most notorious criminals was a monster, family members said, it was only as a result of his abusive upbringing. And Gardner's appellate attorneys long had argued that if his jurors had known more about his childhood, they would have sentenced him to life in prison, instead of death.
Born in Salt Lake City in 1961, Gardner was 6 when his siblings taught him to huff gas and glue. By age 9, he had landed in state custody for theft. When he was 10, police investigated a report that Gardner had traded a BB gun for marijuana. A stepfather used a teenage Gardner as a lookout while he burglarized homes. A foster father paid Gardner for sex.
In 1980, Gardner was convicted of his first adult crime — a robbery. In 1985, while serving time for a subsequent robbery, he attacked an officer at Salt Lake City's University Hospital, stole his gun, and forced a medical student to help him escape. Two months later, Gardner shot and killed Melvyn Otterstrom, a bartender at Cheers Tavern in Salt Lake City.
Arrested and charged with murder for Otterstrom's death, Gardner escaped from custody when a female accomplice slipped him a gun at a Salt Lake City courthouse. During his escape, Gardner wounded bailiff Nick Kirk and killed attorney Michael Burdell. A jury sentenced him to death.
The intervening 25 years were punctuated by attacks on other Utah State Prison inmates and a standoff in a visiting room during which he broke a glass partition, barricaded the door and had sex with his half-brother's wife as officers looked on helplessly.
At peace with his fate
In a final appeal to the parole board last week though, Gardner described himself as a changed man. His daughter, Brandie Gardner, said she believes that to be true.
“Up until 10 years ago, I would have told you he was a bad person,” she said. “But something changed in him.”
The convicted killer said he wanted to help sponsor a farm for troubled youth, “so that they don't end up like he did,” Brandie Gardner explained.
His appeals exhausted, Gardner spent the final hours of his life in an observation cell about 90 feet from the execution chamber. There, prison officials said, he read a spy novel called Divine Justice, watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy, consulted with a bishop from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and visited with his attorneys.
“He was at peace,” attorney Tyler Ayres said. “He even laughed a few times during our conversation, and that helped put me at ease.”
As Ayres turned to leave, Gardner called out after him, “don't get into any trouble.”
“You either,” Ayres said, turning back to a man he had come to see as a friend.
Mourning a killer
Under prison policy and state law, Gardner had the right to invite as many as five witnesses to his execution. But in the weeks before he was killed, the 49-year-old prisoner told his loved ones he did not want them to watch him die.
Saying they wanted to respect the condemned man's wishes, while being as close to him as possible in his final hours, more than 20 members of Gardner's family gathered in a parking lot, across the interstate, overlooking the prison where he was to be killed.
“He believes he needs to pay for what he's done,” Brandie Gardner said. “He absolutely believes that. But at the same time, people should know that what they're doing is murder.”
As the sun set, dozens of death penalty protesters joined family members in a candlelight vigil. One held a sign that read: “Who Would Jesus Execute?” Another implored media onlookers to “tell the world of the barbarity of this act.”
Moments after midnight, family members cranked up a car stereo, which played a concert recording of Lynyrd Skynyrd's ‘Free Bird’. They leaned against each other in a tight cluster, sobbing and shouting as they awaited confirmation of Gardner's death.
A sudden, violent death
Gardner was already locked into the chair with six thick straps, including one that held his head upright against the chair, when a curtain opened to reveal the death chamber to nine media witnesses.
“I could see him moving his eyes,” television reporter Sandra Yi said.
“He didn't look scared,” radio talk show host Doug Fabrizio said.
The prison warden draped the black hood over Gardner's head. A small target was affixed by Velcro over his left breast.
The five executioners readied their weapons, only four of which were loaded with live ammunition.
At 12:15 a.m., the shots rang out.
“It was so sudden, so quick — boom boom — just like that,” television news reporter Marcos Ortiz said.
Several of the witnesses described watching as Gardner's hand and arm continued to move after he was shot.
“He clenched his fist and then let go,” Fabrizio said. “And then he clenched it again.”
Two minutes after the shots, the medical examiner lifted Gardner's hood to reveal his ashen face, mouth agape.
The killer was dead.
Calls for reform
For the nation, Gardner's death marked what could be the final execution of its kind in the country. Utah is the only state still using a firing squad, and only four men on death row could still choose it. The state switched to lethal injection in 2004.
Some hope the attention will highlight problems meting out capital punishment in Utah. Both death penalty opponents and believers decry the nearly 25 years Gardner spent between his conviction for Burdell's murder and the execution.
Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who has pushed to streamline death row appeals, said the run up to today's execution may have generated legislative momentum to remake state law.
“I'm hearing from a lot of people, 25 years is just too long,” Shurtleff said. “It's ridiculous.”
Ralph Dellapiana, an attorney affiliated with Utahns for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said he hopes Gardner's death will spark discussion “that this arbitrary process be changed to something else.”
Members of the victims' families argued both for and against Gardner's death. All said they wanted to end a long nightmare.
“This story must be allowed to slip into history,” Jason Otterstrom said during the commutation hearing. “Our families need peace.”
Barb Webb, daughter of victim Nick Kirk, sobbed when news of the execution came.
“I'm so relieved it's all over,” she said, hugging her daughter, Mandi Hull. “I just hope my sister, who just passed away, and my father and all of the other victims are waiting for his sorry ass. I hope they get to go down after him.”• Tribune reporters Erin Alberty, Nate Carlisle, Matthew D. LaPlante, Pamela Manson, Sheena McFarland and Christopher Smart contributed to this report.______________________________________ RONNIE LEE GARDNER'S EXECUTION
What time was Ronnie Lee Gardner executed?
The shots were fired at 12:15 a.m. Friday. He was pronounced dead at 12:17 a.m.
What were his last words?
Gardner was asked if he had anything to say, to which he replied: “I do not. No.”
What happened after he was shot?
Media witnesses say Gardner's left arm moved up and down, and his hand clenched into a fist. They differ on whether a dark spot near his waist was from blood pooling inside his jumpsuit. There was no blood on the target at which the executioners shot.
Who witnessed the execution?
Five people were present aside from nine media witnesses and Department of Corrections officials: Robert Stott and Kirk Torgensen for the state of Utah, and Craig Watson, VelDean Kirk and Jamie Stewart for the victims' families. Gardner did not request any witnesses.
How did his family react?
The Gardner family had gathered at a parking lot near the prison and kept vigil throughout the evening. As the hour of execution approached, they played Lynyrd Skynyrd's ‘Free Bird’ from a stereo and released red and white balloons into the air. The balloons bore messages to Ronnie Lee Gardner.
What happens to Gardner's body now?
His body was released to the state Medical Examiner's Office, which will conduct an autopsy. After that, there are several possible scenarios. Brandie Gardner has said she will take her father's body with her to Idaho and bury him without a funeral. Other family members have said his body will be donated to science. Corrections Department chief Tom Patterson said he understood Gardner wanted to be cremated. Another relative has previously said the ashes would be spread over an organic farm the killer wanted to start for troubled youth.www.sltrib.com/news/ci_15325197
Protesters pray, plead for end to capital punishmentRally and vigil: They lament Utah has death penalty but keep hope.By KRISTEN MOULTON - The Salt Lake Tribune | 2:40PM MDT - Friday, June 18, 2010 Ruby Price, of Layton, weeps during an interfaith prayer vigil Thursday at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral
in Salt Lake City. — Photo: Chris Detrick/The Salt Lake Tribune.Scores of somber death-penalty opponents gathered in a cold wind on the Utah Capitol steps Thursday night to share their distress that their state was executing Ronnie Lee Gardner.
And yet several speakers struck a note of hope:
“This is not the end of the movement,” said Ralph Dellapiana, a defense attorney and one of the founders of Utahns for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, a new group that sponsored the protest. “This is the beginning.”
Kent Hart, also a defense attorney, introduced himself with a reference to his religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“The Mormon issue is kind of the elephant in the room,” said Hart, who has met with eight of the nine men left on Utah's death row. Hart encouraged Latter-day Saints to reconsider the implications of capital punishment. The Salt Lake City-based church officially is neutral.
“I am not delusional. I'm not saying we're going to abolish the death penalty a week from now or next year,” Hart said. “But I think we can do it. We'll do it in the name of people like Ronnie Lee Gardner.”
The rally was at the Capitol, Dellapiana said, to pressure lawmakers to end capital punishment, as many other states have done.
Rep. Brian King, D-Salt Lake City, said he will push his colleagues on the hill to revisit Utah's use of capital punishment.
The death penalty, he said, has many flaws: It's immoral, violates constitutional protections against cruel punishment, sometimes kills the innocent, is not a deterrent, unfairly targets the poor and ethnic minorities and is more expensive than life imprisonment.
But the real reason to abolish capital punishment, he said, is personal. “As a citizen of Utah I am involved in a very small way with killing another person ... and so are you,” King said.
“What we are doing at the Point of the Mountain is cold-blooded and it's pre-meditated.”
Several members of Gardner's extended family attended the rally, but declined to comment.
Many in the crowd of about 150 protesters were young people carrying handmade signs such as “25 years can change a man! We are not God!” and “Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.”
Candles were passed around, but few remained lit in the brisk wind.
Perhaps the most-poignant comments came from two people who were with condemned Utah men in the hours before their deaths: a legal studies professor from Utah Valley University and a former Catholic chaplain.
Sandra McGunigall-Smith studied death-row inmates at the prison for several years, and was with Joseph Parsons in the hours before he was executed in 1999.
If the state wants true and proportional punishment, she said, it should sentence killers to life without parole.
“The life-sentenced prisoners have no way to end their suffering,” McGunigall-Smith added. “Prison itself becomes a cemetery, the cell a tomb.”
Reyes G. Rodriguez, a Catholic chaplain at the prison for seven years, says he was with John Albert Taylor in the hours before he was shot by firing squad in 1996.
“A soon as they said, ‘Fire’, I closed my eyes,“ Rodriguez said. "That was a very sad, sad event, to see a life just destroyed.”
Those remaining at the end of the protest rally wandered into Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff's conference room, where he had a press conference minutes after learning Gardner was dead.
Nathan Walker, a West Jordan teenager, said he and his friend wanted to stay until the execution was over. “We don't think it's right for a human being to kill another human being,” said Walker, who carried a sign with the words: “25 years can change a man! We are not God!!”
Jonathan Kendall, in Utah visiting family, said he cried when he learned Utah had carried out the execution. He wasn't happy to hear Shurtleff introduce his deputies, who had helped the state argue make the case that higher courts should reject Gardner's appeals.
“I felt some disgust that there was a sense of pride in this. I felt there should be a sense of shame,” said Kendall, who teaches government in London.
“He said it's about justice. It's not about justice at this point and time,” said Kendall, who carried a sign urging prayers for the victims' and Gardner's families. “It's revenge.”
At a protest near the prison, Salt Lake City resident Kristin Powers arrived shortly after 11 p.m. with a handwritten sign reading, “Who would Jesus execute?”
Ron Belnap, a retired priest from All Saints Episcopal Church in Salt Lake City, said he “felt like this was a place for me to be.”
“Murder is wrong,” he said. “That is true regardless of whether you are a murderer or a government that takes the life of a murderer.”
Dozens of Gardner's family members, mingling with the protesters, carried red and white balloons with messages written on them for the condemned killer. They planned to release the balloons at the time of his death.
Not far away were family members of Gardner's victims.
“I had an abusive upbringing. I know people who have done drugs, but we've never killed anyone,” said Kearns resident Wayne Hunting while standing with family members of bailiff Nick Kirk, who was wounded in Gardner's 1985 escape attempt. “It's all about taking responsibility for our actions.”
Earlier Thursday evening, prayers for Gardner, his victims, their families and his executioners were sent up by about 125 people who gathered at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in downtown Salt Lake City.
“Violence breeds violence,” said the Rev. David Henry, interim pastor at First Baptist Church. He urged others to pray that the state soon ends capital punishment.
“It doesn't work,” Henry said. “It's ineffective, and it's brutalizing all of us.”
Michael Bulson, a deacon at St. Andrew Catholic Parish in Riverton and an attorney, said he learned a lesson from the father of a woman killed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
“Hate and revenge will not bring about the healing that is needed,” Bulson said.
Ogden resident Victoria Sethunya, a native of Lesotho, said she was stunned to learn that Utah still executes killers.
“This is a sacred place,” she said. “I grew up thinking only God takes life.”
Sandy resident Diana Mafi, a born-again Christian, said she attended the vigil because she cannot share her dismay over capital punishment with family or friends.
“I feel bad about the people who think they can feel better killing another person.”• Matthew D. LaPlante and Sheena McFarland contributed to this story.www.sltrib.com/news/ci_15321695
Gardner's execution: An end and a beginningClosure: His death marks the start of a healing process for the families of his victims.By CHRISTOPHER SMART - The Salt Lake Tribune | 7:14PM MDT - Friday, June 18, 2010 A panel of nine media witnesses to the execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner by
firing squad answer questions Friday at the Utah State Prison in Draper.
From left to right: Nate Carlisle, Marcos Ortiz, Sandra Yi, Jennifer Dobner,
Sheryl Worsley, Doug Fabrizio, Ben Winslow, Pat Reavy, Fields Moseley.
— Photo: Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune.Killer Ronnie Lee Gardner's execution was the end of a life punctuated by the pain he, in turn, passed along to others.
It was also, hopefully, the start of a healing process for the families of his victims.
Jason Otterstrom, son of Gardner victim Melvyn Otterstrom, decided at the last minute not to witness Friday's execution. He and his mother, Kathy Potter, released a statement saying they are only seeking closure.
“While we cannot forget nor forgive Mr. Gardner's crimes, we recognize that we had to let go of anger and hate or it would consume us, it would destroy us,” the statement said.
Gardner's death, they wrote, won't bring back his victims or undo the suffering their families have endured.
“Our hearts go out in sympathy for the relatives of Mr. Gardner, now at a time when they are in pain,” the statement said.
Neither Jason Otterstrom nor his mother have come out for or against capital punishment. But in the statement, they wrote society must have “a consequence for those who have no respect for society or its laws, or for life.”
Craig Watson, a cousin and close friend of Melvyn Otterstrom, followed through with his own plans to witness the execution. For him, hearing the firing squad shots that killed Gardner brought a surreal kind of relief.
“It almost felt like a dream, like it hadn't really happened,” Watson said.
But moments later, when Gardner was pronounced dead, “I felt like someone had lifted the world off my shoulders. I felt peace.”
ValDean Kirk, too, is seeking peace.
The 77-year-old widow of Gardner victim Nick Kirk said after witnessing the execution she hopes the death will bring a new beginning for her family. Her granddaughter watched Gardner's execution by her side.
“I'm not feeling the healing yet,” she said Friday afternoon. “A couple of my children really hate him and they've got to get over that. It's not good to live with that and they have lived with it so long.”
Both Watson and Kirk said the nearly 25 years between Gardner's capital conviction for the slaying of attorney Michael Burdell and his execution Friday were arduous.
“Those 25 years were excruciating for our family and for Gardner's family,” Watson said.
He pointed to states where the time between conviction and execution is significantly shorter.
“We need to figure out what they're doing, because we're doing it wrong,” he said. “We need to guarantee that people get a fair trial and then have expedient justice.”
He isn't alone in his hope that Gardner's death may be the catalyst of a new discussion of how to speed up capital case appeals in Utah.
University of Utah law professor Paul Cassell, who sat on the federal bench for five years, said the execution will serve as a deterrent to violence. But he concurred that Utah must find ways to streamline death penalty cases.
“I think everyone is investigating why this took 25 years,” he said. “But this is a real ideological dispute. There are those willing to allow long delays because it helps their argument to do away with it.”
Cassell added, however, that he hoped the “barriers” between capital punishment proponents and opponents could be overcome.
So does death penalty opponent Rep. Brian King, D-Salt Lake City. But his notion to reach consensus is to recast life in prison without the possibility of parole as something new — what he calls “death by incarceration.” A life sentence, he said, saves families from ongoing uncertainty of long years of appeals, it saves the state millions, and provides a punishment King believes is worse than being executed.
King said he is considering whether to introduce legislation that would, like 15 other states, abolish capital punishment.
“You can argue this to both sides,” he said. “At some point, you can build a bridge.”
That is what Donna Nu would favor.
Gardner fatally shot Burdell, Nu's fiance, and wounded bailiff Nick Kirk during his April 02, 1985, courthouse escape attempt. Gardner had come to the courthouse for a hearing on his 1984 murder of Melvyn Otterstrom, a comptroller who was working a second job as a bartender.
Nu has said Burdell, an attorney, would have fought against Gardner's execution. She stayed up late at her Mesa, Arizona, home, listening to news of Gardner's last hours.
“I was sad, of course,” she said Friday afternoon. “But I believe he's [Gardner is] fine now. That's the good news.”
Yet she's also disheartened that society hasn't made more progress.
“Can't we come up with better ways to treat each other,” she said. “We all came into this world naked in the same way. I believe in unity.”
Clinging to candles and each other in a parking lot across from the Draper prison, the Gardner family celebrated the “freeing” of his spirit early Friday with word that Utah's death warrant had been executed on their brother, father and grandfather. Their singing and sobbing were some kind of release.
Emotions were raw Friday afternoon for Gardner's daughter, Brandie Gardner. She said she wasn't sure what she was feeling.
But late Thursday night as the remaining minutes of her father's life ticked away, she argued state-sanctioned killing is not an answer.
“They're going to murder my dad,” she said.
Gardner's upbringing was one defined by poverty, drug use, sex abuse and criminality. His time behind bars was often violent and included escapes. But his family, his attorneys and Gardner himself argued the past decade had brought about profound change and regret.
Utah Department of Corrections Director Tom Patterson said Friday his firing squad execution — which drew international attention — was handled with “absolute dignity and reverence for human life.”
“It's been a balancing act of being sensitive to the families who have lost a loved one and the family that lost a love one,” he said.• Matthew D. LaPlante and Lindsay Whitehurst contributed to this report.______________________________________ Ronnie Lee Gardner's remains
Gardner's body was released to the Utah State Office of the Medical Examiner, where an autopsy will be performed as required by law. Per his request, Gardner's remains will be cremated and then released to his family, said Utah Department of Corrections spokesman Steve Gehrke.www.sltrib.com/news/ci_15329563
Firing squad: An eyewitness account of Gardner's executionA Tribune reporter, one of nine media witnesses at Friday's just-after-midnight execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner, offers his firsthand account.By NATE CARLISLE - The Salt Lake Tribune | 8:01PM MDT - Friday, June 18, 2010 Tribune reporter Nate Carlisle, a witness to the firing squad execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner, traced these exit
holes made by the four bullets that ended the killer's life early Friday morning.
— Photo: Nate Carlisle/The Salt Lake Tribune.Ronnie Lee Gardner's head, covered by a black hood, remained upright. His body sat straight in the chair to which he was strapped.
As my eyes traveled down Gardner's left arm, past his dark blue jumpsuit, I saw his pale white skin appear below his elbow. Half a faded blue tattoo, some kind of diamond shape, stuck out from the restraint around his wrist.
At the bottom of his restraint, I focused on his fist. Gardner died much the way he lived — with a clenched fist.
Yes, this was my first time witnessing an execution. I have been amazed at how many people have asked me that.
Firing four bullets into a man's chest is, by definition, violent. If it can also be clinical and sterile, then that also happened in this execution.
Eight other journalists and I had our own viewing area with about a 6-foot-wide bulletproof window. When the curtain opened, there sat Gardner. We were at about a 45-degree angle to his left.
He looked nothing like the athletic 23-year-old with the red hair who murdered Melvyn Otterstrom in a robbery, nor did he flash that grin that defined those infamous photographs of him shackled on the courthouse lawn after killing Michael Burdell and wounding Nick Kirk in 1985.
This time, he looked like Utah's own ghost of Hannibal Lecter. Gardner's skin and his white socks contrasted with the dark blue jump suit he wore and the restraints, chair, wooden backdrop and sandbags, all of which were painted black. Restraints circled his wrists, ankles, shoulders and waist, but the restraint across his forehead best exemplified his confinement to me.
Gardner could not even look around the room and the fluorescent lights in the ceiling tiles illuminated his bald head and pale face.
Over his left breast clung a white square, about 2 inches by 2 inches, with a circle in the middle.
The room had no decor. The floor was white, as were the cinder-block walls. The two slits for the shooters cut into the wall opposite Gardner and the observation windows lined the two perpendicular sides.
Steven Turley, warden at the Draper prison, picked up a microphone and announced Gardner had two minutes to say his final words. When Turley asked Gardner if he had anything to say, Gardner said, “I do not. No.” Gardner moved his head ever so slightly, trying to shake it.
Gardner's final words were to say he had none.
Turley hung up the microphone, then reached up and gently pulled a hood over Gardner's head. Turley picked up the microphone, unplugged its cord from a wall jack, wound the cord in his hand and exited the room.
Over the next 30 seconds, my heart raced. I realized the five gunmen would launch their volleys any moment. I placed a Styrofoam plug in my right ear to match the one I had earlier placed in my left. The other reporters and I stood in front of the glass.
I watched Gardner. As the seconds passed, I grew anxious. I pivoted my eyes away from Gardner toward the slits.
In that fraction of a second my eyes were in transit, I heard “boom boom.” The sounds were as close together as you could spew them from your mouth.
My eyes darted back to Gardner and to his chest. The target, perfect just a second earlier, had three holes. The largest hole was in the top half of the circle and toward Gardner's left side. It may have been where two bullets entered Gardner.
Below that hole, still inside the circle, was a smaller hole. Outside the circle, in the bottom right of the target, was a third hole. Each hole had a black outline. Utah Department of Corrections Director Tom Patterson would say later the target was fastened to the jumpsuit by Velcro, and that may have accounted for the black outline.
I watched Gardner's torso. The firing squad members who shot John Albert Taylor in 1996 said they saw Taylor's body slump and I assumed Gardner's would, too. But I never saw such a movement. Instead, a few seconds after the gunshots, I saw Gardner move his left arm. He pushed it forward about 2 inches against the restraints. In that same motion, he closed his hand and made a fist.
Then it happened in reverse. Gardner's hand loosened, his arm bent at the elbow, straightened again and the fist returned. At the time, I interpreted this as Gardner suffering — clenching his fist in an effort to fight the pain.
As I write this, I don't know whether that's true. It could have just been reflexes or some other process the body begins after a major trauma. Scientists do not know much about what a person shot through the heart feels.
The next movement I saw from Gardner came from beneath his hood. I could see the bottom of his throat and it rippled as though Gardner moved his jaw.
I squinted my eyes, looking for blood. I saw none through the holes in Gardner's chest. None spilled on the floor. The jump suit slightly darkened around his waist and it appeared that's where blood was pooling. But I never saw a drop.
About two minutes passed after the gunshots. It was long enough that I wondered (and some of my colleagues later said they wondered, too) whether Gardner would require a second volley of bullets to die.
Through a side door walked a man in a button-down shirt, slacks and blue plastic gloves. He lifted Gardner's hood only enough to check the pulse on the left side of Gardner's neck. The man appeared to do the same on Gardner's right.
Then the man lifted the hood high enough to shine his small flashlight in Gardner's eyes. When he did this I could see Gardner's face. His mouth was agape. His face was even whiter than it was before the hood covered him.
The man withdrew his flashlight and let the hood fall again. He shut off the flashlight and started to walk out of the room. Gardner was dead.
Turley and Lowell Clark, the director of division institutional operations for the Department of Corrections, entered the chamber. Clark grasped the curtain on my side and Turley grabbed the curtain on the opposite wall.
As Clark pulled the curtain along its rod, I pushed my head toward the glass to take one final look at the scene. In the final second, my eyes focused on the straightened left arm, seemingly flexing, and that clenched fist.www.sltrib.com/news/ci_15325356
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