LOS ANGELES, June 18 (Xinhua) -- Ronnie Lee Gardner became the third person in Utah and the United States to have been executed by a firing squad when he was put to death by five marksmen on Friday morning, a local newspaper reported.
The killer, 49, who was sentenced（判处死刑） to death for murdering two people 25 years ago, died at 12:17 a.m. local time of wounds from four .30-caliber rifle rounds in his chest at a maximum-security facility in Utah State Prison, Desert News reported on its website.
Gardner was strapped in a chair, with a hood over his head and a white target on his heart when he was fired upon by fire executioners（刽子手） who shot from behind curtains and a ported brick wall, the report said.
Friends and family spent the crucial time in a parking lot overlooking the prison where Gardner had been held and executed, the newspaper reported.
According to the newspaper, both the U.S Supreme Court and Gov. Gary Herbert denied requests to stay Gardner's execution during his final hours of life. Herbert twice denied last minute attempts by Gardner's attorney to spare his life.
Attorney Andrew Parnes complained that no court had given Gardner a "full and fair adjudication," claiming that otherwise Gardner would have a life sentence.
Gardner picked firing squad out of his preference, not a desire to embarrass the state or draw publicity to his case, his attorneys said.
He was the third inmate to be shot by a team of marksmen since a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in 1976, and the first in Utah since John Albert Taylor's execution in 1996. Taylor was sentenced to death for the 1988 rape and strangulation of an 11-year-old girl. He also chose a firing squad as a method of execution.
Utah is the only state still using shooters, and only the four men on death row who initially selected the firing squad before the state eliminated it in 2004 could still choose bullets over lethal injection.
Forty of the 50 men, excluding Gardner's execution, legally executed in Utah since 1852 have been killed by firing squad, according to Weber State University criminologist L. Kay Gillespie.
Six were executed by hanging -- an option along with beheading under Utah's first capital-punishment law -- and four by lethal injection.（本文由在线英语听力室整理编辑） |