Idaho’s Department of Correction said Wednesday that its firing squad execution chamber at a maximum-security prison south of Boise was operational, the culmination of a more than $1 million renovation project that included the purchase of $24,000 worth of AR-style, .308-caliber scoped rifles. The department said its procedures were designed “to ensure that any execution is conducted in a secure, orderly, and dignified manner.”
Three volunteer marksmen will carry out the executions; their identities are known only to the state prisons director and deputy, according to the department. Under the new protocol, the condemned prisoner is strapped into a chair, fitted with a black hood and then shot by the marksmen through a target pinned over the left ventricle of the heart. Once “all electrical and mechanical activity of the heart has ceased,” the Ada County Coroner enters the chamber and pronounces death, according to rules reported by local media.
Idaho has eight inmates on death row, one of whom is female. The Guardian reported the state’s transition to the firing squad was driven by the failed execution of Thomas Creech, the longest-serving inmate on Idaho’s death row, in February 2024, when a medical team could not establish an intravenous line for lethal injection despite eight attempts.
The adoption of the firing squad as a primary method places Idaho among a growing number of states turning to firearms-based executions as lethal injection has become increasingly difficult to carry out due to an international boycott of medical supplies used in the procedure. Idaho is the seventh state to include the firing squad among its authorized execution methods, according to The Guardian, with a larger number of jurisdictions now allowing judicial killing by gunfire than at any point in U.S. history.
Though supporters of the firing squad describe the method as “foolproof,” The Guardian reported that forensic experts and court filings have documented cases where executions by rifle went badly wrong. Of the four firing squad executions carried out in the U.S. since 2010, two appear to have been botched, with bullets hitting locations other than the left ventricle, according to the report.
In 2010, Utah executed Ronnie Lee Gardner by firing squad. An examination of autopsy photographs by Dr. Jonathan Groner, an emeritus professor of surgery at Ohio State University, found that the bullet holes in Gardner’s torso and his back were not located where the heart target indicated they should be, Groner told a news conference. He raised the question of whether the marksmen’s inaccurate aim was the result of “some sort of implicit bias in the execution process.”
In April 2025, South Carolina executed Mikal Mahdi by firing squad. According to The Guardian, an Associated Press media witness reported that Mahdi cried out, groaned for 45 seconds and continued breathing for about 80 seconds before a final gasp — far longer than the 10 to 15 seconds he was supposed to have remained conscious. An autopsy revealed only two wounds on Mahdi’s body despite three marksmen firing, and a forensic pathologist hired by Mahdi’s lawyers concluded that the bullets entered “well below” the left ventricle and damaged his liver, causing “excruciating conscious pain and suffering” for up to 60 seconds.
South Carolina’s Supreme Court later ruled that the Mahdi execution had not been botched, but in its ruling confirmed that the marksmen had struck only Mahdi’s pericardial sac and right ventricle, not the left ventricle.
In filings to the U.S. Supreme Court, attorneys for a subsequent South Carolina death row inmate, Stephen Stanko, who was executed by lethal injection in June 2025, alleged that Mahdi’s shooters “intended to miss the direct target” and caused him to endure “the most extreme pain a human can experience until his death.” The Guardian reported that Joseph Perkovich, counsel of record in the Stanko filing, said that “for three marksmen to miss their target 15ft away is effectively impossible — so that leaves us with something very bleak, and that is the intent.”
South Carolina’s Department of Correction denied the allegation, pointing to the state Supreme Court ruling and saying the state “categorically denies this purely speculative accusation.”
Groner, who also examined Mahdi’s autopsy photographs for his forthcoming book on capital punishment, raised a further question about the execution, The Guardian reported. In the book, he writes: “Would corrections officers in a southern state intentionally torture a Black man who murdered a police officer? The historical record suggests this is far from out of the question.”
The Guardian reported that the identities of the three volunteer marksmen who shot Mahdi are unknown, and that the secrecy surrounding executions in South Carolina and other death penalty states prevents any independent verification of the shooters’ intentions.
Deborah Denno, an authority on execution protocols at Fordham Law School, told The Guardian she has grown uneasy about the spread of firing squads across the U.S. She said she once saw the protocol as the “least inhumane readily-available method,” but now is less certain. “We tend to forget that human beings are conducting this, and human beings have emotions and feelings,” Denno said. “Such as wanting to set things right, an eye for an eye, and revenge.”