On Monday, Utah governor Gary Herbert signed a bill to replace lethal injection with firing squads as the preferred method of dispatching death row inmates. This latest development in America's thorny debate over the death penalty — that debate focusing now on how to humanely kill someone — prompted The New Republic to argue: "There is No Such Thing as a Humane Execution."
In 2011, explains essay author and staff writer Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, the European Union stopped exporting lethal injection drugs in hopes that, absent the means to perform state-sponsored executions, we'd just stop the practice altogether. "Though the ban did slow the rate of American executions," writes Stoker Bruenig, "it now seems Europe’s humanitarians underestimated old-fashioned American ingenuity." Which brings us back to Utah's firing squads.
