This country seems to be slowly moving backwards in time, whether it’s shown through racial bias, ever-widening inequality, or even how we execute prisoners. Recently, the state of Utah revealed plans to bring back “death by firing squad” as a means of capital punishment, due to a lack of lethal injection drugs in circulation. Death by firing squad is where the person being executed sits in a chair with a target on their heart. Then, five volunteers shoot at the target and kill the person.
To begin, with how far modern medicine and technology has come, you would think there would be enough lethal injection drugs to sufficiently execute the necessary prisoners. I’m not advocating the death penalty; I’m only advocating that if states are going to maintain this law, then they should have adequate means of carrying out that law in the most humane way possible.
While death row inmates usually have a good reason for being there, having to stoop back down to firing squad as a means of execution is medieval. Some inmates take up to two minutes until they finally die.

Coming from a country that oh-so-vivaciously advocates justice, you would think that there would be another way of execution. The CIA can pay two men millions of dollars to come up with ways to psychologically torture Guantanamo Bay detainees, but can’t come up with a more efficient way to execute criminals?

If we are paying massive amounts of tax dollars to prisons and this sort of thing, I think some of it should at least go to an ethical, humane, and even cost-effective form of death for the death row prisoners.

People could argue that these prisoners did something to deserve to be there and therefore they deserve any form of execution that is deemed fit, but they fail to recognize that these prisoners are still living, breathing humans too. They are ultimately paying for their crimes and are paying for it like everyone else would pay—based on the intensity of their crimes, of course.

People could argue that looking for new ways of execution would be a waste of tax dollars. So stuffing our prisons with people who commit petty crimes isn’t? The average cost of an inmate per year is around $31,000. There are about 2.2 million prisoners in the United States. Now I’m not going to do the math for you, but I think you get the idea.

With Utah reinstating this form of execution, it is a good idea to look at various other methods of execution still used today. Thirty-four states use lethal injection, eight states use electrocution, four use gas chambers, three use hanging, and three use firing squads.

This looks like some deranged type of “American Horror Story” statistic. Of course, most of those are back up to lethal injection, but with the lack of drugs in circulation there could be more of this. While many people may see this as a step forward in cleansing our prison system of the worst of the worst, I see it as this country taking another step back.