USA - 4 execution methods

USA - Firing squad, electric chair, nitrogen gas, injection: US expands execution methods

June 5, 2025:

June 5, 2025 - USA. Firing squad, electric chair, nitrogen gas, injection: US expands execution methods
Between 2021 and 2023, 100% of all executions in the U.S. were done by lethal injection. In the last year and a half, 16% have been carried out with other methods as states get creative.

Until the past 18 months, death row inmates in the U.S. were executed with mostly one method in modern history: lethal injection.

Now, depending on where they’re imprisoned, inmates have a virtual buffet of ways to die: firing squad, nitrogen gas, the electric chair and still, lethal injection. On top of that, Florida passed a law last month that could allow for just about any execution method imaginable, including stoning and beheading, according to one expert.

It’s a unique situation globally. While many nations are secretive about unusual execution methods such as machine-gunning, hanging and beheading, the U.S. is among only four nations that have more than three official forms of execution available, according to a worldwide execution database kept by Cornell University. The others are Nigeria, Iran and Sudan, the database shows.

Of the 44 executions held in the U.S. since January 2024, 7 have been conducted using a method other than lethal injection. That’s 16%. Compare that to 3 years before that, when 100% of the 53 executions conducted were done by lethal injection, according to data tracked by the Death Penalty Information Center.

“It’s a remarkable development,” Frank Baumgartner, a death penalty researcher and political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told USA TODAY. “Going back to these old methods is historically novel for the United States.”

What has led up to the increase in other execution methods?
As lethal injection became the most recent default method in the U.S., challenges to its use have been constant and some executions have been botched, making the fatal drugs harder to obtain for the 23 states with an active death penalty.

Also driving the introduction of new execution methods is a more conservative Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by a very pro-death penalty Donald Trump, who signed an executive order in January restoring federal executions and expanding the application of the death penalty.

Experts agree that the new political landscape has freed up states to explore other methods that may have struggled to hold up under a more liberal court.

This year, death warrants resulted in executions at nearly twice the rate of the past nine years, (68% versus 35%), and courts are only granting stays about 11% of the time, compared to 31% previously, according to Robert Dunham, director of the Death Penalty Policy Project.

“This court is hostile to method of execution challenges,” said Dale Baich, who represented people on death row for 37 years and teaches a death penalty course at Arizona State University. “My sense is the current political climate is emboldening some state leaders to move forward with putting people to death and proposing brutal and cruel execution methods from the past.”

Historically, execution methods have evolved to become – at least seemingly – more humane, Baumgartner said.

People in the Middle Ages were drawn and quartered, boiled in oil, crucified, drowned and burned alive, with the latter also present in the U.S. in the 18th century.

Then the firing squads and hangings of the Wild West days moved to the electric chair, which eventually gave way to the gas chamber and in more recent history, lethal injection.

“We’ve never gone backwards,” Baumgartner said. “It’s always been something new that’s going to promise to be more civilized with our various practices of earlier generations … I mean, it’s like human experimentation, and there’s never been a method that’s lived up to its hype.”

Firing squads gaining in popularity
In South Carolina on April 11, executioners put a hood over Mikal Mahdi’s head, aimed 3 guns at his chest and fired. His attorney, who witnessed the execution, called it “barbaric,” saying it was “a horrifying act that belongs in the darkest chapters of history, not in a civilized society.”

Mahdi’s attorneys have since filed a complaint in the South Carolina Supreme Court arguing that the execution was botched because a forensic pathologist found that only two of three bullets hit Mahdi. The bullets, they say, hit him in a way that prolonged his suffering and resulted in “excruciating conscious pain and suffering” for up to a minute.

State officials maintain the method is constitutional.

Mahdi’s was the 2nd execution by firing squad in the U.S. this year, following that of Brad Keith Sigmon in March, also in South Carolina.

Those executions marked the 1st by firing squad in the U.S. since 2010 and only the 4th and 5th using that method in modern U.S. history. (The others were in Utah in 1977 and 1996.)

In addition to South Carolina, four states have legalized firing squads as an execution method: Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma, and Idaho.

Idaho, which approved of firing squads in 2023, is set to make the firing squad the state’s default method next year.

Use of nitrogen gas spreads
In January 2024, Alabama made history when it conducted the 1st execution by nitrogen gas in the U.S, strapping a mask on the face of inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith and depriving him of oxygen until he asphyxiated.

Since then, the state has used the controversial new method on 3 other inmates and is about to use it again next week, despite objections from some in the Jewish community who argued that it hearkens back to Nazi gas chambers during the Holocaust.

“Gassings can only be rooted in a hatred for shared humanity − the sort of ‘othering’ that enabled the systematic murders of six million Jews,” wrote Stephen Cooper, a lawyer-turned-death penalty abolitionist, in the Montgomery Advertiser, part of the USA TODAY Network.

Louisiana became the second state to use the method when it executed Jesse Hoffman in March, and Arkansas became the fifth state to approve the method when Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a law in March allowing its use.

The Ohio and Nebraska state legislatures have introduced similar legislation this year amid concerns that it violates constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment that apply even to death row inmates.

Witness accounts from all four of the Alabama executions describe “suffering, including conscious terror for several minutes, shaking, gasping, and other evidence of distress,” Louisiana Chief District Judge Shelly Dick wrote in an opinion that temporarily blocked Hoffman’s execution. The witnesses saw inmates “writhing” under their restraints, “vigorous convulsing and shaking for 4 minutes,” heaving, spitting, and a “conscious struggling for life,” she wrote.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has defended the method as “constitutional and effective,” and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has argued that witness accounts from members of the news media are unreliable.

In response to the concerns, one Ohio official told lawmakers considering the method that nitrogen gas executions may very well be painful, according to reporting by the Ohio Capital Journal.

“The Constitution doesn’t guarantee a pain-free death,” said Lou Tobin, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, the Journal reported. “We don’t want to cause them unnecessary pain . . . But whatever they experience as part of an execution pales in comparison to the pain and suffering that they’ve inflicted on their victims.”

New Florida law concerns death penalty observers
Meanwhile a new law in Florida is worrying observers of the death penalty.

A bill signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis last month and going into effect on July 1 “is incredibly broad and extremely dangerous,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center.

The law, House Bill 903, allows for executions using “a method not deemed unconstitutional” if lethal injection drugs become “impossible or impractical” to obtain. The U.S. Supreme Court has never found an execution method to be unconstitutional, meaning that the new law “basically says anything goes,” Maher said.

“It’s astonishing for many reasons,” she said. “I don’t think the American public would sit comfortably with the idea that we are going to use methods that other countries have used in the past, such as stoning and beheading, but under a very literal definition those methods would be permitted.”

DeSantis’ press office has not responded to USA TODAY’s requests for clarification about the intent of the law and what execution methods the state may want to implement.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/06/05/execution-methods-choices-firing-squad-gas-electric-chair/83801621007/