The Case for Firing Squads Over Lethal Injection

Former Ninth Circuit judge Alex Kozinski argues that the United States should abandon lethal injection as its default execution method and replace it with firing squads — a position sharpened by decades of botched executions and renewed by the recent failed execution of Tennessee death-row inmate Christa Pike, who survived two injections of pentobarbital and reportedly described her suffering afterward.

Kozinski traces how lethal injection became dominant: after the Supreme Court's 1972 Furman v. Georgia ruling struck down existing death-penalty statutes, states scrambled to redesign their laws. Oklahoma authorized lethal injection in 1977, Texas first used it in 1982, and others followed. The appeal was largely cosmetic — strapping someone to a gurney and administering drugs looked clinical and modern, distancing the public from the visceral reality of a state killing. But that appearance, Kozinski argues, has proven to be a sustained illusion.

The practical failures of lethal injection are severe. Medical ethics codes bar physicians and nurses from participating in executions, leaving the task to law-enforcement personnel with limited training. Drug manufacturers have refused to supply their products for executions, forcing states into improvised workarounds — sourcing drugs from abroad, sometimes under false pretenses, using expired or improperly stored compounds. There is no validated protocol for causing quick, painless death; drugs are tested to heal, not kill. The 2014 execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood III in Arizona required 15 injections over nearly two hours, then the longest execution in U.S. history — a record since surpassed by Pike's ordeal.

Kozinski's deeper objection is philosophical: lethal injection is fundamentally dishonest. By mimicking medicine — which exists to preserve life — it obscures what an execution actually is. He calls this blurring morally repugnant. By contrast, he commends Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's decision to execute Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan by firing squad, including the transparency of livestreaming it. Kozinski's argument: eight to ten large-caliber rifle rounds fired at close range cause near-instant death reliably; the state already purchases firearms and ammunition in bulk; no supply chain can be interdicted; and the method is honest about what it is. If a society cannot stomach the reality of what execution looks like, he contends, it should reconsider whether to carry out executions at all.