Sometimes, in the stillness of the night, attorney Gerald Bo King watches his client Brad Sigmon die – over and over again. The silence reminds him of the moments in the execution chamber before the shots were fired.
On March 7, 2025, King watched the curtain rise at 6 p.m. to reveal the execution room at Broad River Correctional Institution: Sigmon strapped to a tilted chair. His chin was held in place by shackles and there was a large target on his chest. “The most disturbing thing about it was the mechanics,” King remembers. Sigmon wore black – he joked that it made him slim – but the real reason was to hide the blood. A hood hid his face.
At 6:05 p.m., three shots rang out from hidden ports, and before King could even process the sound of the shotguns in the hands of prison volunteers, he saw the target on his friend and client’s chest simply disappear. “Suddenly there was a huge hole in his chest with blood pouring out of it,” King says. Sigmon did not die immediately; He was pronounced dead three minutes after the shots, his blood collecting in a basin below.
Sigmon’s final choice
In South Carolina, where he was executed, Sigmon was given the choice between lethal injection, the electric chair or the firing squad. Faced with frequent lethal injection mishaps and fear of being “fried alive” in the electric chair, he chose the firing squad – the first person in the United States to be executed this way in 15 years.
“It’s an impossible experience to witness something like that without putting yourself in the shoes of everyone else there – partly because it’s so foreign, so surreal,” says King. “You don’t get over it; it doesn’t hit you in any predictable way. There’s something deeper than grief when you watch someone die for whom you’ve fought for years.”
Last week, the Justice Department announced it would reinstate the firing squad in federal prisons. The method has long been considered more “humane” than other forms of execution—more immediate and harder to botch—but as Sigmon’s execution shows and as critics of the death penalty argue, there is no truly painless way to kill a human being. The revival of an execution method many consider barbaric is most likely the symptom of a president and administration obsessed with violence — and no one knows where that bloodlust will end.
“Not a good way to kill someone”
“Our position is that there is no good way to kill someone – not by lethal injection, not by the firing squad, not by gas, not by electric shock, not by hanging,” said Alli Sullivan, communications coordinator for Death Penalty Action. “Trump loves having the power to kill people. And I think what we’re seeing right now is, on some level, an extension of his frustration over not being able to kill these 37 people whose sentences were commuted by Biden.”
The death penalty has been in flux since Trump first took office in 2016. Always an ardent supporter of the practice, he ended his first term with a wave of executions: 13 federal prisoners were executed before Joe Biden took office. He had previously brought the return of firing squads, hangings and even execution by guillotine into play.
“He had a particular fondness for the firing squad because it seemed more dramatic than what we usually do – injecting someone and putting them to sleep,” a former White House aide told us in 2023. “He was very much in favor of executing large numbers of drug dealers and drug lords because he said, ‘These people don’t give a damn about anything’ – and that they run their drug empire and their businesses out of prison anyway, then get released, all their money come back and continue to commit crimes… and therefore they should be exterminated, not imprisoned.”
Biden’s pardons and Trump’s anger
Biden, in turn, commuted the sentences of 37 people on death row shortly before Christmas 2024 – much to Trump’s chagrin. “Incredibly, Sleepy Joe Biden has also granted a pardon to the 37 most brutal criminals who murdered, raped and plundered like no one before them,” the incumbent president wrote on Christmas Day. “I refuse to wish these lucky ‘souls’ a Merry Christmas and instead say: TO HELL WITH YOU!”
When he took office, Trump pushed forward his commitment to the death penalty – even though it is more unpopular than ever in the US. In January 2025, he signed an executive order repealing Biden’s 2021 moratorium on federal executions, most recently expressing a desire to “restore the solemn duty to seek, obtain, and execute lawful death sentences—clearing the way for the Department to carry out executions once death row inmates have exhausted their legal remedies.”
The Justice Department has since released a 52-page document that outlines plans to reinstate lethal injection in federal prisons (Biden withdrew those protocols just days before Trump took office over concerns about unnecessary pain and suffering), speed up the path from courtroom to execution chamber, and bring back the firing squad and other methods of execution.
Ministry of Justice defends the course
“The previous administration failed in its duty to protect the American people by refusing to impose and carry out maximum sentences against the most dangerous criminals – including terrorists, child murderers and cop killers,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Justice is re-enforcing the law and standing with victims.”
But as Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, notes, “We are at the lowest level of public support for the death penalty in five decades, and opposition to it has never been higher than it has been this year. There are so many concerns about the death penalty that it is truly somewhat puzzling that the Justice Department has decided to prioritize expanding the death penalty and methods of execution over other issues that matter more to Americans.”
The firing squad was the common method of execution until the turn of the 20th century, according to Frank R. Baumgartner, Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Around 1895 they started doing electro-executions,” he adds. “The electric chair was intended to be a more civilized and technologically advanced system. The same was true for lethal injection.”
A bloody story
Since 1977, only a handful of people have been killed by firing squad, starting with Gary Gilmore, who died in a spectacle that newspapers described as a “ghastly circus.” Five states – Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah – currently offer the firing squad as a method of execution.
Sigmon’s execution in South Carolina was the first by firing squad in years, followed by Mikal Mahdi (April 2025) and Stephen Bryant (November 2025), both also in South Carolina. Mahdi’s lawyers claim that he was only hit twice instead of three times and not in the heart, which led to a painful death.
“It is often said about the firing squad that it is more reliable and less error-prone than lethal injection,” says Maher. “[Aber] Execution methods cannot be guaranteed to be without anomalies.”
Trauma for everyone involved
“It’s entirely possible to botch an execution by firing squad; the person dies, but they die from blood loss, which takes time,” Baumgartner adds. “That must be a terrible experience to witness.”
Regardless of the method, executions can be traumatic for everyone involved. Prison officials have complained about the frequency of executions and their impact on their mental health. There were so many executions at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 2022 that the state’s attorney general and the head of the prison service requested that executions be staggered due to “permanent trauma” and “mental distress.” The court did not grant the request.
King, Sigmon’s attorney, points out that we often don’t consider the impact on prison staff. “I keep thinking about the guards who had to put him in the chair and strap him at the chin and waist,” he says of his own experience with Sigmon. “This is just really shocking.”
And the employees in Oklahoma only witnessed lethal injection executions. “The firing squad and the hanging make no secret of the violent nature of the act,” says Baumgartner. “But people have never been comfortable with that honesty because it’s quite brutal – it means blood and the sight of someone bleeding to death.”
Saber rattling or serious threat?
As for Trump’s recent efforts to reinstate the firing squad in federal prisons, Maher points out that it may be more a show of force than anything else – at least a Democrat should be elected in 2028.
“These plans must be published and are open to public comment,” she says. “Protocols must be developed and new facilities constructed to allow these methods of execution to be used. That will require a huge investment of taxpayer dollars and government resources to implement these new methods. And I don’t think the American public will be happy with the idea of that’s where their resources and taxpayer dollars are going.” In addition, there are currently only three people on federal death row, and none of them have been considered for a date to be set, Maher said.
Still, Maher admits, “I’ve learned not to predict what the Trump administration will do or say. I think most people have realized the mistake of trying to do that – because really anything is possible.”
