DOOMED: Ronnie Lee Gardner (above) was executed in a chair (right) by firing squad this morning for killing Michael Burdell (below right) and Melvyn Otterstrom (bottom). (AP)
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah executed a condemned killer by firing squad early today, reviving a style of justice that hasn’t been used for at least 14 years.
Shortly after midnight local time, Ronnie Lee Gardner was strapped into a chair, had a target pinned over his heart and died in a hail of bullets from five anonymous marksmen armed with .30-caliber rifles and firing from behind a ported wall.
A flurry of last-minute appeals and requests for stays were rejected by the US Supreme Court, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Gov. Gary Herbert.
The high court turned down three appeals late yesterday, although one of its orders showed that two justices, Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens, would have granted Gardner’s request for a stay.
Last night, he drank a Coke and a Mountain Dew though officials said Gardner had planned to fast after having his last requested meal of steak, lobster tail, apple pie, vanilla ice cream and 7UP on Tuesday.
He was the third man killed by firing squad in the U.S. since a US Supreme Court ruling reinstated capital punishment in 1976.
Although Utah altered its death penalty law in 2004 to make lethal injection the default method, nine inmates convicted before that date, including Gardner, can still choose the firing squad instead.
Gardner’s attorney said the decision was based on preference — not a desire to embarrass the state or draw publicity to his case.
Gardner, 49, was sentenced to death for a 1985 capital murder conviction stemming from the fatal courthouse shooting of attorney Michael Burdell during an escape attempt.
Gardner was at the court because he faced a 1984 murder charge in the shooting death of bartender Melvyn Otterstrom.
Gardner first came to the attention of authorities at age 2 as he was found walking alone on a street clad only in a diaper. At age 6 he became addicted to sniffing gasoline and glue. Harder drugs — LSD and heroin — followed by age 10.
By then, Gardner was tagging along with his stepfather as a lookout on robberies, according to court documents.
After spending 18 months in a state mental hospital and being sexually abused in a foster home, he killed Otterstrom at age 23. About six months later, at 24, he shot Burdell in the face as the lawyer hid behind a courthouse door.
“I had a very explosive temper,” Gardner said last week. “Even my mom said it was like I had two personalities.”