Idaho made history on July 1 when it became the first state in the nation to designate the firing squad, not lethal injection, as its primary method of carrying out death sentences. The shift, years in the making, marks the most significant change in American execution protocol in decades and puts Idaho at the leading edge of a broader state-level reckoning with how capital punishment actually works.
Eight people currently sit on Idaho's death row. Seven men are housed at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution, where the state retrofitted its F-Block to accommodate the new method. One woman is held at the Pocatello Women's Correctional Center. No execution has been scheduled under the new protocol yet, but USA TODAY reported that the Idaho Department of Correction spent roughly $1.2 million on execution unit updates and rifle purchases to be ready by the July 1 effective date.
The procedure itself is methodical. Three volunteer police marksmen, their identities kept confidential, will fire.308 caliber assault-style rifles loaded with.308 or 7.62 110-grain ammunition. Each weapon carries a single live round. The shooters stand approximately 10 yards from the condemned person, firing through a one-foot opening in a protective wall. The condemned is seated in an execution chair, offered a mild sedative, fitted with EKG monitors, and given a target placed over the heart. A coroner pronounces death.
The backstory is less about ideology than logistics. Starting in 2010, pharmaceutical companies began refusing to let their drugs be used in executions. Pfizer sealed the coffin on that supply chain in 2016 when it announced it would block states from accessing its products for lethal injections, a move described as shutting down the last source of execution drugs available on the open market.
Idaho's last execution took place in June 2012, by lethal injection. The state went more than a decade without carrying out a death sentence. Then, in February 2024, a lethal injection attempt went sideways. The New York Post reported that medical personnel spent roughly an hour trying, and failing, to establish an IV line on death row inmate Thomas Eugene Creech. The execution was halted.
That failure accelerated what Idaho lawmakers had already set in motion. In 2023, the legislature passed House Bill 186, which authorized firing squads as an alternative if lethal injection drugs were unavailable. Governor Brad Little signed it into law on March 25, 2023, after the measure passed with a veto-proof majority on March 20.
The governor framed the decision in straightforward terms of legal obligation. "For the people on death row, a jury convicted them of their crimes, and they were lawfully sentenced to death," Little said. "It is the responsibility of the state of Idaho to follow the law and ensure that lawful criminal sentences are carried out."
Not everyone in his own party agreed. Republican Sen. Dan Foreman called firing-squad executions "beneath the dignity of the state of Idaho." But the bill's supporters held a commanding majority, and the measure moved forward. The law designates the firing squad as the primary method, with lethal injection kept as a backup, a reversal of the hierarchy every other state maintains.
Idaho is not operating in a vacuum. Four other states, South Carolina, Utah, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, authorize firing squads under certain circumstances, though only as alternatives to other methods. South Carolina carried out its third firing-squad execution of 2025 in November of that year, the most recent such execution in the country. The broader debate over execution methods and the death penalty process has intensified as lethal injection has become harder to administer reliably.
The Idaho Department of Correction said it designed the new protocols "to ensure that any execution is conducted in a secure, orderly, and dignified manner," Newsmax reported. The department confirmed it would be prepared to carry out an execution order after July 1.
The Firing Squad Team, per IDOC's own procedural documents, consists of three team members, two alternates, and a team leader. Only the three-member team fires. The department will not share blueprints of the retrofitted execution chamber, citing safety and security protocols. The retrofit allows the prison to conduct executions by both firing squad and lethal injection.
Idaho is now one of seven states that authorize firing squads under some set of circumstances. That number has grown as states confront the same pharmaceutical bottleneck. Courts, meanwhile, continue to wrestle with constitutional challenges to various execution methods. A federal judge in Alabama barred that state from using nitrogen gas on one inmate, calling the method unconstitutionally cruel, a ruling that underscores how contested this legal terrain remains.
The pharmaceutical industry's retreat from the execution business deserves more scrutiny than it typically receives. What began in 2010 as a trickle of corporate opt-outs became a full blockade. When Pfizer shut the door in 2016, states that had relied on commercially available drugs for lethal injection found themselves unable to carry out lawfully imposed sentences.
Some states turned to compounding pharmacies. Others faced lawsuits over drug sourcing and secrecy. Idaho chose a different path entirely, one that bypasses the pharmaceutical supply chain altogether. A rifle and a round of ammunition do not require a prescription, a compounding pharmacy, or a corporate permission slip.
The practical logic is hard to argue with, whatever one's position on capital punishment itself. If the state has a legal obligation to carry out death sentences, and the standard method has been rendered unavailable by private-sector actors, the state must find an alternative or effectively nullify its own laws. Idaho's legislature concluded that a firing squad is that alternative. The death penalty remains on the table in multiple high-profile cases across the country, and the question of how sentences are carried out is no longer theoretical.
Breitbart reported that Idaho is now one of only three states, alongside Florida and Tennessee, to include child rape of a child under 12 as a death-penalty-eligible crime. That provision faces potential legal headwinds. The Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the death penalty for child rape was unconstitutional. But with three states now on the books with such laws, proponents argue the Court may be compelled to revisit the question, and that the current Court's composition makes a different outcome plausible.
The historical echoes are worth noting. The most famous firing-squad execution in American history was that of Gary Gilmore in Utah on January 17, 1977. Before South Carolina's 2025 executions, the last firing-squad execution in the country had taken place in 2010. Idaho's move does not revive a forgotten practice so much as formalize one that never fully disappeared.
Execution protocol expert Deborah Denno of Fordham Law School offered a different lens. "We tend to forget that human beings are conducting this, and human beings have emotions and feelings," she said, pointing to the toll on the marksmen and other personnel involved. That concern is real, and Idaho's decision to keep the shooters' identities confidential reflects an awareness of it.
Legal challenges to execution methods continue to shape capital punishment nationwide. The Supreme Court's recent rulings on death penalty cases have addressed everything from jury selection to method constitutionality, and Idaho's new protocol will almost certainly face its own day in court.
Meanwhile, cases like the blocked execution in South Carolina remind Americans that the legal system's handling of death sentences remains tangled in procedural delays and novel legal arguments, even as states like Idaho work to simplify the mechanics.
Idaho spent $1.2 million, retrofitted a prison block, and rewrote its execution statute, all because a handful of pharmaceutical companies decided they didn't want their products associated with lawful punishment. The state's response was blunt and direct: if the drugs aren't available, the rifles will be.
Rep. Bruce Skaug argued that the botched lethal injection of Creech in 2024 highlighted the problems with that method. He had a point. A system that cannot reliably carry out its own sentences is a system that has lost credibility, not with activists, but with the jurors and victims who trusted it to follow through.
Idaho's firing squad is not a step backward. It is what happens when a state decides that lawful sentences should actually mean something, and that no corporation gets a veto over the justice system.
