Firing Squad, Tweets: Let It Go So the Victim's Families Can Have Closure

"I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner's execution."

Those were the words that came from Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff just before the execution of convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner. The how and the why of both the execution and the communication are ultimately more interesting.

First, there are the how and why of the execution. Gardner, who had been on death row for several years, had requested that he be killed by firing squad instead of by lethal injection, the state of Utah's official method of putting death row inmates to death since 2004. That law wasn't retroactive, however, and Gardner, already on death row when the law came in, had the option, so he took it. Such was his choice, every bit as viable as the choices that he made that led to the crimes for which he was convicted and put away. The debate over whether which form of state-endorsed execution is the more humane will no doubt continue, as will the debate over whether such execution is cruel and unusual. However, under the laws of the land of Utah, Gardner's method of execution was both permissible and possible. Why did he choose it? He has certainly garnered a lot of publicity in recent days, and he will be forever linked to Gary Mark Gilmore, whose final words are echoed in Nike's call to athletic arms. He was on record as saying he wanted a quick end. The firing squad certainly delivered on that count.

Juxtaposed against the debate over how Gardner was killed is the method of communication that the attorney general used to tell the world what has happening. Shurtleff used Twitter.

Certainly the lightning-quick communication method of the moment, Twitter is the choice of millions of people these days, who share the most mundane, intimate, and otherwise important details with anyone who wants to "follow" their 140-character-at-a-time bursts of words and deeds. So Shurtleff, in wanting to get the word out, typed some characters into his Twitter account and pressed Tweet.

Was he callous in doing so? Was he reveling in his role in what many people are calling a return to "old-time justice"? Probably not. He was just doing his job, albeit by choosing a 21st-century mode of communication. In olden times — meaning 10 years ago — he would have typed something up and sent it out to the media or sent a FAX or phoned it in. Now, in the heady light-speed days of email, Facebook, and Twitter, that's how people communicate.

So, the method of execution and the method of the communication announcing that execution can both be argued against and defended. Where does that leave us? In a quandary?

One thing we can probably all agree on is this: What has gotten lost in these twin debates is what happened to Gardner's victims and their families. The second part of Shurtleff's Tweet was this:

"May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims."

In all the hand-wringing over whether to put this man to death, people forget that he killed. He killed a man outside a bar in 1984; for that, he was on trial. Someone slipped him a gun before his pretrial hearing in 1985; during his attempted escape from the courthouse, he killed a lawyer in cold blood.

Those are facts. The anguish he caused his victims will never be extinguished and will, in fact, be made even more painful as long as the twin debates mentioned above continue.