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Page Number: 126.0

30 

GLOSSIP v. GROSS 

SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

test  because  of  their  assumption  that  the  alternative
drugs  to  which  they  pointed,  pentobarbital  and  sodium 
thiopental,  were  available  to  the  State.    See  ante,  at  13– 
14.  This was perhaps a reasonable assumption, especially
given that neighboring Texas and Missouri still to this day 
continue  to  use  pentobarbital  in  executions.    See  The 
Death  Penalty  Institute,  Execution  List  2015,  online  at 
www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/execution-list-2015  (as  visited
June  26,  2015,  and  available  in  the  Clerk  of  the  Court’s 
case file).

In  the  future,  however,  condemned  inmates  might  well
decline  to  accept  States’  current  reliance  on  lethal  injec­
tion.  In  particular,  some  inmates  may  suggest  the  firing
squad as an alternative.  Since the 1920’s, only Utah has 
utilized  this  method  of  execution.  See  S.  Banner,  The 
Death  Penalty  203  (2002);  Johnson,  Double  Murderer 
Executed by Firing Squad in Utah, N. Y. Times, June 19,
2010,  p.  A12.    But  there  is  evidence  to  suggest  that  the 
firing  squad  is  significantly  more  reliable  than  other 
methods,  including  lethal  injection  using  the  various 
combinations  of  drugs  thus  far  developed.  See  A.  Sarat, 
Gruesome  Spectacles:  Botched  Executions  and  America’s
Death  Penalty,  App.  A,  p. 177  (2014)  (calculating  that
while  7.12%  of  the  1,054  executions  by  lethal  injection 
between  1900  and  2010  were  “botched,”  none  of  the  34 
executions  by  firing  squad  had  been).    Just  as  important,
there is some reason to think that it is relatively quick and 
painless.  See Banner, supra, at 203. 

Certainly,  use  of  the  firing  squad  could  be  seen  as  a 
devolution to a more primitive era.  See Wood v. Ryan, 759 
F. 3d  1076,  1103  (CA9  2014)  (Kozinski,  C. J.,  dissenting 
from  denial  of  rehearing  en  banc).  That  is  not  to  say,  of 
course,  that  it  would  therefore  be  unconstitutional.    But 
lethal  injection  represents  just  the  latest  iteration  of  the 
States’ centuries-long search for “neat and non-disfiguring
homicidal  methods.”    C.  Brandon,  The  Electric  Chair:  An