I remember quite well when I witnessed my first public execution by firing squad: the man, named Anini—which means “penny” in the local Bini dialect because he was a short, small man—was led handcuffed to a stake in the middle of a parade ground. I’m not sure, but I think there was an attending priest who gave the condemned his last rites.
Watched by many hundreds of people only yards away and many more others on television, he was then bound to the stake and a black hood put over his head.
A squad of eight or so “mobile policemen” as they were and still are rather quizzically known were led by a fussy-looking officer (with a sword!) and arrayed out into a single line abreast about 30 feet in front of the trussed up fellow; he was bound so tightly he couldn’t move even his head.
The officer stood off to one side, raised his sword and counted down from five. After “one” he cried “fire!” simultaneously lowering that sword in an arc of silver under the afternoon sun. The thunderclap of several rifles broke the breezy, anticipatory silence causing the sweaty crowd of onlookers to divert their gaze away from the man to the squad and the now-billowing smoke from the rifle fire.
Those few who weren’t so distracted kept their watch on the man to see the binding ropes explode in tatters seemingly of their own accord, followed by blood blooms on the man’s clothes over his body as each bullet hit home and true.
The officer raised his sword again and brought it down to the accompaniment of another “fire!” followed by the inevitable blast and smoke. No one was watching the squad this time, all eyes affixed on the now-slumping figure at the stake. His head exploded in a spray of blood and brains and the bullets tore even more at the ropes loosening their grip and causing his body to double over.
The squad brought their rifles smartly down to their sides while the officer marched forward with a man in a white coat and a stethoscope around his neck. After the doctor had pronounced the man officially dead, an ambulance drove forward to receive the corpse as the remaining ropes—the only ones still remaining were those around the corpse’s lower body—were cut away.
I was eight years old.
I don’t know if I was too young to appreciate what I’d just seen, but the children around didn’t seem too bothered by what they’d just seen and neither was I for that matter—the show was, as they say, over. The man had been a multiple murderer, an armed robber who had terrorized the city for many months and this, we thought, was his just desserts.
Imagine my surprise when I heard that the state of Utah just carried out an execution by firing squad not too long ago. The seated, hooded condemned was shot at from 25-feet by a five-man rifle squad. One of them was shooting a blank so that, in the words of one article, “no one knows who fired the fatal shot” as if that mattered a whit.
In this case, the man had chosen this particular form of execution instead of by lethal injection.
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