SALT LAKE CITY — Ronnie Lee Gardner was pronounced dead at 12:17 a.m. Friday, becoming the first person executed by firing squad in the United States in 14 years.
Five anonymous marksmen, all volunteer peace officers, fired .30-caliber rifles from behind a brick wall at a white target pinned over the condemned killer’s heart at Utah State Prison in Draper.
Gardner, 49, declined to make a final statement, answering the standard question with a simple, two-word response: “I do not. No.”
His execution, carried out in a windowless chamber bathed in harsh light, came after the U. S. Supreme Court and Utah Gov.
Gary Herbert both rejected last-minute appeals Thursday night.
The marksmen fired in unison at 12:15 a. m. , with witnesses describing a quick, almost imperceptible event.
Medical staff checked his pulse and confirmed death two minutes later.
A black hood had been pulled over Gardner’s head before the shots. A white cloth target, approximately three inches wide with a black bull’s-eye, had been pinned over his chest.
Gardner, who spent 25 years on death row, was sentenced for the 1985 murder of 36-year-old attorney Michael Burdell, an act that occurred during a daring courthouse escape attempt.
That escape came after Gardner, then 24, somehow obtained a smuggled .22 caliber revolver from a woman during a pretrial hearing and shot his way through the courthouse, firing with his hands cuffed.
The sequence of events began when the revolver was passed to him in a basement corridor. He lunged toward freedom, but a guard fired first, striking Gardner’s chest, but he kept moving.
He cornered two lawyers, Robert MacRae and Michael Burdell, in a recording room. He shot Burdell, a Vietnam veteran who had voluntarily served without ever carrying a weapon, from point-blank range.
Burdell was hit several times and died at a local hospital 45 minutes later. Gardner also wounded bailiff George “Nick” Kirk in the stomach during his attempt to escape; Kirk survived but died a decade later.
Gardner was subsequently shot by officers and captured on the courthouse lawn, thereby ending a three-month run from prison that had started in August 1984.
He had been recaptured for an earlier escape attempt from a hospital, where he beat a corrections officer, stole his gun, and later sent a note back to police that stated, “I don’t want to hurt no one else.”
However, on 9 October 1984, he allegedly carried out a robbery at a Salt Lake City bar during which he shot bartender Melvin Otterstrom, 37, fatally as the man was off-guard behind a counter.
The robbery netted roughly $100, though a lead detective claims the shooting was done to silence a witness. Gardner claims Otterstrom fought back, but authorities found no evidence of a struggle.
In June 1986, a jury convicted him of the first-degree murder of Otterstrom, for which he was sentenced to life, just months after being convicted for the death of Frederick.
That conviction for Burdell’s murder came with the death penalty, a sentence that was ultimately decided by a jury that never heard about the severely early decades of his life.
Gardner’s only hearing for the death sentence that brought him here happened in 1985, a year before juries could ever consider life imprisonment without the option of parole.
He was born in 1961 in Salt Lake City and was institutionalized at the state hospital by age 11 after being found as a toddler wandering a street alone in a diaper, and his early years were defined by chaotic violence.
He spent nearly a year in a locked ward for troubled children, a time he described as both lonely and frightening, before being moved to a foster home where he claimed he suffered and then openly described in court papers.
Medical experts would later identify permanent brain damage resulting from the head trauma suffered while he was a child, and his own sentencing phase had missed that entirely, his lawyers argued.
The U.S. Supreme Court has held that such mitigating evidence is essential to any reliable capital sentence, and his lawyers claimed that the failure to present those details at trial was a fatal flaw.
In 1991, a federal judge agreed with those findings, but the state of Utah appealed that decision. The federal appellate court overturned that and ordered a new hearing.
By the time the courts had sustained his sentence and exhausted his appeals, three of the twelve original jurors had signed sworn statements, saying they’d have chosen life without parole if they had the choice.
Gardner, like the state’s own law changed in 2004, had the option of dying lethal injection, being executed before the statutory change. He chose the squad, saying it was ‘more reliable and mistakes are far less likely.
His final days were documented in detail: He ate his last meal on Tuesday night — fried chicken, lobster tail, apple pie, and vanilla ice cream — before refusing all further food, beginning a liquid fast.
He spent the last hours of his life watching the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, the last three films, before taking a nap until he was woken at midnight for his final walk.
Family members, including his ex-wife and a 4-year-old daughter, received a brief, tearful visit just before he was led out to the chamber.
A short time prior to the execution, his LDS Bishop had placed hands on his head and offered a blessing, a moment in which he jokingly asked, “I don’t suppose you can bless me out of here, can you?”
His final hours also included a surreal request; that he be allowed to walk barefoot across the razor-edge lawn of the prison to feel the cold grass beneath his feet.
Per a Department of Corrections official, he expressed “I have wanted to feel the grass in my toes for a long time; it’s been 25 years.”
His own sentiment on the irony of the manner of his death later was starkly simple: “I changed. It wasn’t a big religious experience. It was just time to grow up and accept what I’ve done,” he told the parole board days before.
His clemency hearing before the court produced a 2-1 split decision, with the Board of Pardons declining to spare his life, citing a long and violent disciplinary record while acknowledging his remorse.
His father also survived him.
Only ashes of a moment later came, his family members and supporters stood outside the prison gates, with a boom box playing Lynyrd Skynyrd’s anthem “Free Bird” once it was announced.
Following the death of 48-year-old Gardner, the convict will be buried according to the conditions of Utah’s twilight law. The shooting was the first in the U. S.
since 1996.
The debate on the method itself is not dead: Gardner was born under the doctrine of blood atonement, a law that allowed the condemned to cleanse their sins by shedding their own blood.
Intense public relations work in the state, the old mentionator advocates and the history of the statute itself says it was, but did not really against the method itself.
It is he who may be the last man to be put to death as such. Even as they prolonged his twilight, family members on both sides of the victim and defender shared their grief, arguing that the man who died was not the man who killed.
Michael Burdell’s fiancée, Donna Nu, stated that the passionate, death-defying defense attorney would never have supported his death, yet he had a chosen death. His sister, by contrast, said she had received closure.
“He finally had to pay for his own crimes,” said one of Gardner’s previous prosecutors, who argued that he was a man not afraid to die.
