As the Utah firing squad did its job, two women embraced – both nieces, one of a victim, the other of the killer
In a darkened car park high on a hill overlooking the sparkling nightscape of Salt Lake City, two young women are clinging to each other and weeping. Their embrace conveys more than a thousand speeches.
Both women are nieces, and both have lost their much-loved uncles at the end of a gun. Donna Taylor's uncle, a lawyer called Michael Burdell, was shot through the right eye on 2 April 1985 by a convicted criminal who was trying to escape from the city's central courthouse having been on trial for a previous murder.
Ashley Gardner's uncle was Ronnie Lee Gardner, that same convicted criminal. In the early hours of Friday morning, just minutes before the two women's locked embrace, Gardner was executed inside Utah state prison, becoming the first person in America in 14 years to be put to death by firing squad.
There was precious little of the positive to be garnered during a long night spent waiting outside the prison for Gardner's execution to be announced. We learnt that the prisoner had spent much of his final hours sleeping and talking to a Mormon clergyman. We heard that at midnight he had been restrained in the execution chair with six straps applied across his head, chest, wrist and ankles. We discovered that the expert marksmen who had volunteered to be the executioners had been issued with Winchester 30-30 rifles. We were told that they had taken aim at a circular target that had been attached to Gardner's prison jumpsuit using Velcro by a doctor who placed it right over the condemned man's heart.
We found out that the executioners were given a countdown but that for some unexplained reason they had decided in advance that they would all fire at the penultimate number.
