Lawyer's US killer executed by firing squad

Ronnie Lee Gardner, 49, was shot dead in Utah by a team of five anonymous marksmen with a matched set of .30-calibre rifles.

Gardner, who had a white target pinned to his chest and was strapped to a chair, was pronounced dead at 12.20am (0620 GMT).

He is the first person to be executed by firing squad in the US in 14 years.

Gardner was sentenced to death for the 1985 courthouse shooting of lawyer Michael Burdell during a failed escape attempt. He was at the Salt Lake City court facing a 1984 murder charge over the shooting death of a barman.

Utah adopted lethal injection as the default execution method in 2004, but Gardner was still allowed to choose the controversial firing squad option because he was sentenced before the law changed.

He told his lawyer he did it because he preferred it – not because he wanted the controversy surrounding the execution to draw attention to his case or embarrass the state.

Some decried the execution as barbaric, and about two dozen members of Gardner's family held a vigil outside the prison as he was shot.

The executioners were all certified police officers who volunteered for the task and remain anonymous. They stood about 25ft from Gardner, behind a wall cut with a gunport, and were armed with a matched set of .30-calibre Winchester rifles.

One was loaded with a blank so no-one knows who fired the fatal shot. Sandbags stacked behind Gardner's chair prevented the bullets from ricocheting around the cinderblock room.

Gardner and his defence lawyers fought to stop the execution to the end. They filed petitions with state and federal courts, asked a Utah parole board to commute his sentence to life in prison without parole, and finally unsuccessfully appealed to Utah Governor Gary Herbert and the US Supreme Court.

Gardner even tried to appeal to the general public, setting up an interview with CNN's Larry King Live. But the Utah Department of Corrections cancelled the phone interview minutes before it was scheduled to take place on Wednesday.

Gardner spent his last day sleeping, reading the novel Divine Justice, watching the Lord Of The Rings film trilogy and meeting his lawyers and a bishop from the Mormon church.

A prison spokesman said officers described his mood as relaxed.

He had eaten his last requested meal – steak, lobster tail, apple pie, vanilla ice cream and 7Up soft drink – two days earlier.

Members of his family gathered outside the prison, some wearing T-shirts displaying his prisoner number, 14873. None planned to witness the execution, at Gardner's request.

"He didn't want nobody to see him get shot," said Gardner's brother, Randy Gardner. "I would have liked to be there for him. I love him to death. He's my little brother."

Gardner's lawyers argued that the jury which sentenced him to death in 1985 heard no mitigating evidence that might have led them to instead impose a life sentence for the man who described himself as a "nasty".

Gardner's life was marked by early drug addiction, physical and sexual abuse and possible brain damage, court records show.

"I had a very explosive temper," Gardner admitted.

The firing squad has been Utah's most-used form of capital punishment. Of the 49 executions held in the state since the 1850s, 40 were by firing squad.

Mr Burdell's family opposes the death penalty and asked for Gardner's life to be spared. In a taped statement, his father, Joseph Burdell Jr, said he believed his son's killing was not premeditated, but a "knee-jerk reaction" by a desperate Gardner attempting to escape.