Wyoming Lawmaker Wants to Bring Back Firing Squads

As alternative to gas chamber when lethal injection unavailable

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A Wyoming lawmaker is pushing legislation that would mandate the use of firing squads to execute inmates on death row if lethal injection is unavailable.

Republican state Sen. Bruce Burns announced Monday that he’ll introduce the bill in the upcoming legislative session that starts Feb. 10., the Associated Press reports. Burns said he considers the gas chamber, currently the legal alternative to lethal injection, to be cruel, unusual, and too expensive.

“One of the reasons I chose firing squad as opposed to any other form of execution is because frankly it’s one of the cheapest for the state,” Burns said, according to the AP. “The expense of building a gas chamber I think would be prohibitive when you consider how many people would be executed by it, and even the cost of gallows.”

Wyoming has just one inmate on death row, and the last execution in the state took place in 1992.

States around the country have been running short of the cocktail of chemicals typically used in lethal injections, forcing some prisons to seek alternative means of killing death row inmates.

[AP]