Utah lawmakers on Tuesday approved a measure that would make firing squad the method of execution in the state if authorities can't obtain increasingly scarce lethal injection drugs. 
 
 Before the 18-10 vote by the state Senate, Gov. Gary Herbert declined to say explicitly if he would sign the bill but noted that Utah is having trouble finding chemicals to kill death-row inmates. 
 
 "If those substances cannot be obtained, this proposal would make sure that those instructed to carry out the lawful order of the court and the carefully deliberated decision of the jury can do so," Herbert, a Republican, said in a statement. 
 
 There are a handful of inmates on Utah's death row who can already choose firing squad as their execution method because they were sentenced before 2004, when the state took that option away. The last prisoner to be executed by firing squad was Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010. 
 
 Randy Gardner told NBC News that his brother — who was sentenced to death for killing a lawyer in court while facing charges for a previous murder — opted to be shot by his executioners because he believed it would stir opposition to capital punishment. 
 
 "It's not humane at all," Randy Gardner said of firing squads. "I got to see the four bullet wounds in my brother's chest after the execution and I could have put my hand in there. It's cruel and unusual punishment for sure." 
 
 Utah is one of several states that have turned to alternate execution procedures because pharmaceutical companies have stopped selling their products to prisons for capital punishment. Tennessee brought back the electric chair as a backup last year, but inmates have sued to stop it from being used. 
 
 "We have to have an option," Utah Rep. Paul Ray told reporters when he introduced the House version of the firing squad bill. 
 
 If the governor signs the bill, any attempt to use a firing squad is certain to come with a court battle. There are nine inmates on Utah's death row right now and no scheduled executions. 
 
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 A raft of executions across the country are on hold either because the states cannot find the drugs or because inmates are challenging the chemicals in the protocol. 
 
 The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal next month that will determine if three states can continue to use a sedative called midazolam as the first agent in a three-drug cocktail despite claims it doesn't protect inmates from excruciating pain. 
 
 A poll commissioned by NBC News last spring, in the wake of a badly botched lethal injection in Oklahoma, found Americans are open to alternatives if the needle no longer becomes a viable way to carry out the death penalty. 
 
 Twenty percent of those polled expressed support for the gas chamber, 18 percent for the electric chair, 12 percent for the firing squad and 8 percent for hanging. 
 
 Last July, a federal appeals judge said lethal injections are a "misguided" effort to mask the brutality of executions and suggested a method most closely associated with the French Revolution would be better. 
 
 "The guillotine is probably best but seems inconsistent with our national ethos," Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in a dissent at the time. 
 
 "And the electric chair, hanging and the gas chamber are each subject to occasional mishaps," he continued. "The firing squad strikes me as the most promising. Eight or ten large-caliber rifle bullets fired at close range can inflict massive damage, causing instant death every time." 
 
 Utah has used the firing squad three times, most famously on Gary Gilmore, the subject of Norman Mailer's "The Executioner's Song," who was the first person put to death in the U.S. after the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. ||||| "I'm sure there's some initial pain to it," he said, "but you don't see the struggling and the trying to breathe you see on any type of lethal injection. Even on the ones that are the lethal drug cocktail, you still see the gurgling and the fighting to breathe." 
 
 The bill was prompted in part by a "botched" execution in Oklahoma where condemned murderer and rapist Clayton Lockett writhed and gasped after he was injected and called out, "Oh, man," according to news reports quoting witnesses. Lockett died of a heart attack about a half hour after getting lethal doses of drugs, prison officials said, sparking a national debate over the drugs used to carry out executions and the death penalty itself. 
 
 Under the bill headed for the 2015 Utah Legislative General Session in January, a court hearing would be held at a minimum of 30 days before a scheduled execution at which a judge would determine if a legal drug combination was available for the execution. If not, the firing squad would become the method of execution. 
 
 In recent decades, Utah gave death row inmates the choice of execution by lethal injection or a firing squad. But in 2004, the Legislature made lethal injection the primary method of execution, with a firing squad available for inmates who previously had the right to chose their method of execution or if a court declared lethal injection unconstitutional. 
 
 Jean Hill, the government liaison for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City, said the diocese opposed the bill because of its longstanding opposition to capital punishment. 
 
 "We don't believe there is a humane way to execute anyone," Hill said. "And the idea that we put five people behind a wall to shoot someone who is immobilized and unarmed is not humane." 
 
 The committee voted 9-2 to endorse the legislation, with Rep. Mark Wheatley, D-Salt Lake, and Rep. Marc Roberts, R-Santaquin, against the endorsement. 
 
 "I don't see where this bill is needed," said Wheatley. "We're not correcting any problem. … It's not solving anything." 
 
 The Utah prison inmate who may be the closest to execution is Douglas Carter, convicted of killing Eva Olesen during a 1985 robbery at her Provo home. 
 
 But Deputy Utah Attorney General Tom Brunker said Carter still has legal actions pending in state and federal courts. 
 
 The last person executed by a firing squad in Utah was Ronnie Lee Gardner on June 18, 2010. Gardner was sentenced to death for the 1985 murder of attorney Michael Burdell during an attempt to escape while Gardner was in the Salt Lake City courthouse for a hearing stemming from another murder the year before. 
 
 Gardner chose a firing squad when a 3rd District Court judge signed a death warrant in 2010. His execution brought an intense focus to Utah and its capital punishment laws. 
 
 The Jan. 17, 1977, execution by firing squad of Gary Gilmore also brought international attention to Utah when he became the first person executed in the United States in 10 years after a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions upheld the death penalty after earlier decisions had struck down previous laws. 
 
 Probably the most famous execution by firing squad in Utah was that of Joe Hill, the Swedish immigrant born Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, who was known for songs he composed on behalf of the Industrial Workers of the World, a militant labor union of that era. 
 
 He was executed on Nov. 19, 1915, for the murders to a Salt Lake City grocer and his son, a conviction that nearly a century later is still disputed. 
 
 tharvey@sltrib.com
– Under a bill passed by Utah's state Senate yesterday, the state's executioners won't have to worry about a shortage of lethal injection drugs unless there's also a shortage of bullets. The bill, introduced by its Republican sponsor as a "backup," allows the use of firing squads when there's a drug shortage and was passed by an 18-10 vote, NBC News reports. Gov. Gary Herbert hasn't said whether he will sign the bill, though his office describes it as a move to "make sure that those instructed to carry out the lawful order of the court and the carefully deliberated decision of the jury can do so," reports Fox 13. Utah decided to phase out firing squads in 2004, but inmate Ronnie Lee Gardner, who had chosen the method when he was sentenced, was executed by firing squad in 2010, and there a few other death-row inmates sentenced before 2004 who can still opt for the method, according to the AP, which notes that the execution method has long been controversial in Utah: In 1879, Wallace Wilkerson faced a firing squad for killing a man over a game of cribbage, but they missed his heart and he wasn't pronounced dead until 27 minutes later. In Oklahoma, where state law allows firing squads only if lethal injection and electrocution are declared unconstitutional, lawmakers are looking into making the state the first one to execute people with nitrogen gas.