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 Death Penalty 
 
 Bill to allow firing-squad executions is being drafted in state with just one death-row inmate 
 
 A legislative committee in Wyoming is drafting a bill to allow firing-squad executions, though the state has only one death-row inmate. 
 
 Committee staffers are beginning work on the bill after the director of the state’s Department of Corrections suggested the state needs an alternative to execution drugs, which are increasingly difficult to obtain, the Associated Press reports. 
 
 Currently the state has no execution drugs, corrections director Bob Lampert said. 
 
 Wyoming law allows gas-chamber executions if lethal injections are found to be unconstitutional. The state doesn’t have a gas chamber, however. 
 
 The only inmate on Wyoming’s death row is Dale Wayne Eaton, 69, convicted in the 2004 murder of an 18-year-old woman, the story says. 
 
 A lawmaker in Utah has also announced plans to introduce a bill to bring back firing squads. Utah State Rep. Paul Ray said he backed the option because “the prisoner dies instantly” and “there’s no suffering,” the Associated Press reported earlier this month. “It sounds like the Wild West, but it’s probably the most humane way to kill somebody,” Ray said. 
 
 Ray plans to introduce his proposal in the next legislative session beginning in January. Utah still allows firing-squad executions for inmates convicted before a 2004 law banned its use. 
 
 Lawmakers in Utah and Wyoming had floated the idea of firing squads earlier this year, but those efforts had stalled. Now the states are reconsidering the proposal after the botched lethal-injection execution in Oklahoma, AP says. ||||| ST. LOUIS (AP) — With lethal-injection drugs in short supply and new questions looming about their effectiveness, lawmakers in some death penalty states are considering bringing back relics of a more gruesome past: firing squads, electrocutions and gas chambers. 
 
 FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Virginia Department of Corrections shows an electric chair which Virginia provides as an alternative to lethal injection. With lethal-injection drugs in... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this May 13, 2011 file photo is the gas chamber at the former Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City that is now a tourist attraction. With lethal-injection drugs in short supply and... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this June 18, 2010, file photo, the firing squad execution chamber at the Utah State Prison in Draper, Utah, is shown. With lethal-injection drugs in short supply and new questions looming about... (Associated Press) 
 
 Most states abandoned those execution methods more than a generation ago in a bid to make capital punishment more palatable to the public and to a judicial system worried about inflicting cruel and unusual punishments that violate the Constitution. 
 
 But to some elected officials, the drug shortages and recent legal challenges are beginning to make lethal injection seem too vulnerable to complications. 
 
 "This isn't an attempt to time-warp back into the 1850s or the wild, wild West or anything like that," said Missouri state Rep. Rick Brattin, who this month proposed making firing squads an option for executions. "It's just that I foresee a problem, and I'm trying to come up with a solution that will be the most humane yet most economical for our state." 
 
 Brattin, a Republican, said questions about the injection drugs are sure to end up in court, delaying executions and forcing states to examine alternatives. It's not fair, he said, for relatives of murder victims to wait years, even decades, to see justice served while lawmakers and judges debate execution methods. 
 
 Like Brattin, a Wyoming lawmaker this month offered a bill allowing the firing squad. Missouri's attorney general and a state lawmaker have raised the notion of rebuilding the state's gas chamber. And a Virginia lawmaker wants to make electrocution an option if lethal-injection drugs are not available. 
 
 If adopted, those measures could return states to the more harrowing imagery of previous decades, when inmates were hanged, electrocuted or shot to death by marksmen. 
 
 States began moving to lethal injection in the 1980s in the belief that powerful sedatives and heart-stopping drugs would replace the violent spectacles with a more clinical affair while limiting, if not eliminating, an inmate's pain. 
 
 The total number of U.S. executions has declined — from a peak of 98 in 1999 to 39 last year. Some states have turned away from the death penalty entirely. Many have cases tied up in court. And those that carry on with executions find them increasingly difficult to conduct because of the scarcity of drugs and doubts about how well they work. 
 
 European drug makers have stopped selling the lethal chemicals to prisons because they do not want their products used to kill. 
 
 At least two recent executions are also raising concerns about the drugs' effectiveness. Last week, Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire took 26 minutes to die by injection, gasping repeatedly as he lay on a gurney with his mouth opening and closing. And on Jan. 9, Oklahoma inmate Michael Lee Wilson's final words were, "I feel my whole body burning." 
 
 Missouri threw out its three-drug lethal injection procedure after it could no longer obtain the drugs. State officials altered the method in 2012 to use propofol, which was found in the system of pop star Michael Jackson after he died of an overdose in 2009. 
 
 The anti-death penalty European Union threatened to impose export limits on propofol if it were used in an execution, jeopardizing the supply of a common anesthetic needed by hospitals across the nation. In October, Gov. Jay Nixon stayed the execution of serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin and ordered the Missouri Department of Corrections to find a new drug. 
 
 Days later, the state announced it had switched to a form of pentobarbital made by a compounding pharmacy. Like other states, Missouri has refused to divulge where the drug comes from or who makes it. 
 
 Missouri has carried out two executions using pentobarbital — Franklin in November and Allen Nicklasson in December. Neither inmate showed outward signs of suffering, but the secrecy of the process resulted in a lawsuit and a legislative inquiry. 
 
 Michael Campbell, assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said some lawmakers simply don't believe convicted murderers deserve any mercy. 
 
 "Many of these politicians are trying to tap into a more populist theme that those who do terrible things deserve to have terrible things happen to them," Campbell said. 
 
 Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., cautioned that there could be a backlash. 
 
 "These ideas would jeopardize the death penalty because, I think, the public reaction would be revulsion, at least from many quarters," Dieter said. 
 
 Some states already provide alternatives to lethal injection. Condemned prisoners may choose the electric chair in eight states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. An inmate named Robert Gleason Jr. was the most recent to die by electrocution, in Virginia in January 2013. 
 
 Missouri and Wyoming allow for gas-chamber executions, and Arizona does if the crime occurred before Nov. 23, 1992, and the inmate chooses that option instead of lethal injection. Missouri no longer has a gas chamber, but Attorney General Chris Koster, a Democrat, and Missouri state Sen. Kurt Schaefer, a Republican, last year suggested possibility rebuilding one. So far, there is no bill to do so. 
 
 Delaware, New Hampshire and Washington state still allow inmates to choose hanging. The last hanging in the U.S. was Billy Bailey in Delaware in 1996. Two prisoners in Washington state have chosen to be hanged since the 1990s — Westley Allan Dodd in 1993 and Charles Rodman Campbell in 1994. 
 
 In recent years, there have been three civilian firing squad executions in the U.S., all in Utah. Gary Gilmore uttered his famous final words, "Let's do it," on Jan. 17, 1977, before his execution, which ended a 10-year unofficial moratorium on the death penalty across the country. 
 
 Convicted killers John Albert Taylor in 1996 and Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010 were also put to death by firing squad. 
 
 Utah is phasing out its use, but the firing squad remains an option there for inmates sentenced prior to May 3, 2004. 
 
 Oklahoma maintains the firing squad as an option, but only if lethal injection and electrocution are deemed unconstitutional. 
 
 In Wyoming, Republican state Sen. Bruce Burns said death by firing squad would be far less expensive than building a gas chamber. Wyoming has only one inmate on death row, 68-year-old convicted killer Dale Wayne Eaton. The state has not executed anyone in 22 years. 
 
 Jackson Miller, a Republican in the Virginia House of Delegates, is sponsoring a bill that would allow for electrocution if lethal injection drugs are not available. 
 
 Miller said he would prefer that the state have easy access to the drugs needed for lethal injections. "But I also believe that the process of the justice system needs to be fulfilled."
– Amid shortages of drugs used in lethal injections and controversy over a botched execution in Oklahoma, Tennessee has become the first state to revive an older method of execution. Gov. Bill Haslam yesterday signed a bill allowing the state to use the electric chair if execution drugs are not available, the AP reports. State lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the bill last month. Other states allow condemned inmates to choose the chair, but Tennessee is the first to reintroduce it without giving prisoners a choice, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Wyoming, meanwhile, says it's all out of execution drugs, and lawmakers are drafting a bill to bring back the firing squad—though the ABA Journal points out that the state has but a single inmate on Death Row (that would be 69-year-old Dale Wayne Eaton, who was found guilty of the 2004 murder of an 18-year-old woman). State law currently permits death-by-gas-chamber, but the state doesn't actually have a gas chamber. (A recent poll found that one in five Americans supports bringing back gas chambers.)