Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed by the State of Utah for the murder of a man during an escape attempt
According to court documents Ronnie Lee Gardner was being tried for murder when he attempted to escape from the courtroom. In the process he would shoot and kill lawyer Michael Burdell, 36.
Ronnie Lee Gardner would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Ronnie Lee Gardner would be executed by firing squad on June 18 2010
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When Was Ronnie Lee Gardner Executed
Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed on June 18 2010
Ronnie Lee Gardner Case
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, Ronnie Lee 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.
Five. Four. Three.
And on the count of two they opened fire.
Gruesome detail piled on top of gruesome detail. But then there was this: the simple embrace, away from the cameras, of two bereaved nieces, brought together across a massive and violent divide by their common loss and their common disgust towards the death penalty.
“I love him, he was a great guy,” Ashley Gardner said about her uncle whose body was even then being wrapped in a black bag, placed on a gurney and sent on its way to a local morgue to await cremation. “I’m hurt because I don’t believe murder justifies murder.”
Donna Taylor wouldn’t speak to the Guardian after the execution; her weary look made clear this was not the time and place. But earlier in the night, before the firing squad had assembled and done its business, she talked about her uncle Michael Burdell.
The day he died he was doing voluntary legal work at the courthouse – that was the kind of man he was, she said. All his life he had a visceral dislike of violence and killing of any nature, so much so that when he was drafted to the Vietnam war he made sure he was put in a role that did not involve carrying a gun.
“Mike was totally against the death penalty,” Taylor said. “He would not have wanted this; he would have said this doesn’t do any good.”
It was only the third time since 1977 that execution by firing squad had been practiced in the US. All three occasions took place in Utah, a state that is unashamed about its fondness for guns and has a history, dating back to its Mormon roots, of equating justice to the principle that blood begets blood.
Of 49 executions in Utah over the past 160 years, 40 have been by firing squad.
That confidence in the rightness of judicial killing was reflected outside the prison on Friday morning by some of the people gathered there, as a counterpoint to the sentiment reflected in the women’s embrace. On the far side of the car park, separated from the nieces only by a bare patch of tarmac, Barb Webb was rejoicing.
Her father, Nick Kirk, was a bailiff at the courthouse where Gardner tried to make his 1985 escape, and was shot in the stomach by the convict. He lived, but spent the final 10 years of his life in constant pain and fear that his assailant would go on the run again.
“I’m mighty relieved,” Webb said. “It’s like a hundred pounds has come off my shoulders. I don’t have to hear Gardner’s name any more; he won’t have another appeal. I won’t hear that date, 2 April 1985, over and over again.”
The execution was carried out in a specially designed chamber inside the prison. A simple room measuring 20 by 24 feet, it is separated from two adjacent rooms by bullet-proof glass to avoid injuries in case of a ricochet to the witnesses who gather there.
There were 14 witnesses on Friday morning, though none from Gardner’s family. “My Dad didn’t want us to see him like that, he wanted us to remember him as he was alive,” Gardner’s daughter Brandie said.
At midnight Ronnie Lee Gardner was taken from his cell, walked to the execution chamber and strapped to the chair. When he was asked if he had any last words, he replied. “I do not. No.”
A black hood was placed over his head. By then the five local law enforcement officers had lined up behind a brick wall some 25 feet away from Gardner. They could not be seen, to preserve their anonymity.
They placed the barrels of their rifles through a slot in the wall and aimed at the target above Ronnie Lee Gardner’s heart. Four of the rifles were loaded with a single live bullet. The fifth contained an “ineffective” round – which unlike a blank gives the same recoil as a live bullet; that way none of the five executioners could know whether or not they had delivered the fatal shot.
Nine journalists from local TV channels and newspapers described what happened next. At 12.15am, when the countdown reached two, a very loud eruption of noise signalled the discharge of the guns. The target had holes in it and began to turn a darker colour.
At the point of impact Ronnie Lee Gardner clenched his fist and his left arm convulsed, rising up and down, then up and down again. He continued rubbing his thumb and finger together for so long that some of the reporters thought he was still alive and wondered if the firing squad would have to reload.
Then, two minutes after the gunfire, the doctor came in and lifted the hood. Gardner’s face was revealed, looking ashen, and his head was slumped backwards. He was pronounced dead at 12.17am.
“It was cleaner than I expected,” said Sheryl Worsley of the local news station KSL. “But he moved and that bothers me. It mirrors the last couple of weeks – he was fighting to stay alive.”
Once the doctor had confirmed that Ronnie Lee Gardner’s 49 years of life were at an end, the news was put out. This being the 21st century, even in Utah, the prison authorities made the grim announcement via Twitter.
Gardner’s family was told that he had gone by his lawyer, and they immediately marked the moment by releasing 25 coloured balloons into the night sky above the parking lot.
“He’s free now,” his sister Diane said. “He’s not in pain any more, he’s not locked up, he’s up there with the rest of his family.”
In the run-up to his execution, Ronnie Lee Gardner did not try to protest his innocence. Instead he told the authorities of his broken childhood and pleaded with them to take that in mitigation.
He reminded them that aged two he was found wandering the streets alone severely malnourished and dressed only in a nappy. At five, he was sexually abused by an older sister and her friend. At six he was sniffing glue. By 10 he was addicted to hard drugs, and by 14 he was being put out to work as a prostitute by a paedophile who was allowed to become his foster parent.
When his daughter Brandie asked him recently why in April he chose the firing squad rather than the more conventional lethal injection method, he said: “I lived by the gun, I murdered with a gun, I will die by the gun.”
In the last few years Ronnie Lee Gardner worked with his brother Randy to set up a project for abused children. With Randy’s money, supplemented by a little Gardner had saved selling craftworks he made in prison, they bought a plot of land in northern Utah where they planned to teach troubled kids how to farm.
It would be organic, Gardner insisted, because he was convinced that chemicals in food were killing people. He told Brandie that if the farm could help just one child who was on the wrong path and save them from his fate, then it would all have been worth it.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/18/utah-execution-ronnie-lee-gardner
