Ronnie Lee Gardner...

...is scheduled to be executed in Utah tomorrow by a five-man firing squad. Yes, a firing squad:

If not blocked by the courts, Mr. Gardner will be hooded, strapped to a chair and shot through the heart.

Yikes! Sounds barbaric. And yet, aren't all methods of capital punishment barbaric?
___

From the same article in the Times, a Ms. Debra Radack makes a point that I've been trying to articulate, in a different context, about myself (my emphasis):

The national debate over capital punishment has evolved, too, especially in the last few years as states from New Mexico to New Jersey to Illinois have repealed the death penalty or halted executions.

Debra Radack has lived that arc of change.

Ms. Radack, 54, was planning her wedding in 1977, working at a radio station and completely convinced that [Gary] Gilmore deserved to die for killing two young men in separate armed robberies. She said she was convinced that Mr. Gardner’s execution was just, too. But the black-or-white certainty of her youth is gone, she said. Evidence about mistakes and miscarriages of justice in death penalty cases around the country have made her cautious.

“After you live a bit, you see more shades of gray,” she said, interviewed on a lunchtime stroll in Salt Lake City, about 20 miles north of here.