A death row inmate died in a barrage of bullets early Friday as Utah carried out its first firing squad execution in 14 years. Shortly before the shooting, Ronnie Lee Gardner was strapped into a chair and a team of five marksmen aimed their guns at a white target pinned to his chest. He was pronounced dead at 12:20 a.m. Utah adopted lethal injection as the default execution method in 2004, but Gardner was still allowed to choose the controversial firing squad option because he was sentenced before the law changed. He told his lawyer he did it because he preferred it _ not because he wanted the controversy surrounding the execution to draw attention to his case or embarrass the state. Some decried the execution as barbaric, and about two dozen members of Gardner's family held a vigil outside the prison as he was shot. There were no protests at the prison. The executioners were all certified police officers who volunteered for the task and remain anonymous. They stood about 25 feet from Gardner, behind a wall cut with a gunport, and were armed with a matched set of .30-caliber Winchester rifles. One was loaded with a blank so no one knows who fired the fatal shot. Sandbags stacked behind Gardner's chair kept the bullets from ricocheting around the cinderblock room. Gardner was sentenced to death for a 1985 capital murder conviction stemming from the fatal courthouse shooting of attorney Michael Burdell during a failed escape attempt. Gardner was at the Salt Lake City court facing a 1984 murder charge in the shooting death of a bartender, Melvyn Otterstrom. Gardner and his defense attorneys fought to stop the execution to the end. They filed petitions with state and federal courts, asked a Utah parole board to commute his sentence to life in prison without parole, and finally unsuccessfully appealed to Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and the U.S. Supreme Court. Gardner even tried to appeal to the general public, setting up an interview with CNN's “Larry King Live.” But the Utah Department of Corrections canceled the phone interview minutes before it was scheduled to take place Wednesday.
