ShareThisSALT LAKE CITY - After convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner announced that he wants to be executed by a firing squad on June 18, national and international reporters suggested it was a throwback to the Wild, Wild West.
Some Utahns, though, had a different explanation for why such an anachronistic execution technique remained an option in the 21st century: blood atonement.
The term refers to an arcane belief tied to the early days of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that a murderer must shed his own blood -- literally -- to be forgiven by God. Since Mormon pioneers first entered the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 until today, most of Utah's formal executions (until recent decades) have been by firing squad, which is a lot bloodier than hanging or lethal injection.
Gardner, 49, was sentenced to death for killing an attorney 25 years ago during a failed escape attempt and shootout.
When state Rep. Sheryl Allen, R-Bountiful, began proposing elimination of the firing-squad option in the late 1990s, the LDS Church did not object. Yet talk of blood atonement percolated "in quiet, backroom discussions," she recalls. "A couple of people in prominent positions said to me, 'We've got to have blood atonement.' "
By 2004, Allen says, all mention of the Mormon concept "just went away" and the measure passed.
The LDS Church disavows any connection to blood atonement, says spokesman Scott Trotter. "(It) is not a doctrine of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We believe in and teach the infinite and all-encompassing atonement of Jesus Christ, which makes forgiveness of sin and salvation possible for all people."
The firing-squad option soon may be history, thanks to the Allen-led ban, but the mythic appeal of a bloody death as payment for sin persists in some Mormon quarters.
Even Gardner told the Deseret News in 1996 that he would sue for the right to die that way.
"I guess it's my Mormon heritage," he told the paper.
Blood atonement has played a role in books about the 1977 execution of Gary Gilmore, in Jon Krakauer's look at Mormonism and violence, in discussions of the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, even in this year's finale of HBO's "Big Love."
Just two years ago, defense attorneys for accused murderer Floyd Maestas, who is not LDS, asked prospective jurors if they were familiar with blood atonement and, if so, what it meant to them. The issue never came up at trial, and Maestas was convicted and sentenced to die by lethal injection.
If the LDS Church doesn't preach blood atonement and the firing squad is virtually finished, why, then, does the notion linger in public and private conversations across the state and on the screen?
The answer may lie in history, symbolism and salvation.
As a young Mormon in Salt Lake City, legal scholar Martin R. Gardner heard adults attribute their support of capital punishment to this idea of blood atonement. As an LDS missionary in England in the late 1960s, he had a pamphlet, penned by the future Mormon prophet Joseph Fielding Smith, that described and defended the teaching.
"It was always around in the popular consciousness," Gardner says in a phone interview from the University of Nebraska Law School, where he teaches criminal law.
In a 1979 article in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Gardner traced the teaching to Brigham Young, who believed even Christ's atoning sacrifice for humanity could not cover some sins, including murder, apostasy and egregious sexual misbehavior.
"There are transgressors," Young said in an 1856 sermon, "who, if they knew themselves, and the only condition upon which they can obtain forgiveness, would beg of their brethren to shed their blood, that the smoke thereof might ascend to God as an offering to appease the wrath that is kindled against them."
Those sentiments were replayed often by the Mormon prophet and his two counselors in the governing First Presidency, Jedediah M. Grant and Heber C. Kimball, during the 1850s, "a period of intense Mormon revivalism bordering on fanaticism," Gardner wrote in Dialogue.
The three also were key players in creating Utah's first capital-punishment law in 1851, which offered killers the choice of being shot, hanged or beheaded (another blood-shedding option).
Perhaps the most famous execution was that of LDS Bishop John D. Lee, shot by firing squad in 1877 for his involvement in the 1857 slaughter of 120 men, women and children known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Lee, who clearly believed in blood atonement, according to historian Ronald W. Walker, sat on his coffin and said to the sharp shooters, "Center my heart, boys. Don't mangle my body."
In 1888, the Utah Territorial Legislature eliminated beheading but adopted similar language that remained state law until 1980, when lethal injection replaced hanging.
The firing squad remained.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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