✏️ Legal Pad
Aim True
On September 30, Tennessee strapped Christa Pike to a gurney and pushed two doses of pentobarbital into her veins. She was convicted of the 1995 murder of a classmate, Colleen Slemmer, and had been on death row for thirty years. The drugs didn't kill her. She woke up in an intensive care unit six days later, arms burned and blistered where the lines went in, and was back at the prison by October 10. Governor Lee halted every execution in the state and ordered an outside review. Nobody in Nashville seems to know what happened.
Alex Kozinski thinks he does. He sat on the Ninth Circuit for thirty-two years, and his op-ed in Monday's Wall Street Journal is titled "The Case for Firing Squads." His argument isn't that the death penalty is good or bad. It's that lethal injection is a lie. It borrows medicine's costume without medicine's people: doctors are barred by their own ethics code from participating, drug companies won't sell the drugs, and so the job falls to corrections officers improvising with whatever the state can find. In 2014 Arizona needed fifteen injections and nearly two hours to kill Joseph Wood. Kozinski's line from back then still holds: "If we, as a society, cannot stomach the splatter from an execution carried out by firing squad, then we shouldn't be carrying out executions at all." It’s a compelling read.
I'll put my cards on the table. John Wayne is credited with saying that some people just need killin', and I prosecuted enough cases to know he had a point. The law in South Carolina agrees with him. The harder question, the one Kozinski is really asking, is whether we're willing to look at what we've decided to do.
Closer to Home: South Carolina already answered. In 2021 the General Assembly rewrote S.C. Code Ann. § 24-3-530 to make electrocution the default and let the condemned elect the firing squad or lethal injection instead. The Supreme Court of South Carolina upheld all three methods under our constitution in Owens v. Stirling, 443 S.C. 246, 904 S.E.2d 580 (2024), reasoning that a bullet to the heart means pain measured in seconds. Then we used it. Brad Sigmon on March 7, 2025, the first firing squad execution in this country in fifteen years. Mikal Mahdi a month later. Stephen Bryant in November. Three volunteers behind a wall, fifteen feet, a small target pinned over the heart.
Mahdi is the asterisk. Three shooters, two wounds, and a defense pathologist who concluded the bullets missed the heart, tore through the liver, and left him conscious for somewhere between thirty seconds and a minute. The state says two bullets went through one hole. Kozinski's pitch is "instant death every time." South Carolina's record is two clean and one disputed.
North Carolina hasn't executed anyone since Samuel Flippen in 2006. There are 122 people on death row in Raleigh, executions are frozen while the courts sort out the Racial Justice Act, and a bill to add the electric chair and the firing squad died quietly at the crossover deadline last year. Same border, two different countries.
Which brings us to Fort Hood. Nidal Hasan killed thirteen people there in 2009, and on December 3 the Army is scheduled to execute him by firing squad, the first military execution in more than sixty years. Last week Secretary Hegseth announced it would be livestreamed. On Thursday the President overruled him: "He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed." The victims' families may attend in person if they choose.
That's the right call, and it's where I get off Kozinski's train (he admits to doubts about the camera himself). Honesty about what we're doing doesn't require an audience. The last public execution in this country was a hanging in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1936, and the carnival that showed up for it is the reason it was the last. A punishment is something the state does in our name: soberly, with witnesses, with the record kept. A spectacle is something it does for us. If the firing squad is the honest method, fine. Keep it honest. Pull the trigger and leave the cameras off.
💡 Sidebar
Lawyer Trick No. 88: Pick Up the Phone
"Keyboard warrior" is a vastly overused term, but there's truth in it. You'd be amazed how many problems in this business get solved not by a five-paragraph email with a snarky closing line, but by picking up the phone and talking to the human on the other end.
Case in point. I recently got a call from a lawyer at a firm I like and respect. Their client was in default, which means the deadline to answer the lawsuit came and went, and the law treats that as forfeiting the right to defend the case. Not a fun call to make. He asked if I'd let them out of it.
I asked the question I always ask in that spot: is this your screw-up or the insurance company's? Because the answer matters. If the carrier sat on the file for weeks and found a lawyer the day after the deadline, I'm going to hold the carrier to it. That's their business model, and the rules are the rules. But if the lawyer dropped it? Well, then I must have just forgotten that conversation we had where I gave him an extension. Funny how that works.
I'd rather beat a defended case than win a default that gets set aside for good cause under Rule 55(c) anyway, and I'd rather have a lawyer across the table who remembers I picked up the phone. Email is for the record. The phone is for the result.
⚖️ Closing Arguments
The Best Damn CLE in the Country
I recently attended what some people call the best damn CLE in the country (trademark PaddyMac). It was a pheasant hunt down in Pinewood, South Carolina, at Featherhorn Farm, and I can't swear to how much continuing legal education took place, but I did eat the best smoked prime rib of my life. The boys at Featherhorn know what they're doing.
I also got to room with a judge. We stayed up until about two in the morning talking about scuba diving, which is not a sentence I expected to write this year. And that's the coolest thing about this particular CLE. You spend your career seeing judges from one angle, looking up from counsel table, and your colleagues from across it. Put everybody in a field with a shotgun and a plate of prime rib and you find out they're people, with hobbies and opinions on dive sites, and that the robe comes off at the end of the day.
I learned something, too. That same judge informed me over drinks that a pheasant is a Chinese chicken. I laughed. He wasn't kidding. The ring-necked pheasant, the bird on every hunting lodge wall in America and the state bird of South Dakota, isn't from here. It's from China. The way he told it, the birds came over in the 1800s alongside the Chinese immigrants who built the railroads, got loose, and decided they liked it here.
I looked it up when I got home, because that's my disease. The judge had the country right and the century right. The paperwork credits a man named Owen Denny, who in 1881 shipped sixty birds from Shanghai to the Pacific Northwest on a sailing ship. Most of them died on the wagon ride to Portland. The survivors were turned loose along the Columbia River, he sent more the next year, and within a decade Oregon's Willamette Valley was overrun. Denny, I should mention, had been a judge before he was a diplomat. So either way, a judge gets the credit.
Chinese chicken. Smoked prime rib. And CLE credit, allegedly. Best damn CLE in the country.
Court is in recess- see you next Friday.
