I’d be interested in seeing what the legislature had to say about their rationale on enacting such a law. All I’m seeing here is a bunch of stuff about how some folks in the LDS church, both present and past, felt about the concept itself.
BTW, Captain Amazing: The last peace-time execution by the United State Armed Forces was a hanging–for the crime of rape, sometime in the 1960s.
STATES! United States. Sorry about the typo there.
Maybe I misunderstood Pepperlandgirl: when she wrote:
I interpreted it to mean the literal shedding of blood, not the figurative shedding. Pepperlandgirl, can you clarify this?
At any rate, I read the Roberts essay, and it doesn’t address what we’re talking about here (at least, I don’t think it does – I confess that I skipped over some of the Biblical passages in my search for a discussion about literal shedding of blood). He seems to be dealing with the slander that the Mormon church engages in assassination – and I think we can all agree that there’s no evidence at all to support such an allegation.
I agre with Monty: I’d like to see the Utah State Legislature’s (and Idaho’s) rationale for making the firing squad an option. Given what Pepperlandgirl said, I’m guessing they make it an option to satisfy the deeply-held religious (folkloric if you prefer) beliefs of some condemned criminals that only the literal shedding of their blood can allow them to atone for their crimes.
Daniel