Gardner Firing Squad Execution Obscured Central Death Penalty Flaws

The firing squad execution of Utah death row prisoner Ronnie Lee Gardner briefly drew national and international attention to the issue of capital punishment due to the unusual and seldom used exeuction method involved. But Craig Haney, a University of California Santa Cruz psychology professor, writes in the Huffington Post that the incident obscures a tragic flaw central to the death penalty: that many of the condemned prisoners share common backgrounds as being abused and neglected as children, resulting in emotional or mental disturbances.