DRAPER, Utah - A firing squad executed killer Ronnie Lee Gardner early today.
Gardner, 49, was shot by a team of five anonymous marksmen with a matched set of .30-caliber rifles. Gardner, who had a white target pinned to his chest and was strapped to a chair, was pronounced dead at 12:20 a.m.
Gardner was the first person to be executed by a firing squad in the United States in 14 years.
A flurry of last-minute appeals and requests for stays were rejected Thursday by the U.S. Supreme Court, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Gov. Gary Herbert.
The Supreme Court turned down three appeals late Thursday, although one of its orders showed that two justices, Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens, would have granted Gardner's request for a stay.
"We are disappointed with the court's decisions, declining to hear Mr. Gardner's case," one of his attorneys, Megan Moriarty, said in a statement to The Associated Press.
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After a visit with his family, Gardner was moved from his regular cell in a maximum-security wing of the Utah State Prison to an observation cell Wednesday night, officials said.
Earlier Thursday, they said Gardner was sleeping, reading, watching the "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy and meeting with his attorneys. A corrections spokesman said officers saw his mood as relaxed.
Gardner was the third man killed by firing squad in the U.S. since a Supreme Court ruling reinstated capital punishment in 1976. Although Utah altered its death penalty law in 2004 to make lethal injection the default method, eight inmates convicted before that date still have the option of the firing squad.
Gardner's attorney said the decision was based on preference, not a desire to draw publicity.
Gardner was sentenced to death for a 1985 murder conviction stemming from the fatal courthouse shooting of attorney Michael Burdell during an escape attempt. Gardner was at the court because he faced a 1984 murder charge in the shooting death of bartender Melvyn Otterstrom.
Gardner acknowledged his tortured trajectory to a parole board last week, saying, "It would have been a miracle if I didn't end up here."
Gardner first came to the attention of authorities at age 2 as he was found walking alone on a street clad only in a diaper. At age 6 he became addicted to sniffing gasoline and glue. Harder drugs followed by age 10.
By then, Gardner was tagging along with his stepfather as a lookout on robberies, court documents say.
After spending 18 months in a state mental hospital and being sexually abused in a foster home, he killed Otterstrom at age 23. About six months later, at 24, he shot Burdell in the face as the attorney hid behind a door.
The American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday decried Gardner's imminent execution as an example of what it called the United States' "barbaric, arbitrary and bankrupting practice of capital punishment."