John Albert Taylor
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John Albert Taylor (born c. 1960) was executed by firing squad in Utah on January 26, 1996 at 12:03 a.m. Mountain Time for the 1988 rape and strangulation of 11-year-old Charla King. He is currently the last person to have been executed in the United States by firing squad, but as of 2007, the method remains a legal (but not necessarily preferred) method of execution in three of the United States (Idaho, Oklahoma and Utah). Over 150 TV crews from around the world came to record the event, with nine media witnesses being allowed to record the actual event. One of them, Paul Murphy (from KTVX Channel 4, Salt Lake City) said:
- "[we] saw this very large man strapped to a chair. His eyes were darting back and forth". He was strapped to the chair by his hands and feet and lifted his chin for Warden Hank Galetka to secure a strap around his neck and place the black hood over his head. At 12:03 a.m., on the count of three, the five riflemen standing 23 feet away fired at a white cloth target pinned over Taylor's heart. Blood darkened the chest area of his navy blue clothing, and four minutes later, a doctor pronounced him dead. Very little blood spilled into the pan under the chair's mesh seat. As the volley hit him Taylor's hands squeezed up, went down, and came up and squeezed again. His chest was covered with blood."
- "The image I have when I close my eyes is of his chest heaving upward after he was shot," said Kevin Dale Stanfield, another witness.
It is interesting to note the amount of media coverage this execution received for being cruel and unusual, when the day before Billy Bailey was in fact, hanged in Delaware, and that execution received minimal media coverage.
Taylor ordered pizzas "with everything" for his last meal and is said to have chosen the firing squad because it would be awkward for state officials. Of the option of lethal injection, Taylor said he did not want to flop around on the gurney "like a dying fish."
