Some Utah lawmakers want John Albert Taylor's execution to be the state's last death by firing squad.
The mother of Taylor's victim agrees it is a good move to wipe the option off the books and supports legislation that will be introduced in the 2004 legislative session.
"I personally don't think anyone has the right to choose their own death, especially when they have murdered," Sherron King said. "I think they take that right away from themselves."
Sherron King found her daughter, Charla Nicole, in the Washington Terrace apartment they shared one June afternoon in 1989 after she got home from work. Charla, who would have been 12 the next day, had been raped and then strangled with a telephone cord and gagged with a pair of panties.
Taylor, diagnosed as a remorseless pedophile while just a teenager, had been visiting his sister, who lived in the same apartment complex.
Convicted of sexual assault and robbery years earlier in Florida, Taylor was linked to the crime through a set of fingerprints left on the telephone.
Six years later, after being found guilty of murder in a bench trial and dropping his appeals, Taylor was executed.
Utah law allows condemned killers to choose their method of execution — either by lethal injection or by firing squad. Taylor chose the firing squad and became the first killer executed by the method in the United States since 1977, when Gary Gilmore died against a wall at the Utah State Prison.
Utah remains the only state in the country that allows inmates to choose an execution in front of a firing squad. While Idaho has the sentence on its books, a judge has to impose that manner of death.
The months leading up to Taylor's death and the execution itself set off a maelstrom of controversy that attracted international attention — stunning the state with its intensity and sparking the inevitable debates over the "barbaric" nature of the execution.
Senate Minority Whip Ron Allen, D-Stansbury Park, said he doesn't want to see a repeat of that.
"Why do these guys get a choice when their victims didn't? Let's take the choice out of the situation and let's take the unwarranted publicity out of it."
Allen and Rep. Sheryl Allen, R-Bountiful, have introduced legislation that would ban the practice.
The Democrat wants his law to be retroactive, meaning three death-row inmates who've already chosen bullets over the needle won't get that chance.
"I don't think it should be a choice any longer," Ron Allen said. "Let's conduct state business in a more professional way. The amount of publicity (Taylor's execution) created was pathetic. And what his victim's family had to go through must have been horrible."
King says she's not opposed to the firing squad as a means of execution, but doesn't like the publicity that comes with it — a glare that focuses unfairly on the killer, not the victim.
"People forgot about Charla. They could only see that John was going to die, but the fact is a little girl died viciously at his hands. That is not hate talking, that is truth talking."
King said the international press, particularly, accused Utah of using a "barbaric" method of capital punishment and were too caught up in the execution itself to remember why the death was being carried out.
"It was like my daughter's life meant nothing. He was a master at publicity."
When Rep. Sheryl Allen ran legislation to ban firing-squad executions just after Taylor's death, the measure died because it lacked leadership support. A Deseret News/KSL-TV poll commissioned that same year showed 60 percent of Utahns wanted the firing squad preserved as an execution method.
However, she will be back at it again early next year, and thinks this time the measure will pass. The prohibition has the support of the Utah Sentencing Commission as well as the Utah Sheriffs Association.
"The firing squad brings an enormous amount of attention, but the attention is on the method and the criminal, bringing very little to the victim or the viciousness of the crime," Sheryl Allen said. "It becomes the criminal's one last magnificent manipulation."
Senate Majority Whip John Valentine, R-Orem, also wants the state to forbid executions on Sundays, Mondays or holidays.
Right now, Utah law is silent on the issue, which means the 60-day death warrant issued by a judge could mean the condemned would be executed on a holiday with sacred associations.
E-mail: amyjoi@desnews.com