Twitter News: A Human Being's Execution Announced Through Social Media

Two days ago, Utah Attorney General Mark Schurtleff announced just before midnight via his Twitter account that he had given the order for convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner to be executed via firing squad.

His exact words were: "I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner's execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims."

Two days is an eternity in Internet time. You've probably already heard about this. Wikipedia already says that his last meal was "steak, lobster, apple pie, vanilla ice cream and 7-Up." TheOneRing.net reported that before his death Gardner watched The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, and has since taken down the story.

A few minutes after his initial tweet, Schurtleff sent another: "We will be streaming live my press conference as soon as I'm told Gardner is dead." He provided the URL for the Utah Attorney General website where citizens could watch him talk about the execution.

Minutes later, Gardner was shot to death. He was hooded, strapped to a chair, had a target painted on his chest, and five men with .30 caliber Winchester rifles shot him at a range of 25 feet.

This story has already been broken. It's been broken in so well that Schurtleff even Tweeted about it. He said, yesterday, "I believe in an informed public. As an elected official I use social media to communicate directly with people." He then posted a link to a BBC News story about his Tweeting the execution. He sent all of these Tweets via his iPhone.

In the past two days, social media news outlets and the blogosphere have been chatting about this story. After all, this is the first time a man's execution has been announced via Twitter. This is the first time a human being's death has been reduced to 140 characters. This is an unprecedented social media event.

Because he was a human being, I will give Ronnie Lee Gardner a few more words here:

Gardner was born to an alcoholic family in Salt Lake City in 1961, and was mostly raised by his older sister. His older brother molested him at an early age and his siblings taught him to huff glue. As early as 6, he was involved with drugs, including methamphetamine. He shoplifted and burglarized cars. By his early teens, he had his first experiences with incarceration in Utah's juvenile detention facilities. He always tried to escape.

Shortly after Ronnie Gardner served a year in Wyoming State Penitentiary in 1968, he and his siblings came to live with a man named Jack Sitt, a pedophile who became their foster parent. Sitt performed sex acts on the young boys and made them work as prostitutes. Gardner has said that his time with Sitt was the most stable of his life, and was one of the few times someone seemed to care about him.

When he was 15, Gardner impregnated a teenage girl named Debra Bischoff. They stayed together for 7 years, despite Gardner being incarcerated on and off during that time. When Gardner was 19, they had a second child. They believed they loved each other. Shortly after, Gardner was convicted of robbery as an adult for the first time and sent to Utah State Prison. He escaped, had an emotional talk with Debra, and was shot in the neck by a man she had slept with while Gardner was in prison.

Gardner was arrested again, incarcerated again, and escaped again in 1984. He maimed a guard badly in the process, but sent the guard's gun to the authorities in a shoebox with a note that read, "I don't want to hurt no one else. I just want to be free."

But he murdered a bartender in a botched robbery while he was high on cocaine later that year. He attempted to escape during his trial, and killed an attorney and wounded another man in the process. For these crimes, he was sentenced to death on October 22, 1985. He was not surprised at his conviction.

In prison, he stabbed a fellow inmate. Shortly after, he stopped appealing his sentence. At a hearing in 1999 he said, "I am burnt out. I can't deal with it anymore. Eventually what is going to happen is the prison is putting me in predicaments where I'm going to end up killing somebody else."

Few of the news stories published over the past two days about Attorney General Schutleff's Tweets have mentioned Gardner's crimes, except to say that he was a convicted murderer. I doubt any have cared about his life.

Ronnie Lee Gardner will be remembered as the first man whose execution was announced on Twitter. He will be remembered as an event, not as a person.

Gardner was bad. He was a serial robber, and that led to him becoming a murderer. He was in and out of prison his whole life. Statements he made later in his life indicated that he knew he was a bad person.

But reducing the narrative of his life, as many news articles published in the past two days have, to a blurb about him being a convicted murderer, does not do him justice.

Gardner was made a junkie before he could know what a "junkie" was, and was sexually assaulted throughout his childhood. He was raised in crime and didn't know anything other than living outside the law.

I do not know if it is right that he was executed or not. Certainly he did not know how to exist in normal society. A jury of his peers in Utah decided after he had murdered two people, hurt several others, stolen and done drugs throughout his life that he should be killed by the state. So it goes.

I do not doubt that Attorney General Schutleff knew all this. He made his decision to go ahead with the execution based on the facts of Gardner's life, and on his own conscience. That Schutleff Tweeted the event was, as he said, a matter of keeping the public informed. Other blogs have already commented on whether announcing an execution via Twitter is appropriate. I do not think that it is.

Reducing a human being's life to 140 characters is inhumane.

Welcome to our brave new world. Now executions are announced via bursts of text through social media outlets minutes before they occur. And afterward you can watch the press conference live. None of this tech existed more than 5 years ago. In 5 years, we may get to watch the execution itself via HD video feed. George Orwell would be proud.

The news blogs that have commented on Schutleff's Tweet have been similarly inhumane. To them, Gardner was a name with a list of convictions attached. They wanted to state the bare, essential facts about the story and nothing else.

Google News only picks up stories that are 400 words or longer. But, as the co-founder of Justmeans has reminded me, people on the internet don't have the attention span to read much longer than that. So writers of online media are encouraged to be as brief as possible. Because people reading news online are accustomed to burst media. Twitter speaks to this desire. But burst media can never tell a whole story. It teaches people to see others as nothing more than quick bursts of text and occasional images.

This post is well over 1000 words long. I doubt many people will read the whole thing. But I felt the need to research and talk about the life of the man who was executed by the State of Utah two days ago. Maybe this makes me too sentimental.