Utah’s Attorney General ruffled some feathers on Friday with a series of tweets about the execution of a prisoner.
Ronnie Lee Gardner had a hood placed over his head and a paper target pinned to his chest before being killed by a firing squad just after midnight on Friday.
Attorney General, Mark Shurtleff decided to keep his 7,000 followers updated as the macabre events unfolded with tweets like the one above and "with my final nod, Utah will use most extreme power & execute a killer."
Many responded with disgust but Shurtleff says that their anger is misdirected and should be aimed at the man who killed two people before being sentenced to death himself.
The outrage however, is not over whether or not the man deserved to die; it was the fact that an elected official announced it on Twitter.
Twitter pages, especially those belonging to politicians are used for self-promotion, and it it did feel a bit like he used the execution for publicity. He followed his first few tweets with this:
- "We will be streaming live my press conference as soon as I'm told Gardner is dead. Watch it at www.attorneygeneral.Utah.gov/live.html"
Gardner had been on death row for 25 years (more than half of his life) after shooting an attorney during a botched escape attempt while on trial for the shooting of a bartender.
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