Utah's Attorney General Uses Twitter To Announce Execution

The attorney general of Utah, Mark Shurtleff, used his Twitter account, @MarkShurtleff, to announce his decision to execute Ronnie Lee Gardner, Politics Daily reports.

"I just gave the go ahead to the Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner's execution," he tweeted, using his iPhone.  "May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims."

That's supposed to be @God, isn't it?

As Politics Daily notes, "Shurtleff has accrued more than 7,000 followers and has posted 632 tweets about all manners of things."

Yesterday, he tweeted this:

A solemn day. Barring a stay by Sup Ct, & with my final nod, Utah will use most extreme power & execute a killer. Mourn his victims. Justice.

Garner, who asked to be executed by firing squad, was killed earlier today, at 12:20 a.m. MST, in Draper, Utah.

According to CNN, "a hood was placed over Gardner's head and a paper target pinned to his chest."

He was heavily restrained as a five-person firing squad took aim at the target and shot him, witnesses said.

Journalists who witnessed the shooting said it happend [sic] quickly. One reporter said she noticed that Gardner moved after he was shot.

"It was over pretty quickly," said Cheryl Worsley, a local radio reporter. "It was cleaner than I expected. It was fast. But he moved. He moved a little bit, and to some degree that bothers me."

Gardner was convicted in the murder of Michael Burdell in 1985.