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A convicted killer that asked to be put to death by a firing squad was granted his final wish yesterday.

As previously reported 49-year-old Ronnie Lee Gardner murdered a man 25 years ago and filed a series of appeals that kept him on death row.

After exhausting his appeals and when asked how he’d like to die, Gardner told a judge in April that he’d like the firing squad.

According to Utah state laws he had the option of choosing between lethal injection and a five man firing squad with rifles, although state legislators stopped allowing death row inmates to choose their method of punishment in 2004.

Gardner was allowed to choose however because he was imprisoned before then.

He was pronounced dead at 12:17 a.m. after a firing squad fired bullets into his chest where a target was pinned over his heart.

Although he requested to be put to death by the firing squad, Gardner later recanted telling a judge that he wished to live and had been on death row for too long, a violation of his eighth amendment.

He received capital punishment for the death of attorney Michael Burdell when he attempted to escape custody in 1985 at a Salt Lake City, Utah courthouse.