Gary Gilmore Criminal

Gary Mark Gilmore (December 4, 1940 – January 17, 1977) was an American criminal who gained international notoriety for demanding the execution of his death sentence for two murders he committed in Utah. After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a new series of death penalty statutes in the 1976 decision Gregg v. Georgia, he became the first person executed in the United States in ten years. These new statutes avoided the problems under the 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia that had led earlier death penalty statutes to be deemed as "cruel and unusual", and therefore unconstitutional , resulting in all states being ordered to commute death sentences to life imprisonment. Gilmore was executed by firing squad in 1977.