4 ideas
Sentenced to death, he refused appeals and fought the ACLU, his own family's lawyers and the courts to be executed. He was shot by firing squad at Utah State Prison on January 17, 1977, the first US execution after the death penalty resumed in 1976.
When the condemned man insists on dying, the defenders of his life become the ones blocking his expressed will, and the state has to be pushed into carrying out its own sentence. The standoff exposes how far the legal apparatus runs on the defendant's resistance, and how uncertain the machinery becomes when he chooses to cooperate with it.
A long story of violence told in short, plain declarative sentences, mostly in the characters' own ordinary diction, with no narrator interpreting, leaves the reader to supply all judgment. The plainness makes a sensational crime look like part of daily life, with its bills, cars, beer, jealousies and ordinary talk. It suggests that the banality of the surroundings is itself the explanation on offer.
As the execution date approached, the rights to Gilmore's life story were bought, interviews were sold, and journalists competed for access. The people around him, including producer Larry Schiller, his lover Nicole Baker, family members and his lawyers, came to hold financial and professional stakes in how the story would end. The mechanism is that turning a death into a commodity gives the people nearest to it reasons to shape its timing and its meaning.