CRIME: By the Sword

John Deering, 39, had spent 17 years in jail and hated it. When he was arrested in Hamtramck, Mich., last July as a robbery suspect, Michigan authorities wanted to jail him again. But John Deering (who had shot his way to freedom once before) rather than take a 15-year jail sentence in Michigan confessed to the murder of Oliver R. Meredith Jr. in a robbery at Salt Lake City two months before. Extradited to Utah and tried for first-degree murder, he stolidly maintained that he was a habitual criminal, would be better dead. The judge agreed. Utah law gave him the choice of being hanged or shot by a firing squad. “I prefer to be shot,” said John Deering.

Last week in Salt Lake City’s death house Gunman Deering explained that he chose a firing squad because “when I was a kid raising hell everyone told me I’d end up on the gallows, so I thought I’d fool them. Also, there’s an old saying I like: ‘Live by the sword and die by the sword.’ ”

One dawn John Deering was taken to the prison courtyard, strapped in a chair, a cap over his head, a target over his heart. At Sheriff S. Grant Young’s orders, five deputies raised their rifles and John Deering got what he asked for.