A death row inmate in the US has asked to be executed by firing squad rather than lethal injection.

Zane Michael Floyd is fighting an execution which is expected to take place in Nevada in June and would make him the first person put to death in the US state in 15 years.

He was convicted in 2000 of killing four people with a shotgun in a Las Vegas supermarket in 1999 and badly wounding a fifth person.

Lawyers for the 45-year-old say he does not want to die and are challenging the state plan to use a proposed three-drug lethal injection.

“This is not a delaying tactic,” Brad Levenson, a federal public defence lawyer representing Floyd, said on Monday, adding that gunshots to the brain would be “the most humane way” for the execution to take place.

His lawyers have called on prison officials to “devise a new procedure or procedures to carry out a lawful execution” and asked a federal judge in Las Vegas to stop Floyd from being put to death until then.

“Execution by firing squad… causes a faster and less painful death than lethal injection,” they said in a court filing on Friday.

A number of states allow other methods of execution, including electrocution, inhaling nitrogen gas or death by firing squad.

Nevada once allowed firing squads, but state law now requires the use of lethal injection in sentences of capital punishment.

The lethal injection used in the state is a combination of the sedative diazepam, the powerful painkiller fentanyl, and a paralysing drug known as cisatracurium.

Floyd’s lawyers argue its use would amount to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of his constitutional rights.

Its use has been challenged before and twice delayed the execution of another convicted killer, Scott Raymond Dozier, who later took his own life in prison in 2019.

Three states – Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah – and the US military allow capital punishment by gunfire, and the last time the method was used was in Utah in 2010.

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