State troopers, I believe. One of the guns has a blank in it so each shooter has a 20% chance of being blameless in the execution.
State troopers are indeed employed in Utah, though the protocol may be diffrent in other states.
Interestingly, the only execution by shooting ever carried in Nevada (1913) was performed by a specially commissioned "shooting machine", after the warned was unable to find five volunteers to form a firing squad (see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andriza_Mircovich).
Anyway, I could never quite understood a rationale behind the blank bullet practice. I imagine every one of the execution squad members keeps wondering, for the rest of their lives, what was that he fired. Was the one "blameless"? Or it was his bullet that killed the prisoner?
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Not to mention anyone familiar with firearms (I.e. cops) would know instantly from the recoil (or lack thereof) whether their guns fired an actual round or not.
