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I believe Utah used Model 94 Winchesters and five shooters for Gary Gilmore. Five shooters and one blank still gives a high probability of at least three heart shots. The .30-30 Winchester round is plenty of gun and there’s no failure to eject the blank to identify the non-shooter.*

The shooters fired through gun ports in a wall that was put there to protect them from ricochets. The rifles were fired off-hand (not from a gun rest or the like) but they could use the gun port as a rifle rest. All firing squad members fired several test shots in their ‘training’ and one failure to hit the target got you booted from the squad.

Gilmore’s younger brother has always maintained that he viewed the body afterwards and counted five bullet holes his brother’s shirt. So maybe the blank has always been a myth.

The state told the press that the autopsy confirmed that all four shots had hit the heart but I read an independent report later that stated Gilmore’s heart had been so completely obliterated that the coroner had to ask for a second opinion to confirm that the goo in Gilmore’s chest had in fact once been his heart. Which would bring to question whether it was possible to determine how many projectiles had hit the target.

*People often bring up the blank cartridges’ lack of recoil but in all centerfire rifle cartridges, the ejecta (the cloud of hot gas and burning gunpowder blowing out the end of the barrel) causes more recoil than the bullet itself (the “jet” principle). Commercial blank cartridges only use a tiny amount of gunpowder, enough to make a ‘POP!’ and virtually no recoil (but they can still kill, just ask Jon-Erik Hexum).

If there ever was a blank, it probably was home-made by pulling the bullet/projectile out of a factory-made cartridge from one of the same boxes of ammo they’d bought for the execution. Then they improvised a plug to obstruct the case mouth to prevent the gunpowder spilling out. That way it would have the same powder charge as the ‘live’ rounds, but without a bullet to get in its way, the charge wouldn’t build up near as much chamber pressure. So there would have been less recoil but it wouldn’t have been ‘starter pistol’ light.

South Carolina uses three shooters, no blanks and (according to press accounts) Winchester .308s. Not much more detail has leaked out about the why-fors and how-comes.

https://www.shootingtimes.com/editorial/gunpowder-contribution-to-recoil/328788