Botched “Executions" or Murders of [disproportionately Black] Inmates by [mostly white] Authorities Reach All-Time High in US, report finds

From [HERE] While the use of the death penalty continues to decline in the United States, a new report has found that “botched” executions reached a new high this year.

In its annual report on the use of capital punishment in the country, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) said on Friday that seven of the 20 attempted executions by US states in 2022 were “visibly problematic”.

That included a case in which Alabama officials struggled to insert an intravenous (IV) line into a man for three hours, said the report, which defined a “botched” execution as one that includes “executioner incompetence, failures to follow protocols, or defects in the protocols themselves”.

“As lethal injection turns 40 years old this year, 2022 can be called ‘the year of the botched execution,'” the DPIC, a non-profit research group based in Washington, DC, said in a statement accompanying its findings, calling the proportion of problematic execution attempts “astonishing”.

Capital punishment – which refers to the sentencing of convicted offenders to death – continues to receive support in the US, with about 55 percent of people approving of its use against convicted murderers, according to a Gallup poll released last month.

A total of 18 people were executed across the country this year, in six states alone: Alabama, Arizona, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas. However, that is far lower than in previous years before the COVID-19 pandemic, as the practice has come under growing scrutiny. [MORE]