More Than A Third Of U.S. Executions This Year Were 'Botched,' Report Finds

LOADING ERROR LOADING More than a third of executions in America this year were “botched,” according to a shocking new report — a record in a period of time when capital punishment is at a 30-year low. Seven of 20 execution efforts were clearly “visually problematic,” stated a year-end report by the Death Penalty Information Center. Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, called the reported number of problematic execution attempts “conservative” because the study was limited to what occurred inside the execution chamber. “There were a number of executions that were called off even before they got to the execution because of failures to comply with the state protocol,” Dunham told NPR. “The families of victims and prisoners, other execution witnesses, and corrections personnel should not be subjected to the trauma of an execution gone bad.” The center’s report attributed the problems to “executioner incompetence, failures to follow protocols or defects in the protocols themselves.” Many of the problems in death chambers this year were linked to difficulties in inserting an intravenous line into a prisoner to inject the lethal chemicals.