Lethal Injections Are to Blame for Over 100 Botched Executions in America

The first U.S. execution by lethal injection took place 40 years ago, when Texas put to death Charles Brooks Jr. for the murder of a mechanic.

Proponents of the lethal injection method had called it a more humane way of carrying out death sentences. But as noted in a report published in The New York Times just hours after Brooks died on December 7, 1982, his death did not appear to be painless.

A total of 1,377 inmates have been put to death with a lethal injection in the past 40 years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).

In those four decades, experts told Newsweek that at least 100 inmates have endured botched procedures.

Austin Sarat, a political scientist who detailed the history of flawed executions between 1890 and 2010 in his book Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America's Death Penalty, told Newsweek that he defines a botched execution as one "that does not follow the state's protocol or what I called standard operating procedure."

His analysis found 75 of the 1,054 lethal injections in that period were botched, and that lethal injection had the highest botch rate—7.12 percent—of any execution method.

Sarat said he has found the botch rate was even higher—8.4 percent—between 2010 and 2020. Twenty-eight of the lethal injections in that decade fitted his definition of botched, he told Newsweek, bringing his tally of the total number of botched lethal injections between 1980 and 2020 to 103.

Meanwhile, Reprieve told Newsweek that its researchers calculated the total number of botched lethal injections in the U.S. is at least 106. That number was reached using Sarat's figures from the period between 1980 and 2010, the DPIC's figures from 2010 through 2017 and using Reprieve's records from 2018 to the present.

Reprieve project manager Ineka Frankcom told Newsweek that Reprieve's categorization of botched executions is "based upon witness reports that reveal visible deviations from what is expected from an execution or from the protocol."

Eight lethal injections were botched in 2021 and 2022, according to the DPIC and Reprieve's analysis, Frankcom said.

Just last month, three executions in three different states were described by death penalty opponents as botched, including one that was abandoned in Alabama after officials failed to find a suitable vein to inject lethal drugs into before a midnight deadline.

"Lethal injection was built on a lie," Reprieve U.S. director Maya Foa told Newsweek, describing it as a "fake medical procedure designed to hide the brutal reality of the state forcefully taking a human life."

Foa said: "There is nothing 'humane' about it and there never has been.

"Doctors, nurses and pharmaceutical companies want nothing to do with it. So the grotesque sham of a hospital procedure is carried out by inadequately-trained prison staff using untested and unregulated drugs."

Abraham Bonowitz, the executive director of Death Penalty Action, told Newsweek that it is difficult to determine how many executions have been botched "because in many states, the public witnesses only see the final steps, once the prisoner is all hooked up."

Foa added that there "are so many ways lethal injections can go wrong and the more that states try to shroud the process in secrecy, the higher the chances of a botch— including using paralytic drugs in protocols, shutting media witnesses out, dropping the curtain and using gag laws to obscure where lethal drugs are sourced.

"It is a tragic irony that in their desperation to obscure the violence being done in the execution chamber, states are condemning many more prisoners to suffer agonizing, drawn-out deaths."

That lack of transparency is the reason Death Penalty Action launched a campaign to "pull back the curtains" in Alabama, Bonowitz said.

"We are calling for witnesses to view the entire process, starting from when the prisoner enters the execution chamber on his own two feet, or, as we've seen five times this year, in his wheelchair," Bonowitz said.

The "real torture of the death penalty is mental," Bonowitz said. "We're holding people for two or three decades before killing them."

And lethal injections also take a toll on corrections employees, Bonowitz said, especially those taken with the "hands-on process of killing a defenseless human being using a medicalized process they really are not well trained for."

Lethal injections are "complicated," Sarat said, but some of the people tasked with carrying them out may not have any prior experience if a state has not carried out an execution in some time.

"Then they start up using lethal injections, and the people who are responsible for doing things like securing a vein, they haven't done one," he said.

One reason for the higher botch rate in the past decade compared to the 20th century, Sarat said, is because the U.S. entered into "a period of experimentation" with lethal injections.

"Between 1982 and 2009, lethal injection meant a single thing," he said. "We were talking about a standard three-drug protocol. Since 2010, by my count, there have been 10 different drug protocols used in lethal injections.

"With the introduction of some previously untried drugs, [it's] not surprising that there would be problems."

But there is "no perfect method of execution," Sarat said. "There is no method of execution that will ensure that it will be safe, reliable and humane."

Part of the reason that previously untried drugs have been used is that the EU and some pharmaceutical companies have been preventing their export. In 2011, for example, the EU imposed export controls on drugs used in lethal injections so that they could not be supplied to the U.S. for use in the death penalty.

A survey by the Pew Research Center in 2021 found that 60 per cent of Americans were in favor of the death penalty for someone convicted of murder. Support for the punishment was higher among Republicans than Democrats.