A new report issued April 17, 2024 by the UK-based international human rights organization Reprieve found racial disparities in the occurrence of botched executions in the United States. As reported in The Guardian, Reprieve analyzed all lethal injection executions between 1976 and 2023. It chronicled 73 confirmed botched procedures and found that 8% of executions of Black people were botched (37 times out of 465 executions), compared with 4% for white people (28 out of 780).
- Death Penalty Information Center (2025, March 14). Articles of Interest: Reprieve Issues New Report on Botched Executions and Racial Disparities. Retrieved October 2, 2026, from https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/articles-of-interest-reprieve-issues-report-on-botched-executions-and-race
- Death Penalty Information Center. “Articles of Interest: Reprieve Issues New Report on Botched Executions and Racial Disparities.” Last modified March 14, 2025. Accessed October 2, 2026. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/articles-of-interest-reprieve-issues-report-on-botched-executions-and-race.
- Death Penalty Information Center. “Articles of Interest: Reprieve Issues New Report on Botched Executions and Racial Disparities.” Death Penalty Information Center, 14 Mar. 2025, https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/articles-of-interest-reprieve-issues-report-on-botched-executions-and-race. Accessed 2 Oct. 2026.
Read Reprieve’s report, “Lethal injection in the modern era: cruel, unusual and racist”; Ed Pilkington, The Guardian, “Black death row inmates suffer botched executions at twice rate of whites in US,” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/18/botched-executions-black-inmates
