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).

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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​.the​guardian​.com/​w​o​r​l​d​/​2​0​2​4​/​a​p​r​/​1​8​/​b​o​t​c​h​e​d​-​e​x​e​c​u​t​i​o​n​s​-​b​l​a​c​k​-​i​n​mates