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