2022 saw a record number of ‘botched’ executions, report finds

More than a third of the country’s execution attempts this year were “botched” or deemed visibly problematic, according to a year-end report released Friday by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). The report — which called 2022 the “year of the botched execution” — found that in 7 out of 20 executions, or 35%, something went wrong because of “executioner incompetence, failures to follow protocol, or defects in the protocols themselves,” calling into question the efficacy of the long-standing practice.

“States have been unacceptably cavalier in attempting to carry out executions,” Robert Dunham, the DPIC’s executive director, told Yahoo News, adding that the continued complications with executions contribute to “declining public confidence that states can be trusted with the death penalty.”

Executions this year in Alabama, Arizona and Texas were botched when administrators were unable to set IV lines, which led to canceled executions or hours-long delays. On July 28, for example, it took executioners three hours to set an IV line before killing death row inmate Joe James, marking “the longest botched lethal injection execution in U.S. history,” according to the DPIC. Executions in states including Alabama, Idaho, Tennessee and South Carolina were paused when the states were “unable to follow execution protocols.” Issues included not having the proper drugs to carry out the executions or failing to ensure that a state had custody of a prisoner to carry out the procedure.

For Dunham, the frequent lapses are inexcusable and demonstrate that “state incompetence in administering the death penalty is more the rule than the exception.”

“The families of victims and prisoners, other execution witnesses, and corrections personnel should not be subjected to the trauma of an execution gone bad,” he said.

There were 18 executions carried out across the country this year, the fewest in more than three decades (with the exception of the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021), according to the DPIC. There were 11 executions last year. Overall, the report notes, it’s the eighth consecutive year when fewer than 50 death sentences were doled out in the U.S.

As the use of lethal injection turned 40 this year, the death penalty was isolated geographically to six states: Alabama, Arizona, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas. Oklahoma and Texas alone account for half the country’s executions, each performing five this year. But Oklahoma continues to designate inmates for execution at the most alarming rate: Beginning in August of this year, an unprecedented 25 inmates are scheduled to be put to death in a total of 29 months (one inmate was executed in August). It’s a startling number that legal experts have questioned, given that somewhere between 2% and 10% of all convicted individuals in U.S. prisons are innocent, according to the 2019 annual report by the National Registry of Exonerations.

“[A state like] Oklahoma views its criminal justice system as, No. 1, infallible and, No. 2, punitive, above all else,” Tracy Hresko Pearl, a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, told Yahoo News earlier this year. “I think that the advent of DNA evidence has really shown us how often we get cases, and even very serious capital cases, wrong.”

Further complicating matters, another report from the registry in 2020 found that more than half of the wrongful criminal convictions were caused by government misconduct, which rarely has consequences.

“Misconduct by police, prosecutors and other law enforcement officials is a regular problem and it produces a steady stream of convictions of innocent people,” Samuel R. Gross, an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan Law School and a co-founder of the registry, told the Washington Post.

Despite the clear challenges regarding the death penalty, a majority of Americans, or 55%, support capital punishment, particularly for convicted murderers, according to the latest Gallup poll released last month. The figure, however, is just one percentage point above the 50-year low, recorded last year, which illustrates that Americans' views on execution have not changed much in recent years, even at a time of record-high perception that local crime has increased.

This week Oregon Gov. Kate Brown commuted the death sentences of 17 death row prisoners and ordered the Department of Corrections to tear down the state’s execution chamber, calling the practice “immoral.”

"It is an irreversible punishment that does not allow for correction; is wasteful of taxpayer dollars; does not make communities safer; and cannot be and never has been administered fairly and equitably,” Brown said in a statement.

In all, 37 states — 3 in 4 — have “abolished the death penalty or not carried out an execution in more than a decade,” according to the DPIC. At the federal level, however, the death penalty remains legal in all 50 U.S. states and territories, though it is rarely used.

Criminal justice advocates ultimately hope context helps shape fuller public opinions on the issue.

“We in this country talk so much about trying to protect children while they’re children, but then for the children who slipped in the cracks and the system doesn’t help, we’re more than willing to throw them away on the back end when they make a mistake,” Andrea Digilio Miller, legal director of the Oklahoma Innocence Project, told Yahoo News. The organization, at the Oklahoma City University School of Law, is dedicated to finding and resolving wrongful conviction cases in the state.

For the DPIC's Dunham, it comes down to the practice’s outcome.

“To the extent that some people attempt to distinguish between ‘innocent unborn lives’ and ‘guilty death-row prisoners,’ the fact that there were two more death-row exonerations this year, bringing the total to 190 death-row exonerations since 1972, demonstrates that innocent people can and do get sentenced to death in the U.S. and have, in fact, been executed,” he said. “So the system is not very good at identifying who is, in fact, ‘bad.’”

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Cover thumbnail photo: Paul Harris/Getty Images