Half of botched executions in the US were of Black people even though Black people only constituted a third of executed prisoners, a report by Reprieve has found.
“There are botched executions, many of them, regardless of the drug, regardless of the cocktail,” Maya Foa told NPR in an exclusive. “Continuing to tinker with the machinery of death is not making this better.”
“The analysis shows not only are we botching these executions and causing people torture more often than with other methods. But we are doing that to Black prisoners far, far more frequently than we are to white prisoners.”
Reprieve’s report is the first body of empirical evidence showing that racial disparities in capital punishment extend to executions themselves.