Idaho abandoned attempts to execute Thomas Creech using lethal injection on Thursday night after repeated failures to insert an IV line.
It was the latest in a series of botched executions in the US and came roughly a month after Alabama became the first state to use nitrogen gas to execute a prisoner. Lethal injection, the dominant method execution in the USA, is statistically the likeliest to go wrong, leading to prisoners suffering agonising, drawn-out deaths.
“Yet another demonstration that, however much states try to hide it, the death penalty is inherently brutal,” Reprieve’s joint executive director Maya Foa told the New York Times.
“When executions repeatedly go catastrophically wrong, across different states, using different methods, it is clear that capital punishment itself is broken.”