Notable review of (increasing?) number of botched lethal injection executions

The Death Penalty Information Center has this notable new posting to mark a notable anniversary under this heading: “As Lethal Injection Turns Forty, States Botch a Record Number of Executions.”  Here is how the lengthy posting gets started (with links from the original):

On December 7, 1982, Texas strapped Charles Brooks to a gurney, inserted an intravenous line into his arm, and injected a lethal dose of sodium thiopental into his veins, launching the lethal-injection era of American executions.  In the precisely forty years since, U.S. states and the federal government have put 1377 prisoners to death by some version of the method.  Touted as swift and painless and a more humane way to die — just as execution proponents had said nearly a century before about the electric chair — the method has proven to be anything but.

Experts say lethal injection is the most botched of the execution methods, estimated to go wrong more frequently than any other method.  And autopsies of more than 200 prisoners put to death by lethal injection found that, regardless of the outward appearance of a tranquil death, 84% of those executed showed evidence of pulmonary edema — a fluid build-up in the lungs that creates a feeling of suffocation or drowning that experts have likened to waterboarding.

Moreover, American pharmaceutical companies universally oppose what they consider the misuse of their medicines to take the lives of prisoners, and the medical community universally deems it unethical for medical personnel to participate in executions.  That means states are relying on what drugs they can lay their hands on — increasingly obtained illegally or by subturfege — from often unreliable sources and administered by inadequately trained prison personnel ill equipped to handle the job and performing it behind an expanding veil of secrecy provisions.

As lethal injection turns forty, states are botching executions in record numbers — seven alone in 2022 in 19 execution attempts, an astonishing 37%.  In articles in Slate and The Conversation on November 21 and November 29, 2022, Austin Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College and author the 2014 book, Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty, says that from Brooks’ execution through 2009, “more than 7 percent of all lethal injections were botched … [and] things have only gotten worse.”

The parenthetical in the title of this post is prompted by the fact that I do not think our society was scrutinizing lethal injections executions nearly as much in the 1980s and 1990s as we have in more recent decades. Though it is quite possible that more executions are being “botched” in recent years, I think it is also quite possible that we are now just much more likely to take notice of lethal injection execution difficulties.