Attorney General Aaron Ford and Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak listen as a former death row inmate defends an incarcerated man during a session of the Nevada Supreme Court Parolees Committee in Las Vegas December 20, 2022 ERIK VERDUZCO/AP
For more than twenty years, the death penalty in the United States has been on the decline. The year 2022 confirmed the trend: eighteen executions were recorded, the lowest number since 1991, excluding the two pandemic years (seventeen in 2020 and eleven in 2021).
For the eighth straight year, fewer than 30 people were executed there, compared with 98 in 1999, the peak year, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), the benchmark organization on the subject, said in its annual report. Only six states (of the twenty-seven states where the death penalty is legal) carried out executions: Texas and Oklahoma (five each), Arizona (three), Missouri and Alabama (two each), and Mississippi (a).
Death sentences are also declining. Despite the security escalations that marked the November 2022 midterms election campaign, the use of the death penalty has not made progress, the DPIC notes. In 2022, US grand juries handed down twenty death sentences, the lowest number on record (excluding the pandemic). The “record” dates back to 1998 with 295 convictions.
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Proponents of abolition, however, beware of boasting: 2022 will remain “the year of botched executions”, regrets the DPIC. Of twenty planned killings, seven – more than a third – were marked by incidents likely to have caused additional suffering to the sentenced person. In question: the incompetence of the assistants commissioned with the execution and the incorrect or poorly implemented protocols. “As support for the death penalty wanes, we are seeing increasingly extreme and irresponsible behavior by states that seek to use it,” DPIC director Robert Dunham told the New York Times.
A “carnage”
The emblematic figure of these botched executions (“botched executions”) will remain that of Joe Nathan James, 50, who was convicted in Alabama in 1999 of the 1999 murder of a former companion. On July 28, the inmate suffered the longest execution since the United States reinstated the death penalty in 1976. It took Atmore prison staff three hours to successfully insert the IV, allowing the cocktail of lethal substances to be injected.
The execution began at 6:00 p.m. and was not declared complete until 9:27 p.m. When witnesses and reporters were allowed into the observation room at 9:00 p.m., the convict was unconscious and had not uttered the last words that those about to speak who are about to speak who are invited to deliver will say. An autopsy carried out by the NGO Reprieve revealed perforated veins, cuts on the arms, probably the result of the work of unqualified personnel. A “carnage,” as The Atlantic magazine put it.
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