NOTE: The below is not intended to be a comprehensive catalogue of botched executions, but simply a listing of examples that are well-known. Botched executions are “those involving unanticipated problems or delays that caused, at least arguably, unnecessary agony for the prisoner or that reflect gross incompetence of the executioner.” Examples of such problems include, among other things, inmates catching fire while being electrocuted, being strangled during hangings (instead of having their necks broken), and being administered the wrong dosages of specific drugs for lethal injections. The protocol can be established by the norms, expectations, and advertised virtues of each method or by the government’s officially adopted execution guidelines. In his book, he defines a botched execution as follows: Botched executions occur when there is a breakdown in, or departure from, the “protocol” for a particular method of execution. Lethal injection had the highest rate of botched executions. Sarat reports that over those 120 years, 8,776 people were executed and 276 of those executions (3.15%) went wrong in some way. In the 2014 book, Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty, Austin Sarat, a professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, describes the history of flawed executions in the U.S.

executions in the period from 1890 to 2010 were botched.

State of survival codes september 2020