For more than twenty years, the death penalty has been in decline in the United States. 2022 confirmed the trend: eighteen executions were recorded, the lowest number since 1991, excluding the two years of the pandemic (seventeen in 2020 and eleven in 2021).
For the eighth consecutive year, fewer than thirty people were executed, against 98 in 1999, a record year, indicates in its annual report the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), the reference organization on the subject. Only six states (of the 27 where capital punishment is legal) carried out executions: Texas and Oklahoma (five each), Arizona (three), Missouri and Alabama (two each), as well as Mississippi (a).
Death sentences are also declining. Despite security escalations that marred the campaign for the November 2022 midterm elections, the use of the death penalty has not progressed, notes the DPIC. In 2022, American juries handed down twenty death sentences, the lowest number ever recorded (non-pandemic). The “record” dates back to 1998, with 295 convictions.
Supporters of abolition, however, are careful not to show off: 2022 will remain as it is “the year of failed executions”, deplores the DPIC. Out of twenty planned killings, seven – more than a third – were marked by incidents likely to cause further suffering to the convict. At issue: the incompetence of the auxiliaries responsible for enforcement and the faulty or poorly implemented protocols. “As support for the death penalty dwindles, we are seeing increasingly extreme and irresponsible behavior by states that want to apply it”explained to New York Times DPIC Director Robert Dunham.
A “carnage”
The emblematic figure of these “failed executions” (“failed executions”) will remain that of Joe Nathan James, 50, convicted in 1999 in Alabama for the murder of a former partner. On July 28, the inmate suffered the longest execution since capital punishment resumed in the United States in 1976. It took staff at Atmore Prison three hours to successfully insert the IV allowing the cocktail of substances to be injected lethal.
The execution began at 18:00 and was not declared over until 21:27. When witnesses and reporters were admitted into the observation room at 21:00, the condemned man was unconscious and had not uttered any of the last words that those about to die are asked to deliver. An autopsy performed by the NGO Reprieve showed perforated veins, lacerations in the arms, probably the result of the work of unqualified personnel. One ” carnage “, according to the expression of the magazine The Atlantic.
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