There's always the unresolved concern of the state killing people amid the uncertainty of a criminal conviction process. There's also an element of incompetenc

There's always the unresolved concern of the state killing people amid the uncertainty of a criminal conviction process. There's also an element of incompetence and cruelty to consider when executions cannot be done mercifully, ideally instantly and painlessly as a goal. Seems we stray pretty far from any such ideal though: "In its annual report on the use of capital punishment in the country, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) said on Friday that seven of the 20 attempted executions by US states in 2022 were “visibly problematic”." https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/16/us-botched-executions-reach-all-time-high-report-finds https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/16/us-botched-executi... The same policy group estimates a 3% failure rate for executions from 1890-2010, with lethal injection at more than twice that, at 7%. https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/botched-executions https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions/botched-executions The state/federal definitions of botched executions might be more conservative than more detailed analyses done by advocacy groups like Reprieve, so what the rates are might be higher depending on the exact definition of a botched execution. It's not clear that firing squad 'fixes' this or is more merciful in terms of having less botched execution, but maybe that's not the point since the condemned prisoner opted for it. Does that matter? Worse still, there are pop groups that have apparently have significantly worse outcomes in US executions, reasons unknown. It's pretty horrible to look at an overall botched-execution rate when it belies horrible outcomes for specific groups: "One of the most significant findings to emerge from the regression analysis is that Black people had 220% higher odds of suffering a botched execution than white people, accounting for gender and age. Analysis of the lethal injection executions conducted in the modern era of capital punishment found that 8% of executions of Black people were botched (37 executions out of a total of 465 executions), compared to 4% of executions of white people in the same time period (28 out of a total of 780 executions)." https://reprieve.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/04/2024_04_17_PUB-Botched-lethal-injection-report-FINAL.pdf https://reprieve.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/04/2024...