Seven botched executions, the emptying of Oregon’s death row and the increasing isolation of the death penalty to just a handful of states marked a tumultuous year for capital punishment in America, where the number of executions, death sentences and public support for the practice continued a decade-long decline.

At just 18, the number of executions this year hit a 31-year low, excluding the two previous pandemic years. And the 22 death sentences imposed mark an all-time pre-pandemic low in the United States, according to figures released Friday in the year-end report by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), which tracks data on capital punishment. Public polling also showed that support for the death penalty continued a steady slide from its peak in the mid-1990s to 55 percent this year — one percentage point up from last year’s 50-year low.

‘Year of the botched execution’

At least some of the public’s continued rejection of the death penalty is fueled by high-profile incidents that highlight its flaws, including death row exonerations of innocent people and executions gone wrong; this year, 35 percent of all executions carried out were botched, according to DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham.

None of the improperly administered executions were based on reactions to the lethal injection drugs but rather failures by corrections personnel, Dunham said.

“You can call this year the year of the botched execution, because there are so many executions that were improperly carried out — and so many more that never happened because they were improperly prepared for,” Dunham said ahead of the report’s release.

Austin Sarat, a political science professor at Amherst College who wrote the 2014 book “Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty,” said in an email that while there’s no official definition, he considers an execution botched when it “departs from the state execution protocol or from standard operating procedure for the particular method used.”

A total of seven executions were considered botched in 2022, according to the DPIC, with instances that included executions where corrections staff took longer than 15 minutes to set an IV line or the prisoner required a surgical “cut-down” to an artery in the groin or neck to expose a vein.

Midway through Murray Hooper’s execution by injection in November, the 76-year-old Arizona death row prisoner, fixed with two separate IV lines, asked officials, “What are we waiting on?”

Hooper had been tied down for more than 20 minutes before prison officials inserted IVs, unsuccessfully trying to place a line in his left forearm and ultimately putting one in his right forearm and cutting into his leg to place one in his right femoral artery, according to reporter accounts of the execution. After his death warrant was read, nothing happened for more than five minutes, prompting Hooper’s inquiry.

“Those are things that states are supposed to be able to do properly. And it goes to the question in the mind of a growing number of people about whether [the government] can be trusted to carry out the death penalty,” Dunham said.

The death penalty remains on the books in 27 states but is only used in six this year, a figure Dunham said points to the fact that just a handful of counties in a few states are driving executions and death sentences. This year, more than half of all executions came from just two states: Oklahoma and Texas.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), whose state carried out five executions in 2022 — the most of any state this year — has called the death penalty “Texas Justice.” Advocates for the punishment regularly note that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of capital punishment and argue that it’s the most appropriate punishment for heinous crimes like aggravated murder.

Even where the death penalty remains in law, states have been dogged for years by difficulties obtaining lethal injection drugs after most major pharmaceutical suppliers pulled their product from corrections facilities. Some states short on drugs have tried — with minimal success — to revive long-abandoned alternatives and force prisoners to opt for death by firing squad or gas chamber if lethal injection is not available. A South Carolina judge ruled in September that the state’s efforts to execute prisoners by firing squad and electric chair were unconstitutionally cruel and unusual.

Other states have faced legal challenges to execution methods and administration.

Republican governors in Alabama, Ohio and Tennessee all issued execution reprieves at some point this year; Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey last month suspended lethal injections pending review after the state’s second and third botched executions in four years. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine issued nine death penalty reprieves, citing ongoing issues with lethal injection drugs and their administration, while Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee temporarily halted executions and called for an independent review of the state’s death penalty after a review of state records found that it had not followed its own execution rules since 2018.

Death penalty support remains flat despite violent crime fears

Dunham noted that overall support for the death penalty remained flat this year despite rhetoric about violent crime flooding the discourse ahead of the 2022 midterms — a break from the 1990s, when crime rates and support for the death penalty both reached record highs.

Instead, perception of violent crime and support for the death penalty remained intensely partisan, with a Gallup survey showing support by Republicans at 77 percent, independents at 54 percent and Democrats at 35 percent.

Dunham said the poll was taken in the middle of the sentencing phase for Parkland, Fla., shooter Nikolas Cruz and amid “an avalanche of negative ads about the fear of crime.”

“It showed that the [political ads on crime] affected the Republican base,” Dunham added, “but it also showed 1990s-style rhetoric doesn’t work on people who have moved from the 1990s.”

Shifts in attitudes toward the death penalty were evident in Cruz’s trial, Dunham said: He was spared the death penalty and sentenced to life in prison — an outcome that would have been less likely in decades past.

But the most significant indicator of flagging support for the death penalty came just days before the DPIC report was issued, when Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D) commuted the sentences of the state’s 17 death row prisoners — the second-largest blanket commutation in history.

“Every year, or every other year, something big happens that shows continued movement away from the death penalty — a state will abolish it, like Virginia did last year, or a governor will implement a moratorium, like California the year before,” Dunham said. “It shows that the movement away from the death penalty continues and has a sense of inevitability.”