A report released last week by Reprieve, a human rights group that opposes the death penalty apparently shows that the lethal injections of convicted murderers are botched more than twice as often as the executions of white convicts. Spinning, the New York Times says, “That finding builds on a wealth of research into racial disparities in how the U.S. judicial system administers the death penalty. The proportion of Black people on death rows is far higher than their share of the population as a whole.”

“We know that there’s racism in the criminal justice system,” said Maya Foa, an executive director of Reprieve. “We know it’s there in the capital punishment system, from who gets arrested, who gets sentenced, all of it. This is, though, the first time that it’s been looked at in the context of the execution itself.”

To start with, they don’t “know” that at all. It is a self-perpetuating theory built on other debatable assumptions, such as believing that the disproportionate number of blacks on Death Row, and in the U.S. prison system generally, is because a disproportionate number of blacks commit crimes that legitimately put them there. Second, how exactly does doing a bad job killing a condemned prisoner show racial bias?

More from the Times:

The group was not able to explain why Black prisoners had suffered botched executions at a higher rate, saying that more research was needed. Reprieve also said that there appeared to be “no easy answers,” adding that “across the botched executions studied, similar issues arose whether the execution was of a Black person or a white person.” Austin Sarat, a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts who has long studied the death penalty, said the new research was “an enormous step forward in understanding the pervasiveness and influence of race” in how the death penalty is carried out. Professor Sarat, who saw the report but did not work on it, said it appeared that racial biases that harm Black people in other contexts, such as in medical care or policing, also do so in execution rooms.

Wait…what? In medical care, the objective is to help a patient, so data showing that the same doctors have worse outcomes treating black patients with the same health issues as white patients may indicate malign influences. In policing, the data is ambiguous, unless you want it to show bias, which many do. (There is no evidence, none, that George Floyd’s fate would have been any different with the same police if he had been a red-headed Irish hood, but never mind, black lives matter.) But in an execution, the objective is to kill someone. Why would a racist want to kill a white criminal more quickly and efficiently than a black criminal? Never mind, there must be a reason, and it must be related to systemic racism because…well, just because.

“The finding doesn’t surprise me, in the context of what we know about the disparities throughout society,” Dr. Sarat told the Times. He’s not a behavioral scientist but a political scientist and lawyer who is an anti-death penalty and “social justice” activist. (No bias there!) The report’s authors also encouraged more research and want it to “be considered in the context of extensively documented racism in the U.S. capital punishment system.” Yes, that would practically guarantee research bias to push the result in a direction that also wouldn’t surprise Dr. Sarat.

To its credit, the Times does eventually quote an expert whose experience suggests that Occam’s Razor may apply, and nothing is sinister about the statistics. Dr. Ervin Yen, an anesthesiologist who has witnessed 11 executions and has started “zillions of IVs” in medical settings, pointed out that several factors can make it more difficult to insert an intravenous line, including the patient being overweight or having a history of injecting drugs. Moreover, it can sometimes be harder to find veins on people with dark skin because the they are often less visible.

Dr. Yen is a spoilsport, or maybe just another racist. This study must have its roots in systemic racism somehow! Then again….the figures that turn up at the very end of the Times piece are underwhelming: no wonder paper waited until the (let’s see) twenty-first paragraph in a 27 paragraph story to reveal them.

Just 37 out of 465 black killers’ executions, about 8%, were “botched,” with botched including minimal flaws in which the death is delayed by a few minutes. Twenty-eight out of 780, or about 3.6 %, of condemned whites didn’t proceed properly. Damn! We need to be able to kill those black murderers quicker! No, wait, that didn’t come out right…Black deaths matter! No, that’s not quite right either. What exactly is this research supposed to prove, and why should anyone care? Call me cynical, but I think this is a search for something to blame on systemic racism that isn’t going to be very persuasive no matter how it ends up.