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?

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