Nick Robins-Early: America Is in Poor Company When It Comes to the Death Penalty Nick Robins-Early - The Huffington Post
go to original May 1, 2014

The gruesome, botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma Tuesday night has brought renewed focus on some of the grim realities of the death penalty in America. While the terrifying course of Locket's death is a relatively rare occurrence in American executions, the fact that the United States carries out death penalties at all makes the nation stand out among most countries of the world.

As Amnesty International notes in its 2014 report, about a third of the world may have a death penalty, but only nine nations across the globe still regularly execute citizens. As one of those nine nations, the United States finds itself in the company of states like Iran, China, Somalia, Sudan and North Korea.

America's status is remarkable not only because of its position as an active and often vocal supporter of human rights, but as this map shows, also due to its location. The U.S. is one of the very few western nations that still has a death penalty, and was the only country in the Americas to have executed a convict in 2013. Indeed, out of all of North America and Europe, only Belarus and Kazakhstan still have laws allowing executions.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

The execution of Clayton Lockett, a convicted murderer in Oklahoma, ended in distressing fashion Tuesday, when he was declared dead from a fatal heart attack a full 43 minutes after being administered the first injection in what was supposed to be a lethal three-drug cocktail. The infographic below, which first appeared earlier this month before Lockett's execution, explains some of the reasons why:

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!