News associated with the death penalty is usually horrific, but this week was particularly horrifying.
Let's start with the always appropriate Oklahoma.

The Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission after more than a year of work has recommended that a moratorium on carrying out capital punishment in the state be continued indefinitely. “It is undeniable that innocent people have been sentenced to death in Oklahoma,” the report concludes....
The commission was formed in the fall of 2015, not long after the state attempted to kill Richard Glossip on September 30 of that year. It was his third date with death. Only after courts had cleared the way for Glossip’s execution — and as witnesses were waiting to be brought to the viewing chamber — did state officials discover they had procured the wrong drug with which to kill him, impermissibly substituting an untested drug in place of one that was specified in the official execution protocol. In a dramatic 11th-hour stay by Gov. Mary Fallin, the state called off the execution.
The high-profile mistake — the latest in a series of ugly incidents casting negative attention on Oklahoma executions — prompted then Attorney General Scott Pruitt to impose the current, indefinite moratorium in order to give officials a chance to sort out what “had transpired” leading up to Glossip’s failed execution. That inquiry morphed into a multi-county grand jury investigation after news broke less than a week later that the state had previously killed another man, Charles Warner, in January 2015 using the same untested and improper drug that it had erroneously obtained to execute Glossip.

There are a lot of reasons to oppose the death penalty, but sheer incompetence during the execution wasn't even the highest item on my list.
Nor was the absolutely horrifying events in Arkansas earlier this week that put on display every reason why not to have a death penalty.

Arkansas put to death two men Monday night in the first back-to-back executions in the United States since 2000.
Jack Harold Jones and Marcel Wayne Williams were among eight inmates set for execution in April before the state's supply of a lethal injection drug expires at the end of the month.

Well, shit! Why not just pull out some rat poison from under the sink? It's just as good, and half the price.

Last week the makers of midazolam and potassium chloride asked a federal judge to prevent Arkansas from using the drugs, saying they were not intended for capital punishment.

Hey Arkansas, I was joking. Please don't take me seriously.
The randomness of this reason for the executions shows that justice has nothing to do with the death penalty. Consider the drugs themselves.

In fact, of the three drugs the state uses to execute the condemned, one is set to expire and one was “donated” by a mysterious supplier. The third was supplied by a company that says the state acquired it under false pretenses, and has stated in court fillings that had it known the drug was to be used it executions, it would never have sold it to state officials. Not to mention that we know little to nothing about how these drugs actually work, as evidenced by the series of horrifying botched executions over the past few years.

At least one of these men, Ledell Lee, tried to have a DNA test to prove his innocence, but the state refused.
Another of the men was convicted primarily on the basis of a 6-year old witness.
It gets worse the further you dig into these cases.

Importantly, these eight cases were not cherry-picked by death penalty opponents to illustrate the deficiencies in how we apply capital punishment in the United States. They were selected by the state of Arkansas for the relatively arbitrary reason that these men happened to be close to execution at a time when one of the state’s execution drugs happened to be near its expiration date, and the state has enough of the drug on hand for eight executions.
In other words, this pool of eight death penalty cases was selected nearly at random. Yet included among them are disturbing deficiencies such as severe mental illness and disability that were never presented at trial, ineffective defense counsel, prosecutorial and judicial malfeasance, and untested but possibly exculpatory DNA. Most of these problems pervaded several of the eight cases. If this pool of eight cases thrust into the spotlight only by the state of Arkansas’s rush to carry out executions could be so rife with problems, one could imagine you could pick any eight cases from the population of death row inmates and find a similar proportion of deficiencies.

It's such a travesty of justice that one state judge who blocked two of the executions, was immediately barred from handling capital punishment cases in the future.