- Welcome to Forum.

I'm Mina Kim.

For the Atlantic's July cover story called "Witness" Staff writer Elizabeth Bruenig has pulled from her reporting on death row and her experience witnessing five recent executions.

What she's seen, she says has not changed her view of the death penalty, but in sometimes unexpected ways has changed her understanding of why she's opposed to it.

Elizabeth Bruenig was named a Pulitzer finalist in 2023 for her reporting on Alabama's death row and joins me now.

And listeners note that our conversation may include graphic descriptions of crimes and executions.

Elizabeth, welcome to Forum.

- Thank you so much for having me.

- I'm glad to have you with us.

So you were not always opposed to capital punishment.

I understand that as a young person growing up in Texas, you were in favor of it for some time.

Why?

- Yeah.

You know, I, I think this is as a quite young person, a teenager going into, I suppose my early twenties where it was just sort of received wisdom.

You know, I grew up in a conservative area and one of the reddest counties in the country, and my family is quite conservative, and it had always just seemed to be a, a legitimate part of the criminal justice system.

It's just what happened to people who committed a certain caliber of crime.

And, you know, I, I suppose I didn't question it much until I started to get into college, and actually my religious convictions started to deepen that I, that I started to think about things in a, in a somewhat different way.

But that was just an intellectual position that I came to.

It was not until the reporting that I started to, in a very sort of active and visceral way, oppose capital punishment.

- You, you did say that, that there is a sort of emotional logic to the death penalty.

What do you mean by that?

- Certain crimes are so horrible, just so unimaginably terrible, that they seem to sort of cry out for demand, the most severe punishment we can come up with, and that is capital punishment.

And I, I can see why people who are in an immense amount of pain, or even people who are unrelated to the homicide, but are outraged by, you know, the barbarity and cruelty of the murder feel that the death penalty would bring about a kind of catharsis and a kind of closure.

So I, I see the way that people feel about it.

- Yeah.

So you talk about how your instincts around the death penalty started to change.

So how did you go from that to wanting to explore execution in particular?

- Yeah, so I, you know, in my early writing career, I'd written a little bit about the death penalty, but essentially from an opinion standpoint, I, I had no firsthand understanding of, of capital punishment as it manifests in execution.

And so I applied to witness one.

This was at a time when I think 2020, the first Trump administration was carrying out a spree of federal executions.

I think there were 13 executions in about six months after I think a 15 year pause on federal executions.

So that was maybe not unexpected, but it was very shocking.

And I wanted to cover that news, and I figured the best way to, to put out good coverage was just to see it for myself.

- So what, tell us about Alfred Bourgeois, the crime that he committed and and what you remember about witnessing that execution.

- Yeah.

Alfred Bourgeois was a man from Louisiana who was a truck driver, and he had recently come into custody of his toddler daughter.

I think she was two or three.

Her name was Karrin.

And he brought her along on his truck routes.

And as, and from what I understand, another child as well, along with his wife and on the naval base at Corpus Christi in Texas, he, he was convicted of slamming the little girl's head against the inside of the truck cabin until she died.

Prosecutors also alleged that he had sexually assaulted her.

Hmm.

This was un adjudicated.

He was not convicted separately of sexual assault, but that was the prosecutor's contention.

Well, whatever the case on that count, the little girl's conditions had been absolutely terrible.

You know, even, you know, her death, not withstanding, she had been in a highly abusive situation, and bourgeois was convicted of that murder and was wound up on federal death row because the murder had taken place on a naval base, which federal property you, you know, was an immensely unsympathetic character.

You know, probably everyone struggles the most with child killers.

And the manner of homicide in this case was so disturbing that I, you know, again, I had a hard time entering into this space where I was like quite emotionally and viscerally opposed to what was happening.

But then it happened and I, I had a totally different reaction.

- Yeah.

You, you questioned whether or not you might feel some degree of satisfaction witnessing the execution in the sense that recompense had been made.

This was in Indiana in 2020, as you note, and it was through lethal Injection.

What did you learn about lethal injection?

- Yeah, so, you know, lethal injection is advertised as, you know, being a sort of painful, or excuse me, a painless and peaceful death.

People, you know, analogize it to euthanizing pets, which I think we generally think of as a sort of peaceful process.

Of course, there are many more rules and regulations around euthanizing pets than carrying out the death penalty.

It's much less regulated.

But what I saw was it was totally inconsistent with that.

He, he, you know, you are being poisoned.

That is how lethal injection works.

And as the poison was affecting bourgeois, he was, you know, sort of twisting and jerking and heaving on the gurney.

Clearly, there was sensation there, and it took a while for him to die.

It was not instantaneous, and it, it certainly did not seem painless or peaceful.

- You said you had a certain idea of what you might feel afterward.

What, what did you actually feel afterward?

- I just felt like it was completely unnatural.

You know, to, to watch someone be killed three feet away from you is, you know, kind of a shocking and stomach turning event.

And, you know, I understood with complete clarity what Bourgeois had done, but that didn't make the, the whole spectacle of it seem legitimate to me.

In the end, I puked on the concrete coming out of the death chamber.

- We're talking about how the death penalty is practiced in the US today with Elizabeth Bruenig, staff writer for The Atlantic, who has the July cover story called "Witness".

And listeners, I wanna invite you into the conversation, what do you want to better understand about capital punishment in America, how it's carried out in our justice system, in your stance on the death penalty, whether it has changed or evolved, or if you have, you know, direct connections to it in some way, or it's affected your life.

I wanna ask you about another thing you learned about how executions are carried out, and that is that you learned or got some sense of how often executions are, are botched.

Can you tell us about Joe Nathan, James Jr. Who was executed for murdering his ex-girlfriend Faith Hall and, and how you came to learn about his execution?

- So, you know, it was the summer of 2022, and I, you know, received a call from a friend who is a doctor and who occasionally, you know, communicates with, works with men on Alabama's death row.

And he said there had been a recent execution that for whatever reason, seemed to have gone wrong.

So, according to the coverage of Jona and James Execution, media witnesses waited for over three hours to go into the execution chamber during which time, Jona and James, whereabouts were totally unknown.

When they were let in the media witnesses were let into the execution chamber and the curtain was pulled back, Jona and James was already unconscious.

I've never seen that happen before.

That's not supposed to be the case, because before prisoners executed, they have to be given their opportunity for last words, and they have to be read their death warrant.

And he was, you know, incapable of either thing.

He was executed.

And the state made a really odd statement in the press conference afterward, where they said, you know, it's within Alabama's execution protocol to set a central line, but that, you know, meaning a central IV line in a, in a major blood vessel.

But that they didn't do that.

They said, it's within our purview, but we didn't do it.

And the execution went off flawlessly, and that was it.

So, you know, prisoners believed something quite bad had happened because they knew the time that James had been taken from the isolation cell to the death chamber.

And it was three hours after that that he was actually executed.

So there was this mystery around what happened to James during that three hour period, and I figured the only way we were gonna know, you know, anything about that was to see his body.

And so I helped arrange an autopsy and I attended it, - And that autopsy painted a very different picture of what actually happened.

We're coming up on a break, but if you could just give us a very brief description of some of the key differences between the account and what the autopsy showed.

- Right.

James had been punctured multiple times with needles.

They had clearly struggled to set a vein.

This was in his arms, his hands, his feet, and there were slashes.

There were incisions made by a sharp tool, multiple of them into his arm that appeared to be an attempt to uncover a vein by removing the skin.

- We're talking about how executions are carried out today, and what Elizabeth Bruenig has learned from her years covering death row.

Stay with us for more.

This is forum.

I'm Mina Kim, welcome back to Forum.

I'm Mina Kim.

This hour we're getting a better sense of how executions are carried out, recent executions, and what it means to commit a person to die in America.

Elizabeth Bruenig is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Our July cover story is called "Witness" in Print and Online it's called Inside America's Death Chambers.

What years of witnessing executions taught me about Sin, mercy, and the possibility of redemption?

Elizabeth is a former opinion columnist, including for the Washington Post where she focused on politics, religion, and morality.

Listeners, what do you wanna better understand about the death penalty in America?

Has your stance on the death penalty changed or evolved over time?

Has it affected your life in direct or personal ways, or what does this discussion bring up for you when it comes to the death?

Death penalty?

Before the break, we were talking about what Elizabeth discovered about the botch execution of Joe Nathan, James, and Paul writes, most of the methods of capital punishment are markedly inhumane, but that was one reason you were drawn to the story of James Elizabeth.

But the other reason was that the victim's family, faith Hill, faith hall's family was opposed to the execution.

They didn't want James put to death.

- That's right.

Her brother and her daughters said that it wasn't what Faith would've wanted, that she believed in forgiveness and that she would wanted, she would have wanted him to live.

And the family, you know, was fairly, fairly active in trying to lobby the state to stop the execution.

They got in touch with a state representative, Wanda Lynn Gvo, who really advocated for them.

But you know, the Attorney General and the governor were not interested in what the victim's family wanted or how they felt.

And the family was quite distressed when he was executed.

They, they were very unhappy about it, and I had never seen that before.

It, you know, had sort of never crossed my mind that a victim's family might have their reasons for advocating against it, not just quietly opposing it, but you know, quite seriously advocating against it.

And so that attracted me to the story, trying to understand that and, you know, come to find out it's not actually that uncommon.

- It's not actually that uncommon.

What, what do you mean it's not actually that uncommon?

- Well, as I worked on the death penalty more and more after, after James' case, you know, I met other families that had been opposed to the death penalty families who had lost loved ones to violence.

And you know, in one, the victim's family, a member of the victim's family, and the prisoner who had killed the victim became very close and, and friendly.

And in that case, also, the victim's family did not end up desiring the execution.

- The Ner Rick writes, I struggle with the death penalty as a Quaker.

I instinctively oppose it, but I can't imagine any other penalty that would've been appropriate for Adolf Hitler.

My opposition to it therefore isn't based on pure ethical reasoning.

Instead looking at the number of exonerations from DNA evidence and changes in the science used to show guilt, I'm convinced that there's no way that it could be done fairly in our justice system.

Where are we as a country, would you say, when it comes to the be death penalty?

Because I understand that public support for capital punishment has as actually it like a 50 year low.

- Yeah, there's been a steady decline in support for capital punishment, and I think we are about half and half with maybe a slim majority supporting the death penalty, but very slim.

And I think that's a sign of, you know, the success of a lot of these critiques of the death penalty.

The ones that, you know, the listener just mentioned the, the issue with fairness and innocence.

- Yeah.

The issue with fairness and innocence, which in a lot of ways you cite cases from the sixties and seventies that you say were, had a big impact in terms of the way that our country understands the death penalty.

Can you talk about some of those cases?

- Right.

I think the, the signal case is, is Furman v Georgia and the, the argument a from the defendants at that point, well, I should say when Furman was heard, the NAACP had already been working for a while on finding cases they could use to litigate against the death penalty.

They did this with their legal action fund and, you know, it was fairly successful.

Their point was, you know, the completely legitimate one, that the death penalty is applied in unfair ways that there is so much, so much of it has to do with the whims of prosecutors and juries, and they don't always make decisions that fit within the parameters of fair and equal justice.

And there was significant evidence of a specifically race playing a large role in who is, you know, convicted of death penalty, eligible crimes and, and the seeking of death sentences often is based on the, the defendant's race and relative especially to the victim's race.

So I think black killers of white victims have the highest rate of death penalty, death penalty convictions sought, and I'm pretty sure carried out.

Yeah, - Yeah.

I understand from your reporting that 27 states have abolished the death penalty or have halted executions by executive action in California, of course has a moratorium though there are questions around whether or not that could change.

Are you seeing changes though, in this general decline in support for capital punishment?

Are you seeing it potentially move in the other direction?

- Absolutely.

So, you know, one of the big paradoxes of capital punishment right now is that we're in this period of long decline of public support and also of long diminishment of executions carried out, death warrants sought.

Those have been on the drop for a long time and, and still we're nowhere near where we were in the nineties in terms of, of death penalty, death sentences and executions.

But there is an uptick going on right now.

I think we've had 25 executions this year so far, and the year is not yet over.

And 24 was the, the total number of people executed last year.

I think Florida is about to break its previous year of record as well.

In terms of executions.

Ron DeSantis has been zealous about pursuing executions.

And so there is, there is renewed interest right now among states in pursuing these kinds of sentences.

And I think it has a lot to do with maybe the current administration, the current political climate.

It just seems like there's more of an appetite for it right now than there has been in the last several years.

- How so, with the current administration, the current political moment?

- Well, president Trump has been, you know, quite vocal in his support for capital punishment and has floated in the past these sort of, you know, fantastical ideas about having executions in stadiums or doing group executions, forms of public executions.

And it appears to me that attorney generals in various red states, especially those who maybe have designs on political careers themselves, seem interested in carrying favor with the administration by carrying out executions.

You know, Trump sort of led by example in 2020 when Bill Barr carried out those 13 executions, and I think the message was heard quite clearly in red states that this was a desirable thing.

This was an aspect of the MAGA movement.

And you know, I think the decisions that ags and Red states have have reflected that.

- Hmm.

We've got calls coming in as well.

Let me go to Lindsay in San Francisco.

Hi Lindsay, you're on.

- Hi, Nina.

Hi Elizabeth.

I had to call in.

I've, I've always been fascinated by not execution certainly, but by the herd mentality, especially in the deep south around them.

You know, where I grew up was, it was like if someone was being executed for a crime, it wasn't, let's make sure they didn't do it or anything like that.

It was, let's do this, let's go team.

I mean, they truly, they loved it and advertised it and never questioned it.

And I had a very gentle heart and it broke me every time I heard it on the news or saw it on the newspaper.

But what I wanted to mention, growing up in Mississippi in the deep south on the border of Alabama, they unbeknownst to probably most people, they would air the execution live on the radio.

This was in the 1980s, and I would be in my bed, I had on the top eight to eight, then I would listen to whatever came on after.

And one night around midnight, it, it drops and it goes straight to a very formal morose tone of a person talking.

And he begins explaining exactly what's about to happen to this person - Hmm.

- In the in chamber.

And I'm six years old and I'm horrified.

Oh, and I'm so paralyzed in my bed, I can't even get up to change it.

But this was how it was celebrated down there.

- I can hear how still, how it affects you, Lindsay, and I really appreciate you calling in to share your own experience and observation of it from Mississippi.

So much of your reporting, Elizabeth is from the south, from Alabama in particular, and where you also found that there were many executions that needed to be called off partway through because they were being botched in not dissimilar ways to the way that you described James' execution as well.

I wanna read a couple more comments.

Mike writes, when I was in my twenties, I was opposed to capital punishment.

But in extreme situations where it is objectively known that a person has murdered one or more people with objective and verifi verifiable evidence, that's not circumstantial, I am strongly in favor of capital punishment.

I wanted to ask you about you witnessing the execution of David Neil Cox.

And I wanna ask you about this because this is somebody who, well, he, he committed a very heinous crime in Mississippi.

He murdered his estranged wife, Kim Cox, and sexually assaulted his daughter Lindsey.

And he admitted he did it.

He said he wanted to be executed and, and as you write, testified to his own depravity, you are witnessing the executions of people who are unambiguously unambiguously guilty of their crimes and also stating that they would do it again if given the opportunity.

I don't know if there's more that you wanna say about Cox's execution, but I guess the question for me is why did you volunteer to serve as a witness in Cox's execution?

- Well, I was very curious about, this was the first case I had run into of a death row volunteer death row.

Volunteers are maybe more common than you might think, but I was sort of green in this area, and I had just never run into a person who was advocating for their own execution.

Most people are, you know, defending themselves in a pretty frantic way, an end stage capital litigation.

And he was firing his attorneys and waiving appeals and asking for his date to be moved up.

And Mississippi was more than happy to oblige him.

It struck me that there was something probably, you know, it's unlikely that somebody would be, let me put it this way, if someone were that suicidal in any other context, we would presume they were mentally ill. And theoretically, you can't execute someone who is suffering from a certain degree of mental illness.

Now, I, I don't think that Cox necessarily met that threshold, but it was disturbing, you know, seeing someone who clearly had some kind of mental deficiency being executed, you know, because it, it, I think, calls into question the validity of a lot of capital punishment because, you know, the mentally ill people and people with intellectual disabilities are very, very well represented on death row.

That's, those are very common things on death row.

- I guess the other reason I wanted to ask you this is because I'm wondering if you wanted to challenge your own capacity for mercy in this case.

So this listener, Edward writes, I oppose the penalty for two reasons.

The first is that I don't believe our justice system gets it right 100% of the time and innocent people are being killed.

The second is that I think it speaks ill of us as a species.

So I guess, yeah, you know, I, I think, and we're getting some interesting comments from listeners who are sort of asking things about, you know, like maybe if I knew that it was something that was administered fairly or that the death was being done humanely, for example, Andrea writes, I'm not in favor of the death penalty, but I keep wondering why fentanyl is not used.

It seems to be very effective for killing people and is readily available, but, but I'm wondering if you're seeking something further.

- Yeah, I mean, you know, I am, I, look, I agree with, with many of those objections that it's administered unfairly.

I think that's uncontroversially true and verifiable with data.

The fact that it, you know, seems to be frequently botched and the fact that even the executions that are considered successful seem to come with a degree of pain and suffering, that's, that's unacceptable.

And I do think those are useful arguments in terms of getting people to think twice about capital punishment, and I think they're correct.

At the same time, full rejection of capital punishment requires that you be willing to reject capital punishment.

Even in cases where it's administered fairly, it's carried out painlessly.

We know beyond the shadow of a doubt the person was guilty, the murder was particularly heinous.

You know, those cases do exist.

And if you agree that in those cases the person should be executed, then you're, you're not fully opposed to capital punishment.

And I, I am.

And so that's where I, you know, find those objections to be helpful, but also in some cases, somewhat limiting.

- Hmm.

We're talking with Elizabeth Bruenig about the death penalty this hour, and hearing from you, our listeners, what do you wanna better understand about capital punishment in America and how the death penalty is carried out in our criminal justice system?

And what questions do you have around how the position in our country on the death penalty is changing or evolving, or has evolved?

And if you have any experiences related to the death penalty, feel free to share those two at 8, 6, 6, 7, 3, 3, 6, 7, 8, 6 at Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads, or by emailing forum@kqeed.org.

Let me go to Jeff in San Jose.

Hi, Jeff.

You're on.

- Hi.

Thank you.

First of all, I, your guest has mentioned in cases where there's irrefutable evidence, the person has confessed it's a very heinous crime.

I have no problems with capital punishment, but what my question is, is if you can put a dog to sleep, I know this sounds callous, but why can't they come up with a humane way to execute somebody?

There has to be, I, I keep hearing about how, how they screw this up so many different times in so many different ways.

It doesn't seem like brain surgery when we have so much, you know, so many years of examples.

When you have a pet put down or a horse or a large animal, it, it can be done.

Why is it not being done that way?

- There is some talk about nitrogen hypoxia, right, Elizabeth, and again, we're coming up on a break, but I don't know if you've a quick answer to Jeff and we can get into it more afterward.

- Yeah, I, it, there's, there's quite a lot to say on this point, but yes, lately there has been a new execution method pioneered called nitrogen hypoxia.

- Yeah, we'll get to it after the break with Elizabeth Bruenig.

Stay with us.

You're listening to Forum.

This is forum, I'm Mina Kim.

We're talking with Elizabeth Bruenig, whose Atlantic Peace is called Inside America's Death Chambers.

What years of witnessing executions taught me about sin, mercy, and the possibility of redemption?

Listeners are weighing in this listener writes on blue sky.

There are numerous accounts of horrible deaths when it comes to lethal injection.

It's anything but painless and peaceful Noel on discord rights.

I wonder if the push for lethal injection is to make execution more palatable, but it should be as unpleasant as possible for everyone involved.

Like with the use of firing squads.

I am against the death penalty.

Just before the break, we were talking about new methods to, I don't know, try to make execution more palatable if I borrow Noel's words.

But it is with some of the concern that your reporting has brought to light, right?

That it's not something that is being carried out in a humane way.

- That's right.

This, you know, the United States capital punishment has been going on in the United States since before the country was established, you know, in the colonies in New England, it was mostly done by hanging, you know, in almost all cases, you know, at that time the idea was to make executions sort of as horrible as possible and spectacular as possible because, you know, people felt that was deserved.

And the, our our sense of human rights was not as fully developed then as it is now.

As time went by in the United States was established as a country, and the eighth Amendment came around against cruel and unusual punishment.

This process began of trying to establish humane execution methods, excuse me, that allowed capital punishment to be carried out without, you know, this excess pain, humiliation and torture and so on.

And so, you know, hanging was often botched.

It was often pretty horrific.

People's eyes would pop out, people's heads would be ripped off it, or people would struggle to die and die over a long period of time, sort of suffocating slowly.

It was, it was very disturbing and it drew huge crowds.

And so, you know, public officials brought executions inside prison walls at that point.

There was, there were, you know, new options available for execution.

There was gas, poison, gas, and there was the electric chair.

The electric chair was sort of hailed as this, as scientific invention that was supposed to carry out these almost instantaneous executions.

But come to find out, the electric chair also led to horrific botches.

People catching on fire, people vomiting on themselves, people bleeding from the eyes, things like that, that, you know, horrified witnesses.

And the accounts in newspapers were, again, pretty ghastly.

And so, you know, the move to poison gas continued that was popular through the mid-century.

Once again, very heinous.

You had people banging their heads on the walls inside the execution chambers being poisoned to death and clearly suffering.

And so lethal injection came about after ferman in the seventies, actually, Ronald Reagan analogized it to putting injured horses down.

And that was the idea, this sort of veterinary practice that could be imported into modern execution practices.

But the problem is states have problems getting a hold of the drugs to carry it out.

They're not using fentanyl, they're using often pentobarbital or a cocktail of several medications.

They therefore end up using expired drugs and drugs that come from sort of illicit compounding pharmacies.

So the drugs may not be as effective and they may not work exactly as understood because they are so long expired.

Texas has, for years and years been using expired chemical debts with people.

The other problem is that it's difficult to get competent staff in execution chambers because medical professionals, like doctors, nurses, people who are in the habit of setting IV lines, even in difficult circumstances every day, they don't want anything to do with executions.

That's not why people go into medicine.

And it could potentially threaten their licensure depending on the state.

It also, you know, people don't want to be known as executioners.

There are laws in place to protect their privacy.

So those are some of the reasons that we have difficulty carrying out lethal injection in a, in a painless and humane way.

- Do you know, or have you heard anything about how nitrogen hypoxia affects the people who are being executed?

- Yes.

So nitrogen hypoxia is an execution was created by a man named Stewart Creek, who is a screenwriter.

And his idea was that since people die frequently, not frequently, but occasionally in industrial accidents involving nitrogen suffocation without seeming to have suffered very much, it would be a good idea to use that method in an execution setting.

You know, so once again, this was advertised as a, a painless and peaceful method that was just like going to sleep because the prisoner was still breathing.

They weren't suffocated by having their airways shut off, theoretically, they wouldn't feel this sense of panic or, or suffocation that proved not to be true.

Nitrogen hypoxia executions take a while much longer than expected, and people who have been executed by nitrogen hypoxia have once again struggled, you know, in incredibly on the gurney against their bonds.

And so I think it has also been discredited as a, as a humane execution method, which is not to say they'll stop using it.

- Well, Gregory writes, capital punishment is about giving satisfaction to the victim's, loved ones.

They want retribution, punishment, and suffering at the level that the perpetrator inflicted on the victim.

You have personal experience with this, Elizabeth, and you've written about it, about murdering it, murder, entering your life.

And I was very sorry to read about your sister-in-law, Heather, and I'm sorry to have to ask you to share what happened to her, though.

I know you've written about it, but also more importantly, how your spouse and his family responded to what should happened to her killer.

- Yeah, so I completely understand why a family would want that.

I think it's natural to want retribution and even to want some level of pain and suffering.

But what I would contend is that those desires aren't good for you.

And part of what made me think this was when my sister-in-law was murdered, she was murdered by a man she'd been romantically involved with.

He stabbed her to death shortly before, you know, she was planning to move in with this person she was engaged to.

It was horrific.

It was, you know, extremely unexpected.

It was shattering.

But my husband and his father were not interested in capital punishment.

That seemed to never occur to them as a, as a possible solution to what they were feeling.

They weren't interested in the state pursuing that.

And you know, I think my husband and his dad are very rational people.

I would say that's their key characteristic, both of them.

And I think for each of them, they felt like, this doesn't accomplish anything.

The killer's going to die anyway.

You know, it's, it's guaranteed for all of us.

Speeding it up doesn't make the deceased person come back to life or reverse what was done to them.

So, you know, there's certainly a level of punishment that's deserved and that's carried out with, for example, a life without parole sentence or basically a lifetime sentence.

And I think those options are in many cases preferable for the victim's families.

- You said it's bad for us if it's bad for us, what effect has witnessing five executions in the last decade?

What effect has it had on you personally?

- Yeah, you know, it, it's not, it's not always pleasant.

It, you know, when you're talking to someone every day who knows of their impending death, you know, especially someone who, like Kenny Smith had survived a failed execution before.

That level of terror and torment is, is unimaginable.

It's almost difficult to express.

And when you're kind of going through it with somebody, you know, takes a psychological toll, though, obviously I'm not the one suffering the most in these cases, but it takes a toll.

I haven't, you know, my children don't know what I do.

They know that I write for a magazine, but I haven't told them about what - Yeah.

And you begin your piece talking about how you've had dreams or nightmares about being in the execution chamber yourself.

That you are in fact the person who committed the crime and is about to be killed.

And I think part of it you say is, is about your faith dictates around how we're all, we're all sinners, we're all capable of sin.

- Yeah, absolutely.

We are indeed.

And we do evil to different degrees in our daily lives all the time.

And you know, my sense is that based on, you know, my understanding of Christian teaching, we're supposed to forgive each other and have mercy, even in cases where it's very difficult.

You know, Jesus intervenes to stop an execution in the gospel.

It's the execution of the woman caught an adultery, she's gonna be stoned to death and Christ intervenes to stop it.

And of course, the next execution in the New Testament is the execution of Christ, which also seems to be a commentary on executions and whether they're generally a good thing.

So, you know, what I have derived is this sense that for reasons relating to the health of our souls, it's better to have mercy.

It's better to forgive.

- Your father-in-law said that he could have mercy for Heather's killer, but not forgiveness.

What was the difference?

- Yeah, mercy is when you withhold the maximum penalty deserved or called for by an action.

And forgiveness is when you repair your feelings towards another person.

So you know, it seems if you're going to forgive someone and or you know, return to the prior state, you were before the offense, I now regard you the exact same as though it never happened.

That's forgiveness.

Mercy is, I don't necessarily want anything to do with you, but I think I'm going to withhold this harshest penalty, not necessarily for your sake, but for mine.

And I think that's quite noble.

I think it's one of the noblest things I can think of.

It's not an idea that comes directly from Christianity, though it's advocated for in Christianity.

It's an idea that existed in the ancient world, it was written about by the Roman stoics.

And I still think that's highly effective, very important philosophy there.

- Let me remind listeners, you're listening to Forum, I'm Mina Kim, this Isner Magda writes, the death penalty contradicts the basis of our constitution that all persons are individuals and have complete freedom, some of which they trade for the benefits of society.

However, this social contract becomes null and void when society requires the individual's death by execution.

Jen writes, capital punishment is more expensive than life without the possibility of parole.

And there's no data that show that it is a deterrent to people committing future crimes.

Whereas Chris Wrights, has your guest found any history of the death penalty being a deterrent for crimes such as mass shootings?

- No.

So there is no evidence that the death penalty actually deters crime states with the death penalty often have higher homicide rates than states without.

The reality is that when people are committing violent crimes, they're not thinking about the penalty.

They're either so emotionally inflamed, they're just not thinking ahead, which is extremely common, or they think they'll get away with it.

So when people are committing, you know, this level of violent crime homicides, I don't think they're rationally sketching out what they should or shouldn't do.

These are often decisions that are made in the heat of the moment.

And you know, in terms of mass shootings, what, what's difficult about those cases is very frequently the shooter wants to die and is suicidal.

Oftentimes they either want to be shot by police or they shoot themselves.

And so I, I think it's hard to deter people who already have a nihilistic sense about the, you know, the worth of life, theirs and everyone else's.

So there's no evidence that, that the capital punishment actually deters crime.

No.

- You mentioned earlier Kenny Smith, this is a man in Alabama whose execution, his initial one by lethal injection was actually called off in part because they had difficulty, I think in that case accessing a vein as well.

And so they just could not carry it out.

And then ultimately he was put to death by nitrogen hypoxia, like one of the first people after a moratorium to investigate what was going wrong with the executions.

Can you talk about him, the crime that he committed and then what you came to know of him when you met him?

- Yeah.

Kenny was convicted of participating in a murder for hire plot.

So there was an Alabama pastor who decided he wanted his wife dead.

He hired a local criminal to do the job, and that man hired Kenny and Kenny's co-defendant, sort of his subcontractors, and he charged them with the task of killing the pastor's wife, whose name was Elizabeth Sin and ransacking the house to make it look like a robbery.

So Kenny's job was to ransack the house and make it look like a robbery.

That's what he did.

His co-defendant beat Mrs.

Sin and left her for dead.

Kenny always said he wasn't involved in the beating.

And his co-defendant who had reason to say that Kenny had been also never said Kenny had been involved in it.

So no evidence actually tied Kenny to the violence.

But nevertheless, he was convicted of, I think, capital murder for being present at the time of a homicide and sentenced to death.

Kenny had been on prison by the time, had been in prison by the time I met him most of his life, decades.

His children who had been toddlers little kids when he went away, were grown with their own children.

Kenny was a grandfather and he was, you know, I've met a lot of different people talking to folks on death row.

Some of them are, you know, cantankerous and difficult and that's, you know, just like anybody else I suppose.

But Kenny was a sweetheart.

He was a guy who was good to be around, easygoing, took the temperature and situations down, didn't have any record of violence or fighting inside the prison.

I think his only, his only rip was for like having marijuana at some point.

Kenny was a, a very kind person, even in these periods where I was working with him, where he was in huge amount of distress.

He was always polite, he was always thoughtful.

He relied heavily on his family.

He was a religious man.

I found it very easy to work with Kenny.

You know, part of the fun of working in journalism is you get to meet a lot of interesting people and you know, take them into your life in a certain way.

And Kenny, it was a pleasure to know him.

- What did knowing him teach you about people's capacity to change?

- Yeah, you know, I think it's very easy to, to intellectually come to the conclusion that people change.

It simply has to be the case.

You know, people change in, in short periods of time from, you know, one year to five years.

People change.

Of course they change in decades and decades, but it's another thing to see what that looks like.

To see someone who, at a young age, in a very immature stage, made a horrible decision and participated in something terrible, but have since grown into a pretty good adult.

- And it connects to capital punishment.

How and I, we just have 20 seconds.

You just have to leave room for people to change.

Elizabeth Bruenig, the pieces inside America's death chambers or witness, depending on the medium with which you get it.

Thank you so much for talking with us.

Thanks - So much for having me on.

- Atlantic staff, writer.

My thanks as well to Caroline Smith for producing this segment.

And always to our listeners, this is Forum, I'm Mina Kim.