Inside America’s Death Chambers
June 11, 2025 at 11:12PMIn attempting to learn more about capital punishment and her own beliefs about it, Elizabeth Bruenig has witnessed several executions. She’s written extensively for The Atlantic about why the death penalty is racist and wrong. In getting to know condemned men personally, she has tried to learn about the man behind the crime, not just the act which came to define them in life, and also in death.
I had been trying to compose my thoughts about the death penalty for a while, distilling them into scraps and stubs of writing, but the only certainty I had going into the Indiana death chamber in December 2020 was the simple sense that it’s generally wrong to kill people, even bad people. What I witnessed on this occasion and the ones that came after has not changed my conviction that capital punishment must end. But in sometimes-unexpected ways, it has changed my understanding of why.
Of course, capital punishment as an institution relies on judgment at every level: judgment about guilt, about fairness, about proportion, about pain and cruelty, about the possibility of redemption. Judgment about how to carry out a death sentence and how to behave as one does so. And then there is the judgment that must be directed at oneself and one’s community—the distant, sometimes-forgotten participants. In all of this, I see the arc of my own evolving comprehension.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/06/11/inside-americas-death-chambers/
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