As of December 1, officials across the U.S. have executed 44 people in 11 states, making 2025 one of the deadliest years for state-sanctioned executions in recent history. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, three more people are scheduled for execution before the new year.
The justification for the death penalty is that it’s supposed to be the ultimate punishment for the worst crimes. But in reality, who gets sentenced to die depends on things that often have nothing to do with guilt or innocence.
Historically, judges have disproportionately sentenced Black and Latino people to death. A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union released in November found that more than half of the 200 people exonerated from death row since 1973 were Black.
Executions had been on a steady decline since their peak in the late 1990s. But the numbers slowly started to creep back up in recent years, more than doubling from 11 in 2021 to 25 last year, and we’ve almost doubled that again this year. Several states have stood out in their efforts to ramp up executions and conduct them at a faster pace — including Alabama.
Malcolm Gladwell’s new podcast series “The Alabama Murders” dives into one case to understand what the system really looks like and how it operates. Death by lethal injection involves a three-drug protocol: a sedative, a paralytic, and, lastly, potassium chloride, which is supposed to stop the heart. Gladwell explains to Intercept Briefing host Akela Lacy how it was developed, “It was dreamt up in an afternoon in Oklahoma in the 1970s by a state senator and the Oklahoma medical examiner who were just spitballing about how they might replace the electric chair with something ‘more humane.’ And their model was why don’t we do for humans what we do with horses?”
Liliana Segura, an Intercept senior reporter who has covered capital punishment and criminal justice for two decades, adds that the protocol is focused on appearances. “It is absolutely true that these are protocols that are designed with all of these different steps and all of these different parts and made to look, using the tools of medicine to kill … like this has really been thought through.” She says, “These were invented for the purpose of having a humane-appearing protocol, a humane-appearing method, and it amounts to junk science.”
Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Akela Lacy: Malcolm and Liliana, welcome to the show.
Malcolm Gladwell: Thank you.
Liliana Segura: Thank you.
AL: Malcolm, the series starts by recounting the killing of Elizabeth Sennett, but very quickly delves into what happens to the two men convicted of killing her, John Parker and Kenny Smith. You spend a lot of time in this series explaining, sometimes in graphic detail, how the cruelty of the death penalty isn’t only about the execution,