I love Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, Revisionist History, but until recently I had completely skipped the latest season. It’s called “The Alabama Murders”, presenting itself as some sort of gritty true crime. Brilliant from a marketing perspective, but just not for me.
But then I learned what the season is really about, and I listened to all 8 episodes back to back.
The real focus of this season isn’t about grisly true crime; rather, the murders in the name refer to capital punishment in Alabama. It’s just as heartbreaking as it is fascinating.
The season does actually start out with a homicide, a murder-for-hire story tied to religion. The young men who were hired for the job didn’t successfully kill the preacher’s wife, so their jury wanted to put them in prison for life. However, the judge overrode their decision and sentence them to the death penalty.
I won’t go through the season beat-by-beat here; I think it’s worth your time to listen along. Just to give you one example of something that will stick with me–as someone who is already against capital punishment–is that lethal injection is actually a contradiction to the Bill of Rights, as it is medically considered “cruel and unusual punishment”. It was conceived in a single day and never really studied until someone took the time to realize that one of the injections will boil a person’s lungs from the inside while they are still conscious. If that isn’t cruel and unusual, I don’t know what is.
I don’t intend for this to be a debate about the death penalty or how it’s administered (along with other legal and ethical implications), but if you’d like to share your thoughts, I highly recommend first listening to the podcast.