Understanding the Death Penalty: Malcolm Gladwell on The Intercept Briefing

Malcolm Gladwell here, my new book, The American Way of Killing, investigates America's gun violence crisis. Why is the richest country in the world plagued by such lethal violence? Through a series of stories, interviews, and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas and examine Why the US has never quite understood its own problem and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Get the American way of killing at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or at Audible, Spotify, or wherever audiobooks are sold.

Pushkin. Hey revisionist history listeners, Ben Nat of Haffery here. This past season on Revisionist History, the Alabama murders, we told the tale of how one death snowballed into a cascade of moral failures, masked with legal fig leaves, the misunderstanding of what constitutes reasonable doubt, the myth that there's a painless way to kill somebody. At its core, the Alabama murders is a searing critique of cruelty in America and the legal system that allows that cruelty to thrive.

But the story goes much deeper than a single case or a single incident from the 1980s. As of December 1 this year, 11 states have executed a total of 44 people, making 2025 one of the deadliest years for state-sanctioned killings. And in Alabama, they're still using nitrogen hypoxia, the brutal method pioneered in Kenny Smith's final execution. Malcolm recently joined Liliana Segura, a criminal justice reporter at The Intercept, to discuss capital punishment and what happens when a legal system that's supposed to catch mistakes and reduce harm doesn't. They also talk about why Malcolm felt drawn to investigate the death penalty in the series.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (44 minutes, 7,586 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.