Hi, I'm Anna Mrycox and welcome to With Friends Like These, a show about difference and difficult

conversations. On today's show, we're going to talk about one thing. We're going to talk

about the death penalty. And I'll warn you, the second half of the show, I will have a

conversation with my former colleague at MTV News, Jim Millsmith. We will probably talk

about the morality of the death penalty and the political divisions that it brings up

and doesn't bring up those pro-life people who, for some reason, are also pro-gathered

penalty, for instance. But the conversation that I think we can bring you that you might

not get elsewhere is with Brian Leiman. He is a reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser.

And he just covers the Department of Corrections and part of his beat is the death penalty.

He's actually witnessed an execution. And he's seen what happens before and after.

I wanted to talk to him not about the morality of it, but about this the process and the

experience. What is it like in that room? What is the aftermath? What is covering the

death penalty done to him? So Brian Leiman, in a minute. You're a state government reporter

for the Montgomery Advertiser and Montgomery Alabama. And the reason why you're on, which

is something that you tweeted a while ago that I saw, quote, a few things in my experience

are more depressing than covering an execution. Anormous waste and loss on all sides.

So why don't you tell me first about the circumstances of what brought you to tweet that? And then

like I want to dig in on exactly what your experience has been?

When you cover a death penalty, any kind of death penalty case, you're confronted with

a lot of horror. You start with the crime, for example. One of the death penalty cases

that I've covered involved a man who was convicted of shooting a police officer and shooting

his girlfriend, Lowe's girlfriend was trying to protect her child from the gunshots.

...