Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I'm Akala Lacey. As of December 1st, 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, how it operates, and its inherent brutality.

I think he just got home from work and they come and he said, well, mom, can you come?

He said, the police are here.

There's no sense in even having a jury if you, if you're going to be able to overturn the jury if a judge can overturn the jury

he said but i was involved and that's a horrible thing i was involved in i've been in prison 24 25 years

that's probably not long enough. I didn't kill them.

They get burned from the inside, and then blood just pours into the lungs.

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