You ever feel tired of that voice in your mind that just won't be quiet?

It's not just the noise in the world I'm trying to get away from, but it's the chatter in my head.

Writer Pico Iyer has found his antidote, and he has ideas for how to find yours.

Great Escapes. That's on the TED Radio Hour podcast from NPR.

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. What happens when you come face to face with death? Not as a victim or an

executioner, but as a witness. That's the question at the heart of journalist Elizabeth Brunick's latest

Atlantic cover story, inside America's death chambers, what years of witnessing executions taught me

about sin, mercy, and the possibility of redemption. In the piece, Brunick takes us inside of her

decision to serve as a volunteer witness to state-sanctioned

deaths, from botched lethal injections to the country's first use of nitrogen hypoxia,

which is a method of execution, and which a person is put to death by breathing nitrogen gas.

Brunick's essay weaves together her reporting with the personal. She and her family were devastated by the murder of a loved one,

and through her faith, she explores sin and forgiveness, and what it means to watch people, society has decided must die.

Elizabeth Brunick is a staff writer at the Atlantic. She was previously an opinion writer for the New York Times in the Washington Post, where she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. In 2023, she was a finalist again for her writing about a string of botched executions undertaken by the Alabama Department of Corrections. And her work led to a temporary moratorium on the death penalty while the state investigated its own failures.

Elizabeth Brunuch, welcome to fresh air. Thank you so much for having me.

Elizabeth, you're one of the few journalists who has become a regular presence in these execution chambers here in America.

What is the process of becoming a witness?

And why do you want to be one?

Multiple states have laws on the books that allow witnesses to view executions.

And the idea behind these laws is that there should be some level of

transparency in the execution process to hold governments accountable, essentially, for this

work they're carrying out with taxpayer money. And so there are three ways to witness executions.

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