Is the death penalty still legitimate in 2024?

“It’s a hell of a thing, killin’ a man,” Clint Eastwood’s character said in the 1992 Western Unforgiven. “You take away everything he’s got and everything he’s ever gonna have.” The statement, made with cold indifference by a hardened killer, underscores the stakes in putting someone to death.

Those stakes are not only born by individuals who take another’s life, either in murder or in self-defense. We as a community face its enormity whenever our government, state or national, executes a convicted person.

Alabama will soon experience that matter twice for the same man. In 2022, the state failed to carry out the death penalty for Kenneth Smith, a convicted murderer. The failure came from trouble with inserting an IV used to administer the most common form of execution in America today: lethal injection. The state tried again Thursday, using a new method of execution known as nitrogen hypoxia. This form of the death penalty involves covering the convicted person’s face with a mask and administering nitrogen gas through it, causing death by oxygen deprivation.