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...