Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - On Fire from the Inside - Lethal Injection Up Close with Malcolm Gladwell

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

Last week, Cautionary Tales told the tragic story of Derek Bentley, exploring Britain's troubled relationship with capital punishment. Across the Atlantic, Revisionist History has also been scrutinizing what it means for a state to try to execute a person. For this bonus episode, Malcolm Gladwell joins Tim Harford to discuss his new series The Alabama Murders, and to confront the disturbing truth behind the death penalty in America today. Hear Revisionist History: The Alabama Murders wherever you get podcasts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Nine times out of 10, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, Why? Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. From prologue projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi. What difference at this point does it make? Yes, that's right. Lock her up. Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, wherever you get your podcasts. Florence, Alabama, 1988, a preacher has an affair. A woman is murdered. It sounds like the beginning of one of the many true crime series that saturate the podcast world,

but when I tell you that I am teeing up the latest series of revisionist history, you know it's going to be different. Malcolm Gladwell doesn't do podcast by numbers. Instead, he's taking this terrible crime, as a jumping-off point to explore the death penalty in the U.S. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. It's still damaging all of us. It still hurts us to think about it. There was this joke that said that it was easier to get forgiveness in the Church of Christ

for murdering somebody than it was to be divorced. I don't know which one of them killed. I really don't. But I think both of them got what they probably deserved. He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left,

tell my family I love him. He was taken out of his cell, thinking that his execution was imminent. Because a cold-blooded, convicted killer complains about the prodding and poking of a small abbey line. Really? We recently explored capital punishment in the UK with our episode of cautionary tales, Derek Bentley must die.

So I was keen to find out more about revisionist history, the Alabama murders. and I am delighted to say that Malcolm Gladwell joins me now. Malcolm, welcome back to Cautionary Tales. Thank you, Tim. Delighted to be here. So what drew you to this story, Malcolm? I met a woman, a friend of a friend, who was a trauma specialist, and I thought she was really interesting. And so I just started meeting with her once a month or so for two, two and a half hours. And she just told me about her life and her work. And she treats torture victims.

and then she started doing people who had suffering from PTSD, and she spent time at Guantanamo Bay. And then she started working with people on death row because they were often people who had been greatly traumatized as children. She'd done something like 35 death row cases over the course of her career, but this was the one that stayed with her. And immediately when she started to talk about this case, I realized, oh, that's why we're doing this.

I always like discovering the purpose for an interview in the interview as opposed to before. And this was a perfect example of that when she started to talk about it. What she was saying was so powerful and emotional that I realized that's the story I wanted to tell. Your conversation with her really stayed with me as well as a listener. There's a real sense of place in the season. You take us right into the heart of the Bible Belt and this very devout area. But the Church of Christ features very heavily at the beginning of this story. And even by Bible Belt standards, the Church of Christ has these very strict rules.

And you start by introducing us to a minister of the church. So tell me about Charles Senate. Charles Senate is a Church of Christ minister. You know, there are many flavors of American fundamentalist religiosity. This is the kind of ascetic, intellectual, unflinching version. They don't believe in any kind of instrumentation. They are people of the book. Everyone in that world takes the Bible literally,

but these guys take it super literally. And they have a belief that they are the true Christian church and that everyone else is either soft or a backslider or is misinterpreting the text. There's also no church structure whatsoever. no hierarchy. The preacher is in complete control of his church, and I say his because there are no women in positions of authority in the Church of Christ. My best friend, his father, was a Church of Christ minister. So I knew all about this denomination quite well. It's centered in Texas

and Alabama and Oklahoma. It's a very southern. So our lead character is a Church of Christ minister who is doing something that in their world is absolutely unforgivable. which is he's having an affair. You know, if you get a divorce, you have to leave the church. Like, this is, these guys are serious. They have a kind of grim, grim is too strong a word, but an incredibly strict moral code. So like this is the world in small town Alabama,

we have a preacher who has done the unthinkable. He has had an affair with a congregant, and that's where we begin. Yeah. And you introduce this quite early on to the, idea of a failure cascade, one thing leading to another and another. And we're not going to discuss the entire cascade in this conversation, but the failure cascade begins with the affair and then it quickly escalates to a murder. Tell us about the murder and how that came about.

Well, first of all, let me say that there is no concept in this entire series, more Tim Harford-friendly than the failure cascade. Yeah. I felt seen when I, when, I heard you describe it. It is straight out of your own playbook, but it's this fascinating concept, an engineering thing, to describe how an initial very small mistake or misstep or malfunction can balloon into something bigger. This whole series is about a failure cascade,

but begins with this affair that Charles Senate is having with one of his congregants, and then the next stage is that Charles Sennon's wife is murdered. Her home is, she's alone at home, and someone breaks in and robs the house and stabs her to death. That happens in the spring of 1988, and it is the first serious step in the Cascade. And who did the police initially suspect? Well, they find they get a tip. The two kind of wayward kids, John Parker and Kenny Smith from this town of Florence in northwestern Alabama,

the VCR stolen from the house turns up in one of the kids' homes. Someone turns them in. But then suspicion very quickly falls on Charles Senate himself because there's too many inconsistencies in his story. My colleague Ben and I spent an evening talking to a former law enforcement person who had been investigating the case back in 1988 named Ricky Miller. And he very memorably told us about how quickly law enforcement developed suspicions about Charles Senate. The first thing that caught our attention, the best I can remember, was he made too many alibis. It was overkill. You know, he stopped to see people they'd have never seen. And that just threw up a red flag to us. Why is he

seeing all these people for the first time? It hadn't been at the time his wife's being murder. You know? He could tell you every time, everything, every day. Well, had my wife just been murdered in my home, I couldn't tell you nothing. My mind's gone. But he knew everything in detail. That's a red flag. He started talking about how she'd been attacked by two men when he would have no reason to know that it was more than one person. I mean, it was kind of like he's not a high percentile criminal. He hadn't thought through anything or didn't figure out how to tell his story properly.

They quickly established that the two men they had been told were involved in this crime had a connection, a previous connection to Charles Senate. And there's a moment when the police officer says to him, do you know and mentions the name of one of this guy, Kenny Smith, and he turns bright red. And it turns out that he in the end hired these kids. Yeah.

He is the one who approached these two kids and gave them a couple thousand dollars and told them to deal with his wife, which they do in a kind of spectacularly inept way. What's interesting about the case is there's a version of this case that it ends with the apprehension of Charles Senate and of these two kids, and that's it. People go to jail and we walk away. But that's not what happens. It just keeps going and going and going. And ultimately, you know, the last and most sort of grotesque act in this case does not take place until last year. So some 35 years after the murder, the thing goes on, we're talking about something. It goes on forever. We've recently heard about the case of Derek Bentley on

cautionary tales. One of the men in the frame for Elizabeth Senate's murder reminded me of Derek Bentley. He was on the scene when a police constable, Sydney Miles, was killed. He didn't pull the trigger. It seems unlikely he intended any harm. Derek had learning difficulties. He was very easily led. And I think there's a hint of that with John Parker. Yeah, I mean, I would say it more broadly. any systematic discussion of people who are involved in murders like this, there's always some history of trauma. I mean, that's who commit murders, both John Parker and Kenny Smith, the two people who were ultimately convicted of this crime. They're both come from the most, the bleakest childhoods. Parker had suffered a serious concussion as a toddler, had major learning

disabilities, was using drugs since he was in his late adolescence. These are not healthy, well-adjusted, advantaged people. These are people struggling with a whole series of deficits. And that is the rule as opposed to the exception when it comes to homicide that we're dealing with people who are not whole in the way they see and deal with the world. So eventually these two young men, John Parker and Kenny Smith, are tried for murder. So what happens when their case reached? court. In the cascade that we're describing in the story where there's one misstep after another,

this is one of the crucial stages in the cascade that at the crucial moment where the criminal justice system is supposed to deliver justice, it fails. And it's really, really unclear whether John Parker and Kenny Smith, two men convicted in this case, actually murdered Elizabeth Senate. In both cases, the jury overwhelmingly says, we don't have enough certainty here to recommend the death penalty. And in both cases, the judge sets in and says, I don't care. These guys should be executed for their crimes. So I was curious about the motivation of the judge, because in the case of Derek Bentley, the judge in that case was notorious. He was nicknamed the tiger, Judge Goddard. And it seems pretty clear that

he took a perverse pleasure in handing out the death sentence. What was going to on in the Alabama cases, were the judges enjoying the idea of dishing out life and death? In the state of Alabama, they have partisan elections for judges. So a judge is essentially as a

political figure in the same way that a congressperson is or a state senator. If you're in a conservative district running for office on the Republican ticket, you're powerfully motivated to be seen as tough on crime as you

possibly can be. And there's no sure a way to say that you are unflinching in your opposition to crime in the state of Alabama than to say the jury's wrong. We've got to crack down on this murderer. That opens up this whole question as to if you as a state wish to kill somebody as a punishment, how are you going to do it? And this is where the details that you were exploring, I think, astonished me. I just assumed, well, I guess you're going to kill someone, you're going to kill someone. How hard can it be? Not so easy, it turns out. Well, first of all, it's hard to kill people, period. But then if you have to do so in a way that sort of meets a certain humane standard, then your job gets even tougher. Then you have to do it, if you have to do it

without the assistance of medical personnel, because, of course, no doctor is going to help you kill someone, right? No real doctor. That's the difficult bit. I mean, you said it's hard to kill someone. It's probably not physically, probably isn't that hard to kill somebody. But it's this bizarre, almost grotesque constraint where you say, well, you know, you've got to kill them, but you've got to do it the right way. And then that raises the question of, well, what is the right way? What is the way that is not cruel and unusual?

What is the appropriate way in which the state can kill somebody? Yeah. As you say, there's no doctors. They've sworn the Hippocratic oath. Yeah. They can't do it. It's useful to remember that the guillotine is invented as a humane alternative to previous methods of capital punishment. The point of the guillotine is like, oh, finally we can kill someone cleanly and without undue suffering, you know, in a way that's consistent with our beliefs about civil society.

Like the struggle to come up with a good way for the state to kill someone has been going on for hundreds of years. I'm not a historian of the death penalty, but I feel that hanging was also regarded as relatively clean. And then the electric chair, presumably, that was a kind of a modern technological method. They didn't introduce the electric chair because they thought it would hurt more. That was not the aim. It may have been what happened, but it wasn't the goal. Yeah. When I was doing this, my reporting, I had a conversation with a death penalty expert who is personally opposed to the death penalty,

but she was making the argument that it was time to bring back the firing squad. Her point was in this kind of ongoing search for the most humane method. We should have stopped with the firing squad. It's the best. Yeah. Because you really do die pretty quickly and consistently under the firing squad. Where did the idea of lethal injection itself come from? One of the earliest proponents was Ronald Reagan when he was governor of California.

And he made the observation at a time when people were in. increasingly aware that, or concerned that the electric chair was a kind of grisly and inappropriate way to execute someone. Reagan famously says, why don't we just put murderers down the same way we put down horses? That insight, such as it was, catalyzes all kinds of people to look for ways of killing people through injecting them with lethal drugs. Which I think sounds intuitive, but you describe it's not quite as pain. meaningless as you might think. No, I talked at length to this really extraordinary man named Joel Zivitt, who's a Canadian intensive care specialist, who has developed a kind of sub-specialty

in the death penalty. And he was the first person ever to ask the question, when you try and execute someone through lethal injection, what exactly happens to the person being executed? That is to say, how do they die? You're giving them a cocktail of lethal drugs, and we had a kind of assumption about what drug did what, and at what point in this protocol of these three drugs you're being injected with, at what point do you die? And he pointed out that our prevailing assumption about it was entirely wrong.

And what's interesting about his discovery, apart from how kind of grotesque it is, was that we've been using the lethal injection in the United States as a method of killing people for whatever, 30, 40 years. No one had ever bothered to ask the question how it worked. So there's a level of kind of indifference and callousness, and you think it's some kind of scientific thought-out process, and it's not.

It's a bunch of random people who come up with something on the back of an envelope and use it to execute people. This is Zivit describing what he found out about what really happens when you try and kill someone through lethal injection. It travels rapidly to the heart where the heart pumps it immediately into the lungs,

and it tears the lungs apart, basically. They get burned from the inside, and then the separation of air and blood, there's a very fine layer of tissue there that gets destroyed. And the blood just pours into the lungs. And I'm sorry as I'm saying this. It's awful.

And this is how lethal injection actually kills you. It kills you by burning your lungs up. And you're also paralyzed so you can't complain that this is happening. And then to finish you off, of course, you know, you're probably begging for the potassium at that point because that finally stops your heart. and stops this process. But in the meantime, you know, this has been gone on for a few minutes. So the last thing that, you know, you may know

is that you're on fire from the inside and the blood is filling up your lungs as you die. I mean, one of Zivots's points is that because you're restrained and you've been given a paralytic, you are in agony as you're dying of lethal injection, but you can't, no one's aware of it. You look calm and you can't move and you can't speak. You've been given this very powerful drug that renders you mute.

It's the worst, it's just an unimaginable kind of horror story. And to loop back to what originally drew you into this story, you were talking to Kate Porterfield and she works with people who have been tortured. And the discovery, the realization really, that to be on death row facing execution is a kind of torture and at least some of these methods of execution are themselves a form of torture but we've just not really thought about it that way.

Yeah. The only way that the death penalty I think can sustain itself in the modern world is through an act of kind of willful indifference on the part of a society. You just have to kind of close off any kind of empathy or moral awareness of what you're doing. We see that all over the place, but I think this is something Americans

have proven to be very good at when it comes to the use of the death penalty. Yeah, I wanted to ask about that. Here in the UK, we haven't had the death penalty for 60 years, and in fact, it was the case of Derek Bentley that I think was an important turning point in the campaign

to abolish the death penalty. And in fact, Derek was posthumously pardoned in 1988. So that's the UK story, but do you think we're ever going to see an end to the death penalty in the U.S. or any time soon? Well, you know, it's very hard to be optimistic about moral progress in the United States right now. But the death penalty is slowly going away. But there's two things that are hindering it.

What is the unresolved conflict between the two arguments that are used against the death penalty? One is that we execute people who don't deserve to die, who either innocent or moderately guilty, as you describe Derek Bentley, or who are impaired in some way and not fully responsible for their actions. Yeah, there was the sense with Bentley that he had done something wrong, but he didn't deserve death. He hadn't committed this grotesque crime of murdering a police officer. Yeah.

That's argument one, and that's the easier one. The harder one is, should you execute people who, in a kind of colloquial sense, deserve to die, right? The cold-blooded, vicious murderer. And what happens if all you make is argument one, then you leave the proponent of the death penalty with the opening to say, well, let's just do a better job of implementing it. And you're not confronting the fact that ultimately you have to say that there are people who are evil and in every conceivable sense and unmistakably guilty and who have violated every social compact. But we have to affirmatively decide as a society whether we want to stoop to their level or not. And that is that second

part that America struggles with, right? Yeah. Argument one is not sufficient to end the death penalty in the United States. Is that why you called the series the Alabama murders? Because Yes. Legally speaking, there was only one murder, Elizabeth Senate. Yeah. We felt that the subsequent executions of the two men found guilty in Elizabeth Senna's murder qualify as murders. There are state murders, but they're murders.

And that the state should not be lowering itself to the level of the common murderer. We should be better than that. Yeah. Yeah. But like I say, it's hard to make arguments about what were better than. Yeah. And right now in the United States. We ended our episode, Derek Bentley must die,

with a quote from England's chief hangman, peer point. I have his book. Yeah. Interesting fellow. What he said was, I do not now believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder, capital punishment, in my view, achieve nothing except revenge.

Do you agree? I do agree. It's funny, he's such a compromised authority on the subject of death penalty. Yeah. And I'm still hung up on how that's the lesson he chose to draw from his lifetime of work of executing people to wonder about his deterrent effect. as opposed to reflect on what it said about his society, about what it felt like to be responsible for so many deaths? Has making the series made you think differently

about the death penalty, Michael? Well, I was never a fan. It has lowered my estimation of state authority. We keep in revisions history returning to Alabama because it's just such a bizarre place. It is the place where sort of every, contradiction of American history and society is concentrated. And it's amateur hour. At one turn after another, as we tell the story, you're just struck by the fact that they don't know what

they're doing and they don't care. Yeah. Not even trying to keep up appearances. You know, to be a Canadian is to believe that government is at least moderately competent and well-meaning. that most high-minded and brightest of the people I went to college with went into government. And like, you look at Alabama and you're like, the most high-minded and confident people did not go into government. One thing that really struck me listening to a statement by one of the officials after a particularly controversial episode in Alabama's history of capital punishment. And the point he made was, oh, there are people out there who are trying to prevent us,

doing these executions. And they sympathize with the criminals. Some of them are international. And I just thought, oh, wow, it's an unusually clear example of using some kind of tribalism as an alternative to thinking through the issues. Rather than justifying what we've done or possibly acknowledging that something has gone wrong. Instead, there are people out there, many of them abroad, who love criminals.

And they're trying to take away your death. penalty. I thought, gosh, that's a really striking stance for him to take. Their willingness to jump to that kind of language and attitude is breathtaking, yeah, as opposed to examining what they're doing. Alabama's a weird place. I will say, I love the state. I love going there. No, you made that quite clear, actually. You thought it was strange, and you thought that the government was behaving in a shameful way, but there was a real affection for the place and the people.

Yeah. I loved listening to the whole season of the Alabama murders, Malcolm. When I started listening, I was thinking, oh, this is really cool. They've done a really good job. I love the music. I love the way they've done this. And by the end, I wasn't thinking at all about the way anybody had done anything. I was completely in the moment.

It really changed the way I saw the death penalty. And I think it's an amazing piece of journalism. So just tell people where. can they find it? It's in the revisionist history feed. It's out now, wherever you get your podcast. It's called the Alabama Murders, seven-part series. You can subscribe to Pushkin Plus and binge it all at once,

or you can listen to it piecemeal over the course of the next weeks. I have been talking to Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm. Thank you very much. Thank you, Tim. What I told people, I was making a podcast about Benghazi. Nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. From prologue projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi.

What difference at this point does it make? Yeah, that's right. Lock her up. Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I-Heart podcast. Thank you.