What A Day - Sentenced To Death in the U.S.

Episode Date: October 19, 2026

Executions are on the rise in the U.S., even as more Americans oppose the death penalty. An October 2025 Gallup poll found that 44% of Americans oppose capital punishment, the highest level since 1966. Recent headlines, including a proposed public execution by firing squad and the botched execution of Christa Pike, have brought the issue back into focus. Jane discusses the death penalty with Elizabeth Bruenig, a staff writer at The Atlantic who has covered the issue for years.Show Notes: Check out Elizabeth's work – theatlantic.com/author/elizabeth-bruenig/ Call Congress – 202-224-3121 Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

You know, I think it has been very unfortunate that for a certain period of time, people were or and maybe still are under the impression that lethal injection is kind of this fail-safe medical method. You know, that is a mistake. If they were witnessing these executions, they might very well understand that it's a highly unprofessional and not at all medical sequence of events. It's Tuesday, October 20th. I'm Jane Koston. and this is what a day. President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance announced a $25 million program today to encourage the public to blow the whistle on suspected fraud in the federal government because no two people care more about fraud in the federal government. So here's what we're going to be doing.

Anybody that can prove that he turned somebody in, in other words, he or she, if you turn somebody in and you, let's say report, and you find a billion dollars, we are giving a commission to that person of 1%. It's a lot of money. And if it's 10 billion, 200 billion, 400 billion, we're giving a 1% commission to that person. You have to prove that you were the one

and prove that it was you. I have some suggestions, Mr. President. under the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program, anyone who submits a tip to Fraud.gov that leads to a fraud conviction or a significant federal enforcement action is eligible for a cash reward.

The president says he'll be the, quote, arbiter of who deserves the money for his new anti-fraud initiative. The White House had said that the Justice Department will administer the program. I'm guessing that blowing the whistle on fraud committed by members of the Trump administration won't get you.

a check. Curfews are being imposed in city centers across France after the most destructive rioting in years. Paris police said the curfew in two designated zones had restored, quote, public peace overnight and would remain in place as long as necessary. The curfew zones leave out other areas where protesters set up barricades and lit fires on Saturday. Student unions and groups from the Yellow Vest Movement, whose protests over fuel prices shook France in 2018 and 2019, have called for another date of protests this Saturday. Today marks two weeks until Election Day. If you don't have your voting plan ready yet,

this is your reminder to do it now. As we've been talking about this week, Democrats are becoming more confident in races in the Ruby Red South. Senate Democrats' top campaign spending group is waiting into Mississippi's U.S. Senate race for the first time this year. The Senate Majority Pack will spend $1.2 million and a new television advertisement

to boost Scott Colum, a district attorney in his campaign against Republican senator, Cindy Hadd Smith. The ad is set to start airing tomorrow and run through election day. This is a very aggressive move for Mississippi, where Trump won in 2024 by 23 percentage points, and where a Democrat has not won a Senate seat since 1982. But I want to talk about the death penalty. A tough topic to talk about, but one that just keeps coming up. Joining me is Elizabeth Brunuch, a staff writer at The Atlantic who has been covering the death penalty for years. Elizabeth, welcome to Wedaday.

Thanks so much for having me. So we're at a weird moment where there are more executions taking place in the United States while the practice loses favor with Americans. So in 2024, there were 25 executions in the U.S. There were 47 in 2025. there were 23 new death sentences in 2025, and it seems to be increasing in number. But Gallup found in October 2025 that the support for the death penalty is the lowest it's been since 1972. The most opposition, 44 percent, is the highest since 1966. What do you see happening here?

Are more executions making people less supportive of the death penalty? I think the drop in support for the death penalty is this long-term trend that's been happening over time. expected to continue. What we're seeing politically is a spate of executions that are associated with Donald Trump. So Trump has always been a fan of the death penalty. He, I think, took out a full page ad back in the day calling for the Central Part 5 to be executed. This has been a part of both presidential platforms. When he had the opportunity in 2020, he executed, I think, more than a dozen prisoners who are on federal death row. And he has directed his attorney general

to pursue more federal death sentences. So I think states are interested in governing toward Trump in trying to win his favor and appeal to his base. And so that's part of their reason for picking up the pace of executions a bit. So I think probably what we're seeing is a temporary spike on a general decline. So while we are seeing the spike, and clearly the spike is aimed at Trump and aimed at the people who are most supportive of him, it seems like the general public is less supportive of the death penalty. Why do you think that's happening? Well, I think one of the most important factors in terms of turning people away from the death penalty in the past 30 years has been the presentation of evidence of innocent people being convicted and sentenced to death. There have been,

historically executions of innocent people in the United States who were posthumously proven to have been executed under false pretenses. And I think that, you know, a lot of people find that to be a barrier they can't get over, an obstacle to support that they can't, they can't confront. Why, we already all agree that we shouldn't put innocent people to death. And I think for a lot of people, recognizing that there's always going to be this potential for the execution of innocent people has really driven support for the death penalty down in recent decades. You yourself have witnessed multiple executions. What have you learned from observing that process?

And what do you think people who haven't don't understand about that process of putting a person to death? Yeah, well, I think there's a sort of widespread notion that lethal injection is like the most medical and the most professionalized and the most humane form of execution. As it was advertised in the 70s, it was supposed to be about sort of using the latest technological advancements to put a person peacefully to sleep the way that we do animals. Of course, there's no way to actually test lethal drug cocktails in terms of how they affect people, what the sensations are, what the side effects, as you were, are before heading to death. So the drug cocktails are just guesses.

And the staff who are present to and checked those drugs are very frequently unprofessional. They're unqualified. They're totally incapable of carrying out successful lethal injections in a lot of cases. And this is multiple cases this has happened with in the past 10 years. So I think, you know, sort of having front row seats to lethal injection, you really get a sense of how completely failed this is as a method and how completely devoid of any merit in terms of how it was promised. So there have been two recent cases that have obviously brought the issue of the death penalty back to the forefront of public attention. And one, to that point with regard to lethal injection, is the failure of the execution of Krista Pike in Tennessee.

What does the failure of an execution look like? It seems a little strange, right, because a failed execution seems like the preferable type of execution because you survive. But it is a very terrifying way to survive. It is agonizing. It is horrifying in a way that I think few people can imagine. If you can think about yourself strapped to a gurney and you're sort of surrounded by people who are, you know, working very hard to calmly make sure that they kill you. I think that would be immensely psychologically distressing for anyone. But in Krista Pike's case and in Tony Carruthers and in multiple cases in Alabama,

the failed lethal injections were themselves pretty torturous. So it's not as though it were a clean failure where there were attempts and they were basically humane and then they failed to actually kill them. These are, you know, extremely traumatic experiences. In Tony Carruthers' case, which was the person in Tennessee who they failed to execute prior to Christopher Pike, there was a doctor in the execution room cutting into his body with a scalpel with zero evidence that he was properly anesthetized. And so I think when you look at it that way that these executions may have been failed, but they were still torturous. Then calling them successful versus failed really starts to make little sense, yeah. Right. I mean, Elizabeth, I think one of the challenges that I would guess some people have is that, yes, like what happened to Krista Pike was awful, but what Krista Pike did was horrifying. The murder she took part in was horrible. Every detail about that murder was awful. How do you and how should we be thinking about the death penalty as a means of the only just punishment for,

someone who commits a crime that that's that awful. Because I think that that's something, I'm not sure if we spoke about this the last time. We talked about the death penalty several years ago. But, you know, someone made reference to, say, the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, or any number of cases of people who have either received the death penalty or are on death row,

Dylan Roof, for example. These are people for whom I'm like, I'm making a hand gesture that says, eh, how do you think about this? where you're thinking, you know, this is not a case of someone who was innocent, who was put to death or may have been put to death. These are cases of people who, we know for sure, did a horrible thing. Why is the death penalty not the right response? I think there's sort of an inviolable dignity to human life. I think that killing is wrong. The death penalty, a lot of people see excluded from killing, but in reality, you're dealing with a harmless person. They are completely incapacity. They're living in a concrete and iron box. They can no longer hurt you. They can no longer hurt society.

So the question is, are we going to do anything in excess of some combination of restraint, which in the case of murder might need to be lifelong restraint and rehabilitation? The death penalty, I think, is it's very emotionally satisfying. It kind of makes sense on a primal level. But it doesn't really check out. terms of fitting certain crimes because, for instance, you can only execute someone once, even if they murdered lots of people. So in that sense, the death penalty itself is inadequate as a punishment to certain crimes. It simply maximizes what we can do and we can do no more.

But this means that a lot of people in a lot of cases don't get justice even with the death penalty. So I feel like it's an error to imagine that maximum justice is achieved when the maximum punishment is handed down. We'll get back to my conversation with Elizabeth Brunig in just a moment. What a day is brought to you by Zbiotics pre-alcohol. I have to tell you about this game-changing product I drink before a night out with drinks. It's called pre-alcohol by Zibiotics. The Zibiotics pre-alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was engineered by Ph.D. microbiologists to break down acetyl-dehyde, an unwanted byproduct of alcohol metabolism. Make pre-alcohol your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and

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The other argument I think you hear for the death penalty is that it serves as a deterrence and that let's listen to a clip from President Trump speaking in Kansas last night. We will pass the death penalty for large-scale drug dealers, human traffickers, and anyone who kills a police officer or law enforcement official. So this is something you hear a lot, the idea that the death penalty being the ultimate punishment, the death penalty. being, you know, the obviously worst form of punishment would deter people from committing the crimes that would lead to them getting the death penalty. Why do you think that that's not true? There have been studies on whether jurisdictions with the death penalty versus jurisdictions without the death penalty have, you know, similar rates of murder.

And it's very common that jurisdictions that do have the death penalty have higher rates of murder. The thing about deterrence, which has also been studied in that, academic context is deterrence requires the absolute certainty that you will get caught. So if you think about in terms of raising children, right, I have a seven and ten year old, you can give them a very severe punishment, like a multi-week grounding if they, you know, let's say toilet paper, the other, the neighbor's tree or something. But if they only get caught every five times they do that, it's not a deterrent because a lot of them get away with it.

And the reality is in the United States, a lot of people get away with murder. The homicide clearance rate is not that high. So a lot of people who commit murders walk and they have good reason for thinking that might happen because we do a woefully inadequate job of actually clearing those homicide cases. So that's why it doesn't function as a deterrent. You know, the short form is basically that these people don't think they'll get caught. A lot of them don't get caught. We can only begin to have a conversation about deterrence if that can.

case clearance rate was 99% and we're nowhere near that. Right. I also think that it implies that people who commit capital offenses put a lot of thought into it and into the ramifications of their capital offenses. And in several of the cases that you've been recently writing about, your most recent piece in the Atlantic is about a woman who works on a death penalty mitigation, clearly no one thought about the after effects of that horrible crime at all. There was no thinking taking place at all. Right. Someone was, you know, having serious drug-induced psychosis. Yeah, it was not a carefully planned killing. You know, it was heinous. It was particularly heinous. But, you know, when you look at the person who committed that crime, I don't think you're looking at a

criminal mastermind who sat down and really thought through how it was going to get away with all this. And I feel like in a lot of capital murder cases, you see someone who did something impulsively or did something under a mistaken impression. I know that sounds difficult, but you have to imagine like an organized crime context. There are people, these are not capital crimes who kill people accidentally. There are a lot of reasons that people do kill. And I think that they're very rarely well thought out because murder is not a good idea. if you thought about it very clearly and you were capable of thinking clearly, you would see that it's a bad idea. So if the death penalty doesn't deter and that death penalty is not a source of real justice, what does the death penalty do?

I mean, I think it's very satisfying if you are of a particular mind about it. Crimes, especially capital crimes are really horrific. It's sort of emotionally taxing just to know that you sort of share. country with people who do these things and you can imagine yourself or your family being victimized by someone in this way and it's it's very distressing it's upsetting a reality of crime in the world is distressing the fact that people do antisocial things is very upsetting the death penalty i think is a is a very hot-blooded response to those emotions um you know well fine if you've done such a horrible thing you've forfeited your right to life you should be killed right here right now

You hear a lot of people say that there shouldn't even be that lengthy of an appeals process for that reason, because the closer to the crime it is, the more emotionally satisfying it is. But I really think that's the only thing it has going for it, which is that for a minute, for some people, emotionally it is satisfying. So I want to talk also about the case of the Fort Hood shooter, which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegesath had suggested live streaming, his firing. squad execution, which will take place in December. Trump agreed and then backed away earlier this month. So in that case, the Ford Hood shooter wants to die. He very much, he wanted to die while killing multiple soldiers. And he wants to be executed because it serves his purpose of becoming a martyr. What does that tell you about the way the death penalty can be wielded by the people who receive it, especially with this whole live streaming idea, which is, I mean, this is ultimately why

the live stream got canceled, which is a strange sentence to say about a death penalty. I know. You know, I think that there have been multiple cases in the past of people sort of wanting martyrdom. I think one of the most notable is Tim McVeigh, right? He waved some appeals. He thought it would sort of spark people's uprising. It didn't. It never does. does. But I think that, you know, martyrdom and spreading the message is something that certain killers really aspire to. And I mean, this is another reason the possibility of especially killers who are motivated politically of being martyred and having their causes parroted by every news outlet. I think this is another reason. The death penalty is just a really bad idea,

which, you know, could potentially cause a lot of blowback. The last public execution in the ad states was in Kentucky in the 1930s, and reportedly it caused so much fervor that officials were like, we can't keep doing this because the crowds become unhinged, as you might imagine. Do you think that hiding the procedure, medicalizing the procedure, making it so that most people will never see an execution take place, do you think that that's a form of progress or avoidance? You know, I think it's sort of a lateral move, honestly, because I think that executions being made very public sort of didn't help the cause of the person being executed. And it certainly wasn't morally good for the people who were observing it. But medicalizing it and putting it inside prison walls sort of, you know, has its own set of risks and its own set of drawbacks. You know, I think it has been very unfortunate that for a certain period of time, people were, and maybe still are under the impression that lethal injection is kind of this fail-safe medical method. You know, that is a mistake.

If they were witnessing these executions, they might very well understand that it's a highly unprofessional and not at all medical sequence of events. but I believe that people would respond to that with glee. So I think that exposing people to how incredibly torturous and difficult lethal injection is, I mean, it would certainly have the effect of making some people who are opposed to the death penalty even more opposed. And I think that it could have the effect of making people who are in favor of the death penalty more in favor. The United States is an outlier when it comes to. the death penalty. Why do you think that is? What is it about the United States, whether it's federalism or whether it's just our society, that keeps the death penalty around?

The United States is a conservative and violent country. If you look at our rates of violent crime and the ways that our social attitudes compare to other Anglophone countries like the United Kingdom and Canada and even Australia, you'll see the United States tending on the conservative side of things in a big way. And likewise, we have a violent crime problem that we, you know, we're not addressing. Crime has been dropping for a long time. But if you compare our rates of crime, including homicide, to comparable countries or countries of comparable development, you'll see that American crime rates are kind of disturbing. And I feel like the death penalty is, is, an indicator of those of those factors.

Elizabeth, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me on. That was my conversation with Elizabeth Brunig, staff writer at The Atlantic. Before we go, CricketCon is just over two weeks away. Join us in Washington, D.C., November 5th through 7th, as we reflect on the midterm results and look ahead to what's next in 2028. And now, even more reasons to come.

We've just added some big name. to our lineup. Catch Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, and Minnesota Representative Elon Omar. Plus, California Representative Sarah Jacobs is talking on our AI panel. And there will be many, many more. Get a front row seat to the discussions that will shape the future of our pro-democracy movement. Go to cricketcon.com to get your tickets if you haven't already. See you there. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. I stand with Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton and tell your friends to listen.

And if you are into reading, and not just about how in the worst ad of this entire cycle, allies of Vecra Ramoswame's campaign got Acton's estranged mother to denounce her, like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston, and I think to understand how bad this is, we should hear from Amy Acton's brother, Philip Stearns. In a statement, he said, quote, It's not surprising that Vivek Ramoswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at 12 years old from our birth mother's husband into a political talking point. After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy's rapist until he died.

This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramoswamy is at his core. A pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants. What Today is a production of Cricket Media. Our show is produced by Emily 4, Erica Morrison, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Haley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg,

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We're in the final stretch of the midterms, and the political map has only gotten more competitive with new states and districts emerging as potential flips. So we thought it was time to get back out on the road and take a closer look at what's actually happening on the ground. I'm Aaron Haynes, journalist and expert on all things Southern politics. And I'm Jennifer Palmary, former White House Communications Director. Tune in on Mondays to Longplay Series on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.