“The only certainty I had going into the Indiana death chamber in December 2020 was the simple sense that it’s generally wrong to kill people, even bad people.”
Bruenig has watched five people die at the hands of the state, including the first person ever executed by nitrogen hypoxia. She went in opposing capital punishment and came out still opposing it, but with a deeper understanding of how the whole machine relies on layers of human judgment about guilt, fairness, pain, and redemption. Every single layer can fail. The system doesn’t need you to believe it works. It just needs you to not look.