October 28, 2025 • 27 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, Florence, Alabama, nineteen eighty eight. 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'm teeing
(00:35):
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 US.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
The bad news.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
That's how a Wlizabeth said, graded for justice to.
Speaker 4 (01:03):
Occur is still damaging all others. It's still hurts us
to think about.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
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.
Speaker 5 (01:22):
I don't know which one of them, kid, I really don't,
but I think both of them got what they probably deserved.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
He would say to himself, turned to the right, to
the victim's family and apologize.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Turn to the left, tell my family, I love him.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
He was taken out of the cell thinking that his
execution was imminent.
Speaker 6 (01:43):
Because a cold blooded convicted killer complains about the prodding
and poking of a small ivy line. Really, we recently
explored capital punishment in the UK with our episode of
(02:06):
Cautionary Tales Derek Bentley die.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
So I was keen to find out more about revisionist
history the Alabama murders, and I am delighted to say
that Malcolm god Will joins me now. Malcolm, welcome back
to Cause Me Tales.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
Thank you, Tim, delighted to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
So what drew you to this story, Malcolm?
Speaker 7 (02:25):
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
(02:45):
people with 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 thirty five
death row cases that was 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,
(03:08):
that's that's why we're doing this.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
You know.
Speaker 7 (03:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
In your conversation with her really 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,
(03:50):
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.
Speaker 7 (03:59):
Charles Senate is a Church of Christ minister. You know,
there are many flavors of American fundamentalist religiosity. This is
the kind of setic, intellectual, unflinching version. They don't believe
in any kind of instrumentation. They are people of the book.
(04:19):
They take everyone in that world take 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 incomplete control of his church.
(04:41):
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 I'm Oklahoma, so by southern. So
our lead character is a Church of Christ minister who
(05:01):
is doing something that in their world is absolutely unforgivable,
which is he's having an affair. If you get a divorce,
you have to leave the church. Like this is.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
These guys are serious.
Speaker 7 (05:14):
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 On, Alabama, we have
a preacher who has done the unthinkable. He has had
an affair with a compregant. And that's where we begin.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah, and you introduce us 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.
(05:54):
Tell us about the murder and how that came about.
Speaker 7 (05:57):
Well, first of all, let me say that there is
no concept in his entire series more Tim Harford friendly
than the failure cascade.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah, I felt seen when I heard you describe this.
Speaker 7 (06:10):
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,
(06:30):
but begins with this affair that Charles Sennatt is having
with one of his congregants. And then the next stage
is that Charles Senen'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
(06:54):
the spring of nineteen eighty eight, and it is the
first serious step in the cascade.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And who do the police initially suspect.
Speaker 7 (07:02):
Well, they find they get a tip that 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.
Somebody turns them in. But then suspicion very quickly falls
on Charles Senner himself because there's too many inconsistencies in
(07:25):
his story. Mike, colleague Ben and I spent an evening
talking to a former law enforcement person who had been
investigating the case back in nineteen eighty eight named Ricky Miller,
and he very memorably told us about how quickly law
enforcement developed suspicions about Charles Sennett.
Speaker 5 (07:42):
The first thing that called our at tension, the best
I can remember, was he made too many alibis, but
it was overkilled. You know, he stopped to see people
they had never seen, and that just threw up a
red flag to us.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
Why is he.
Speaker 5 (07:58):
Seeing all these people for the first time? That happen
to me at the time his wife's being murder. You know,
they could tell you every time everything, every day, What
had my wife just been murdered in my home? I
couldn't tell you, my mind's gone, but he knew everything
in detail.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
That's a red flag.
Speaker 7 (08:21):
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. She 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
(08:42):
a connection, a previous connection to Charles Sennett. And there's
a moment when the police officer says to him, do
you know and mentions the name of one of the
sky Kenney Smith, and he turns bright red, and it
turns out.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
That he he, in the end, hired these kids.
Speaker 7 (08:59):
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. In what's interesting about the case is
there's a version of this case that it ends with
the apprehension of Charles Sennett and of these two kids,
and that's it. People go to jail and we walk away.
(09:22):
But that's not what happens. It just gets it just
keeps going and going and going, and ultimately, you know,
the the last and most sort of grotesque act in
this case does not take place until last year, So
some thirty five years after the murder thing goes on,
(09:43):
we're talking about something it goes on forever.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
We've recently heard about the case of Derek Bentley on
Cautionary Tales. One of the men in the frame for
Elizabeth Sennett'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
(10:08):
any harm. Derek had learning difficulties. He was very easily led,
and I think there's a hint of that with John Parker.
Speaker 7 (10:18):
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
(10:40):
come from the most the bleakest childhoods. Parker had suffered
as 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
(11:00):
is the rule, as opposed to the exception when it
comes to homicide, that we're dealing with people who are
not whole the way they see and deal with the world.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
So eventually, these two young men, John Parker and Kenny
Smith are tried for murder. So what happens when their
case reaches court.
Speaker 7 (11:22):
In the keske that we're describing in this story, where
there is 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
(11:43):
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 hear to recommend the death penalty,
and in both cases the judge said it and says,
I don't care. These guys should be executed for their crimes.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
So I was curious about the motivation of the judge
because in the case of Derek Bentley, the judge in
that case was 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 on in the Alabama cases, but the judges
(12:24):
enjoying the idea of dishing out life and death.
Speaker 7 (12:27):
In the state of Alabama, they have partisan elections for judges,
So a judge is essentially is a political figure in
the same way that a congress person 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
(12:49):
seen as tough on crime as you possibly can be.
And there's no sure way to say that you are
unflinching in your opposition to crime in the state of Alabama.
Then to say the jury's wrong, We've got a crack
down on this murderer.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
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?
(13:25):
Not so easy?
Speaker 7 (13:26):
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 if your job gets even tougher, and
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,
(13:46):
no real doctor.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
That's the difficult bit, right, 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 said, 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
that is not cruel and unusual? What is the appropriate
(14:09):
way in which the state can kill somebody? And yeah,
as you say, there's no doctors, they've sworn the hippocratic oath. Yeah,
they can't do it.
Speaker 7 (14:17):
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.
(14:39):
Like the struggle to come up with a good way
for the state to kill someone has been going on
for hundreds of years.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
I'm not a historian of the death penalty, but I
feel that hanging was was also regarded as relatively clean.
And then the electric chair presumably that was that was
that kind of a modern technological method. They didn't introduce
the electric chair because they thought it would hurt more
that that was not the aim, and it may have
been what happened, but it wasn't the goal.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (15:06):
When I was doing this my report, 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
(15:30):
diet pretty quickly and consistently under the firing squad.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Where did the idea of lethal injection itself come from.
Speaker 7 (15:37):
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 increasingly aware that were concerned
that the electric chair was a kind of grizzly and
inappropriate way to execute someone. Reagan famously says, why don't
we just put murderers down the same way we put
(15:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
I think sounds intuitive, But you describe it, it's not
quite as painless as you might think. No.
Speaker 7 (16:17):
I talked at length to this really extraordinary man named
Joel Zivett, who's a Canadian intensive care specialist who has
developed a kind of subspecialty 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,
(16:42):
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 these three drugs you're being injected with, what point
do you die? And he pointed out that our prevailing
assumption about it was entirely wrong. And what's interesting about
(17:03):
his discovery, apart from how kind of grotesque it is,
was that we've been used into lethal injection in the
United States as a method of killing people for whatever
thirty forty 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
(17:26):
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 if describing what he found out
about what really happens when you're try and kill someone
through lethal injection.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
It travels rapidly to the heart, where the heart comps,
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.
Speaker 4 (18:07):
Just pours into the lungs.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
And I'm sorry as I'm saying this, it's awful, and
this is what 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
(18:30):
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
(18:53):
you die.
Speaker 7 (18:55):
I mean, one of the Zibet's points is that because
you're restrained and you've been given a paralytic you are
in agony as you are 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
(19:15):
the worst. It's just sort of an unimaginable kind of
horror story.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
And to loop back to what originally drew you into
this story, you were talking to Kate Portfield 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
(19:41):
of these methods of execution are themselves a form of torture.
But we've just not really thought about it that way.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (19:49):
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 are have proven to be very good
(20:10):
at when it comes to the use of the death penalty.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Yeah, I wanted to ask about that now. Who In
the UK, we haven't had the death penalty for sixty 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 nineteen eighty eight. So that's the
UK story. But do you think we're ever going to
(20:33):
see an end of the death penalty in the US
or anytime soon.
Speaker 7 (20:37):
Well, you know, it's very hard to be optimistic about
moral progress, you know states right now. But the death
penalty is slowly going away. But there's two things that
are hindering out. One 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,
(21:01):
who either innocent or moderately guilty, as you describe Derek Bentley,
or are impaired in some way and not fully responsible
for their actions.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Yeah, there was the sense with Bentley that he had
done something wrong, but he didn't deserve death. He hadn't
he hadn't committed this grotesque crime of murdering a police officer.
Speaker 7 (21:19):
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 if all you make
is argument one. Then you leave the proponent of the
(21:41):
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 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
(22:03):
society whether we want to stoop to their level or not.
And that is that's second part that America struggles with, right, yeah,
argument what is not sufficient to end the death bentley
in the United States?
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Is that why you called the series the Alabama Murders
because yes, legally speaking, there was only one murder, Elizabeth Sennett.
Speaker 7 (22:27):
Yeah, we felt that the subsequent executions of the two
men found guilty in Elizabeth Senna's murder qualify as murders.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
There are state murders, but they're murders.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
And though the States should not be lowering itself to
the level of the common murderer, we should be better
than that.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (22:49):
Yeah, But like I say, it's hard to make arguments
about what we're better than.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Yeah, right now, in the United States.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
We ended our episode Derek Bentley Must Die with a
quote from England's chief hangman Pierpoint.
Speaker 4 (23:06):
I have his book.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
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, achieved
nothing except revenge.
Speaker 6 (23:30):
Do you agree?
Speaker 4 (23:31):
I do agree.
Speaker 7 (23:32):
It's funny he's such a compromised authority does a 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
(23:53):
to reflect on what it's said about his society, about
what it felt like to be responsible for so many deaths.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
As making the series made you think differently about the
death penalty, margam.
Speaker 7 (24:07):
Well, I was never a fan. It has lowered my
estimation of state authority. We keep in Revision's 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
(24:30):
one turn after another as we tell the story, you're
destruck 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 Canadianist to
believe that government is at least moderately competent and well meaning,
that most high minded and brightest of the people I
(24:50):
went to college with went into government, and like you
look at Alabama, you're like most high minded and competent
people did not go into government.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
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 actal punishment, and the point he
made was or there are people out there who are
trying to prevent us doing these executions, and they sympathize
(25:21):
with the criminals. Some of them are international. 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,
(25:41):
many of them abroad, who love criminals and they're trying
to take away your death penalty. Gosh as a really
striking stance for him to take.
Speaker 7 (25:52):
Their willingness to jump to that kind of language and
attitude is Beth taking as opposed to examining what they're doing.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
Alabama's a weird place. I will say, I love the state.
I love going there.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
No, you made that quite clear. Actually you thought it
was straighten. You thought that the government was behaving in
a shameful way. But there was a real affection for
the place and the people.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
I loved listening to the whole season of The Alabama
Murders malcom I. 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 it, 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
(26:39):
way I saw the death penalty, and I thank you.
It's an amazing piece of journalism. So just tell people
where can they find it.
Speaker 7 (26:48):
It's in the Revisionist History feed. It's out now wherever
you get your podcasts. 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.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Over the course of the next two weeks.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
I have been talking to Malcolm Gladwell, Malcolm, thank you
very much, thank you.
Speaker 4 (27:08):
Tim D
Pushkin, Florence, Alabama, nineteen eighty eight. 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'm teeing
(00:35):
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 US.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
The bad news.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
That's how a Wlizabeth said, graded for justice to.
Speaker 4 (01:03):
Occur is still damaging all others. It's still hurts us
to think about.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
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.
Speaker 5 (01:22):
I don't know which one of them, kid, I really don't,
but I think both of them got what they probably deserved.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
He would say to himself, turned to the right, to
the victim's family and apologize.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
Turn to the left, tell my family, I love him.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
He was taken out of the cell thinking that his
execution was imminent.
Speaker 6 (01:43):
Because a cold blooded convicted killer complains about the prodding
and poking of a small ivy line. Really, we recently
explored capital punishment in the UK with our episode of
(02:06):
Cautionary Tales Derek Bentley die.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
So I was keen to find out more about revisionist
history the Alabama murders, and I am delighted to say
that Malcolm god Will joins me now. Malcolm, welcome back
to Cause Me Tales.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
Thank you, Tim, delighted to be here.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
So what drew you to this story, Malcolm?
Speaker 7 (02:25):
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
(02:45):
people with 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 thirty five
death row cases that was 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,
(03:08):
that's that's why we're doing this.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
You know.
Speaker 7 (03:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
In your conversation with her really 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,
(03:50):
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.
Speaker 7 (03:59):
Charles Senate is a Church of Christ minister. You know,
there are many flavors of American fundamentalist religiosity. This is
the kind of setic, intellectual, unflinching version. They don't believe
in any kind of instrumentation. They are people of the book.
(04:19):
They take everyone in that world take 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 incomplete control of his church.
(04:41):
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 I'm Oklahoma, so by southern. So
our lead character is a Church of Christ minister who
(05:01):
is doing something that in their world is absolutely unforgivable,
which is he's having an affair. If you get a divorce,
you have to leave the church. Like this is.
Speaker 4 (05:13):
These guys are serious.
Speaker 7 (05:14):
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 On, Alabama, we have
a preacher who has done the unthinkable. He has had
an affair with a compregant. And that's where we begin.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah, and you introduce us 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.
(05:54):
Tell us about the murder and how that came about.
Speaker 7 (05:57):
Well, first of all, let me say that there is
no concept in his entire series more Tim Harford friendly
than the failure cascade.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
Yeah, I felt seen when I heard you describe this.
Speaker 7 (06:10):
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,
(06:30):
but begins with this affair that Charles Sennatt is having
with one of his congregants. And then the next stage
is that Charles Senen'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
(06:54):
the spring of nineteen eighty eight, and it is the
first serious step in the cascade.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And who do the police initially suspect.
Speaker 7 (07:02):
Well, they find they get a tip that 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.
Somebody turns them in. But then suspicion very quickly falls
on Charles Senner himself because there's too many inconsistencies in
(07:25):
his story. Mike, colleague Ben and I spent an evening
talking to a former law enforcement person who had been
investigating the case back in nineteen eighty eight named Ricky Miller,
and he very memorably told us about how quickly law
enforcement developed suspicions about Charles Sennett.
Speaker 5 (07:42):
The first thing that called our at tension, the best
I can remember, was he made too many alibis, but
it was overkilled. You know, he stopped to see people
they had never seen, and that just threw up a
red flag to us.
Speaker 4 (07:57):
Why is he.
Speaker 5 (07:58):
Seeing all these people for the first time? That happen
to me at the time his wife's being murder. You know,
they could tell you every time everything, every day, What
had my wife just been murdered in my home? I
couldn't tell you, my mind's gone, but he knew everything
in detail.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
That's a red flag.
Speaker 7 (08:21):
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. She 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
(08:42):
a connection, a previous connection to Charles Sennett. And there's
a moment when the police officer says to him, do
you know and mentions the name of one of the
sky Kenney Smith, and he turns bright red, and it
turns out.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
That he he, in the end, hired these kids.
Speaker 7 (08:59):
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. In what's interesting about the case is
there's a version of this case that it ends with
the apprehension of Charles Sennett and of these two kids,
and that's it. People go to jail and we walk away.
(09:22):
But that's not what happens. It just gets it just
keeps going and going and going, and ultimately, you know,
the the last and most sort of grotesque act in
this case does not take place until last year, So
some thirty five years after the murder thing goes on,
(09:43):
we're talking about something it goes on forever.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
We've recently heard about the case of Derek Bentley on
Cautionary Tales. One of the men in the frame for
Elizabeth Sennett'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
(10:08):
any harm. Derek had learning difficulties. He was very easily led,
and I think there's a hint of that with John Parker.
Speaker 7 (10:18):
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
(10:40):
come from the most the bleakest childhoods. Parker had suffered
as 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
(11:00):
is the rule, as opposed to the exception when it
comes to homicide, that we're dealing with people who are
not whole the way they see and deal with the world.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
So eventually, these two young men, John Parker and Kenny
Smith are tried for murder. So what happens when their
case reaches court.
Speaker 7 (11:22):
In the keske that we're describing in this story, where
there is 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
(11:43):
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 hear to recommend the death penalty,
and in both cases the judge said it and says,
I don't care. These guys should be executed for their crimes.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
So I was curious about the motivation of the judge
because in the case of Derek Bentley, the judge in
that case was 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 on in the Alabama cases, but the judges
(12:24):
enjoying the idea of dishing out life and death.
Speaker 7 (12:27):
In the state of Alabama, they have partisan elections for judges,
So a judge is essentially is a political figure in
the same way that a congress person 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
(12:49):
seen as tough on crime as you possibly can be.
And there's no sure way to say that you are
unflinching in your opposition to crime in the state of Alabama.
Then to say the jury's wrong, We've got a crack
down on this murderer.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
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?
(13:25):
Not so easy?
Speaker 7 (13:26):
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 if your job gets even tougher, and
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,
(13:46):
no real doctor.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
That's the difficult bit, right, 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 said, 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
that is not cruel and unusual? What is the appropriate
(14:09):
way in which the state can kill somebody? And yeah,
as you say, there's no doctors, they've sworn the hippocratic oath. Yeah,
they can't do it.
Speaker 7 (14:17):
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.
(14:39):
Like the struggle to come up with a good way
for the state to kill someone has been going on
for hundreds of years.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
I'm not a historian of the death penalty, but I
feel that hanging was was also regarded as relatively clean.
And then the electric chair presumably that was that was
that kind of a modern technological method. They didn't introduce
the electric chair because they thought it would hurt more
that that was not the aim, and it may have
been what happened, but it wasn't the goal.
Speaker 4 (15:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (15:06):
When I was doing this my report, 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
(15:30):
diet pretty quickly and consistently under the firing squad.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
Where did the idea of lethal injection itself come from.
Speaker 7 (15:37):
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 increasingly aware that were concerned
that the electric chair was a kind of grizzly and
inappropriate way to execute someone. Reagan famously says, why don't
we just put murderers down the same way we put
(15:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
I think sounds intuitive, But you describe it, it's not
quite as painless as you might think. No.
Speaker 7 (16:17):
I talked at length to this really extraordinary man named
Joel Zivett, who's a Canadian intensive care specialist who has
developed a kind of subspecialty 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,
(16:42):
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 these three drugs you're being injected with, what point
do you die? And he pointed out that our prevailing
assumption about it was entirely wrong. And what's interesting about
(17:03):
his discovery, apart from how kind of grotesque it is,
was that we've been used into lethal injection in the
United States as a method of killing people for whatever
thirty forty 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
(17:26):
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 if describing what he found out
about what really happens when you're try and kill someone
through lethal injection.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
It travels rapidly to the heart, where the heart comps,
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.
Speaker 4 (18:07):
Just pours into the lungs.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
And I'm sorry as I'm saying this, it's awful, and
this is what 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
(18:30):
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
(18:53):
you die.
Speaker 7 (18:55):
I mean, one of the Zibet's points is that because
you're restrained and you've been given a paralytic you are
in agony as you are 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
(19:15):
the worst. It's just sort of an unimaginable kind of
horror story.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
And to loop back to what originally drew you into
this story, you were talking to Kate Portfield 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
(19:41):
of these methods of execution are themselves a form of torture.
But we've just not really thought about it that way.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (19:49):
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 are have proven to be very good
(20:10):
at when it comes to the use of the death penalty.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Yeah, I wanted to ask about that now. Who In
the UK, we haven't had the death penalty for sixty 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 nineteen eighty eight. So that's the
UK story. But do you think we're ever going to
(20:33):
see an end of the death penalty in the US
or anytime soon.
Speaker 7 (20:37):
Well, you know, it's very hard to be optimistic about
moral progress, you know states right now. But the death
penalty is slowly going away. But there's two things that
are hindering out. One 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,
(21:01):
who either innocent or moderately guilty, as you describe Derek Bentley,
or are impaired in some way and not fully responsible
for their actions.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Yeah, there was the sense with Bentley that he had
done something wrong, but he didn't deserve death. He hadn't
he hadn't committed this grotesque crime of murdering a police officer.
Speaker 7 (21:19):
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 if all you make
is argument one. Then you leave the proponent of the
(21:41):
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 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
(22:03):
society whether we want to stoop to their level or not.
And that is that's second part that America struggles with, right, yeah,
argument what is not sufficient to end the death bentley
in the United States?
Speaker 1 (22:19):
Is that why you called the series the Alabama Murders
because yes, legally speaking, there was only one murder, Elizabeth Sennett.
Speaker 7 (22:27):
Yeah, we felt that the subsequent executions of the two
men found guilty in Elizabeth Senna's murder qualify as murders.
Speaker 4 (22:38):
There are state murders, but they're murders.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
And though the States should not be lowering itself to
the level of the common murderer, we should be better
than that.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 7 (22:49):
Yeah, But like I say, it's hard to make arguments
about what we're better than.
Speaker 4 (22:54):
Yeah, right now, in the United States.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
We ended our episode Derek Bentley Must Die with a
quote from England's chief hangman Pierpoint.
Speaker 4 (23:06):
I have his book.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
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, achieved
nothing except revenge.
Speaker 6 (23:30):
Do you agree?
Speaker 4 (23:31):
I do agree.
Speaker 7 (23:32):
It's funny he's such a compromised authority does a 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
(23:53):
to reflect on what it's said about his society, about
what it felt like to be responsible for so many deaths.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
As making the series made you think differently about the
death penalty, margam.
Speaker 7 (24:07):
Well, I was never a fan. It has lowered my
estimation of state authority. We keep in Revision's 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
(24:30):
one turn after another as we tell the story, you're
destruck 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 Canadianist to
believe that government is at least moderately competent and well meaning,
that most high minded and brightest of the people I
(24:50):
went to college with went into government, and like you
look at Alabama, you're like most high minded and competent
people did not go into government.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
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 actal punishment, and the point he
made was or there are people out there who are
trying to prevent us doing these executions, and they sympathize
(25:21):
with the criminals. Some of them are international. 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,
(25:41):
many of them abroad, who love criminals and they're trying
to take away your death penalty. Gosh as a really
striking stance for him to take.
Speaker 7 (25:52):
Their willingness to jump to that kind of language and
attitude is Beth taking as opposed to examining what they're doing.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
Alabama's a weird place. I will say, I love the state.
I love going there.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
No, you made that quite clear. Actually you thought it
was straighten. You thought that the government was behaving in
a shameful way. But there was a real affection for
the place and the people.
Speaker 4 (26:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
I loved listening to the whole season of The Alabama
Murders malcom I. 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 it, 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
(26:39):
way I saw the death penalty, and I thank you.
It's an amazing piece of journalism. So just tell people
where can they find it.
Speaker 7 (26:48):
It's in the Revisionist History feed. It's out now wherever
you get your podcasts. 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.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Over the course of the next two weeks.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
I have been talking to Malcolm Gladwell, Malcolm, thank you
very much, thank you.
Speaker 4 (27:08):
Tim D
Host
Tim Harford
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