Hey there, it's Shamita.
Just a quick warning before we get started.
This episode includes descriptions of death row executions.
This is In Conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shamita Basu.
Today, where the death penalty goes from here.
In just the past month, two unprecedented death penalty stories have dominated national news.
First, on September 30th, Krista Pike, a woman convicted of a gruesome murder in Tennessee in 1995,
survived two attempts of a lethal injection, sparking investigations into the systems that failed along the way.
Then on October 8th, the Pentagon announced that it would live stream the execution by firing squad of Nadal Hassan.
A former Army officer convicted of killing 13 soldiers
and wounding 32 at the Fort Hood base in 2009. That execution is still scheduled to take place this year,
but last week, President Trump issued a statement saying that it would no longer be live-streamed to the public.
I think the fact that Trump later said we're not going to live-stream this execution distracted,
in a way, from how novel this all still is going to be.
That's Maurice Shema, a staff writer at The Marshall Project.
He's been reporting on the death penalty for over a decade.
In fact, he's been on this show before to talk about it.
I wanted to talk to him again, given everything that's going on, to try to understand
how and why the national conversation around the death penalty seems to have shifted so much in recent weeks.