Matters of Life and Death with Liz Bruenig

AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast · Apr 14, 2026 · 48m

In December 2020, after the journalist Liz Bruenig witnessed an execution for the first time, she threw up on the pavement outside the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. “The idea of execution promises catharsis,” she wrote in The New York Times after the experience. “The reality of it delivers the opposite, a nauseating sense of shame and regret.” That initial experience of witnessing the death of a man named Alfred Bourgeois led Liz to what has now become a yearslong journalistic project of covering capital punishment in America. Most of her writing on the subject has appeared in The…