有目击者称，本周在田纳西州的死刑执行现场发生的一切“不合常理”。确实如此。
The Lede A witness said that what happened in Tennessee’s death chamber this week was “not normal.”Of course it wasn’t.
目前，田纳西州的医生们正竭力挽救一名刚刚被该州试图处决的女子的生命。‘卡夫卡式’这个词如今已被滥用到近乎陈词滥调的地步，但面对9月30日发生的一连串事件，我们还能用什么词来形容呢？
Doctors in Tennessee are attempting to save the life of a woman whom the state just tried to kill. “Kafkaesque” is a term so overused that it has become a banality, but how else can one characterize the chain of events that occurred on September 30th?
据说史密斯在死刑执行室内剧烈挣扎。在他去世几周后，也就是2024年初，我前往蒙哥马利，跟随民权律师兼死刑废除主义者布莱恩·史蒂文森行动。作为海伦·普雷让修女的继任者，史蒂文森在电影《善良的法官》中备受颂扬，如今已被视为国家英雄。他的工作意义重大且困难重重——好莱坞的过度渲染反倒使其意义有所扭曲。
Smith is said to have thrashed and thrashed in the death chamber. A few weeks after his death, in early 2024, I found myself in Montgomery, trailing the civil-rights attorney and death-penalty abolitionist Bryan Stevenson. Stevenson, a kind of successor to Sister Helen Prejean was lionized in the film “Just Mercy,” and is now recognized as a national hero. The importance of his work, the difficulty of it—the Hollywood reverence almost distorts it.
通过他创立的“平等正义倡议”组织，他成功阻止了100多名死刑犯被处决，对遏制国家滥用死刑起到了重要作用。他还为蒙哥马利带来了巨大变化：修建了一座将奴隶制经济与现代监禁制度联系起来的博物馆、一座 lynching受害者纪念园、一座雕塑公园以及一座民权纪念地。
Through his organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, he has acted as a check on the killing state, saving more than a hundred people on death row from execution. He has also transformed Montgomery, erecting a museum linking the slavery economy to our carceral society, a memorial to lynching victims, a sculpture park, and a civil-rights memorial.
那时，我常在傍晚离开他的办公室，随后去酒吧小坐，在与当地人的交谈中刻意表现出一个来自北方的好奇者形象。我记得曾问一位酒保对史蒂文森及其工作有何看法。他微笑着回答，认为史蒂文森值得敬佩。虽然司法体系并不完美，偶尔也会有无辜之人被处死，但他坚信死刑正是上帝意志的体现。
When I was I’d leave his office in the early evenings and then prop myself up at bars, playing up the curious-Northerner thing in my conversations with locals. I remember asking a barkeep what he thought of Stevenson and his work. He smiled. He thought Stevenson was to be admired. The justice system was not perfect; sometimes innocent men were put to death. But he thought that the death penalty itself materialized God’s will.