As a long-time death penalty abolitionist, I’ve often compared the death penalty in America to a train with no brakes: Once the machinery starts moving, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to stop.

But the real problem is that the train should never have been built.

Today, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Arkansas are experimenting with nitrogen gas executions, a method officials claim is more humane. But from noose to needle to nitrogen, our constant search for a more acceptable way to kill is a story of failure—not moral progress.

There’s no acceptable way to practice a form of state killing that, for Black Americans especially, has long been intertwined with terror.

History should make us skeptical whenever governments begin searching for new technologies to make killing appear more acceptable.

Take my home state of Arkansas. Within a year of becoming a state in 1836, Arkansas adopted laws establishing a racial hierarchy by which even civilian whites could dispossess or punish a Black person. These codes even designated certain offenses as capital crimes when committed by Black people but lesser crimes when committed by white people.

The message was clear: Some lives were worth less than others.

That message echoed through the decades that followed. Between 1877 and 1950, Arkansas recorded 493 documented lynchings—the highest per capita rate in the nation. In Arkansas and throughout the South, these killings were not hidden crimes. They were public spectacles—acts of terror meant to reinforce social hierarchy.

Eventually, lynching became politically unacceptable. But state killing did not disappear—it simply changed form. The spectacle moved behind prison walls, and the language became more clinical. But the act of killing remained the same.

George Hays, who served two terms as governor of Arkansas, wrote in 1927 that “if the death penalty were to be removed from our statute-books, the tendency to commit deeds of violence would be heightened owing to the Negro problem. The greater number of the race do not maintain the same ideals as the whites.”

Since the Civil War, Arkansas has........

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