What is it about the swaggering, sweltering heat of summer that stirs up so much bloodlust? By now it’s a platitude that murder and other violent crime rates rise when the weather gets hotter. And while there’s no time of year Alabama’s criminal justice and correctional systems don’t discriminate against Black people, recent years have demonstrated summertime is when Alabama especially seems to torture Black men with its racist capital punishment regime.

I wrote as much in my column “Alabama’s summer 2024 legal lynching” when I posited “it’s not officially summer in Alabama until a Black man’s been lynched—legally or illegally[.]” At the time I observed: “Alabama still has a despicable penchant for using a vestige of slavery—the death penalty—in the 21st century to subjugate and to disproportionately dehumanize its poor Black and brown condemned citizens, most of whom grew up in impoverished and hellacious homes very far from the kind of safe, stable, and suitably nurturing and loving environments many Alabama families take for  granted.”

The name of that 2024 column was taken from an earlier essay I titled “Alabama’s summer 2022 legal lynching” concerning the execution of Joe Nathan James........

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