This is an opinion column.

Read this paragraph from law professor Bernard E. Harcourt’s essay in the New York Times this week, about nitrogen hypoxia, Alabama’s experimental new chosen method for killing people:

“We do not even reserve this fate for dogs or cats,” he wrote. “Nitrogen gas asphyxiation was previously used to euthanize pets. However, the American Veterinary Medical Association no longer recommends nitrogen asphyxiation for nonavian animals, citing data that indicates those animals may experience panic, pain and severe physical distress before dying. The group states in its 2020 guidelines that nitrogen gas “is unacceptable” for animals other than chickens and turkeys.”

I did not know that. And I thought I knew a lot about Alabama’s ineptitude and indifference to killing people. I’ve watched a botched execution. I’ve paid attention.

But damn. We literally wouldn’t kill a dog like that. Just turkeys and chickens and certain people, in this state that proclaims itself in love with life and the Constitution.

I don’t usually columnize about other people’s columns. I find it better to have my say and let them have theirs.

But Harcourt, a lawyer and author and professor who specializes in methods of punishment, among other things, laid out a case – under the headline Alabama Has a Horrible New Way of Killing People on Death Row – that people in Alabama who claim to care about life and justice should read.

“What past executions amply demonstrate is that the State of Alabama is not competent at performing the task,” he wrote, in a plain, clear, accurate and sobering statement of truth.

“It is one thing to “botch” an execution, which is commonly understood to mean that an execution caused unnecessary agony or showed gross incompetence by the execution team,” he went on. “Alabama has botched four of the nation’s nine known botched executions since 2018. It is another thing for a state to preside over both a botched and failed execution, in which the condemned person actually survives. Three of the six known failed executions since 1946, according to my research, have taken place in Alabama, and all of those have occurred since 2018.”

It’s macabre. And he’s right. Although Alabama’s bungling did not begin in 2018.

I stood in the observation room at Holman prison in 1989 and watched my state strap a man with an IQ of 69 to an electric chair lovingly nicknamed “Yellow Mama.” His father watched beside me as my state hit him with a massive electrical charge, but the man did not die. So they hit him again, as his father stood shaking beside me.

It took me almost 30 years to decide how I felt after that. Alabama’s nonchalance about its own repeated cruelties helped me understand.

The state is as evil as any murderer, because the kind of record Harcourt describes cannot be an accident. It is a result of practice, and attitude, and process. It is willful disregard for inflicting conscienceless and unconstitutional cruelty on prisoners in its charge.

While Attorney General Steve Marshall and Gov. Kay Ivey dare defend the wrongs, or pretend they are rights.

I talked to Harcourt, who represents a client on Alabama’s death row, after reading his piece. I was particularly struck by the way Alabama treats other mammals better than its people. Harcourt said he was haunted by the casual cruelties.

Guards last month went to inmates on death row to hand out new protocols detailing how they will be killed, asking them to sign for a document without telling their lawyers, he said.

“I don’t know if it’s callous or if it’s intentional terrorism … to go around out of the blue and say ‘Hey, here’s the way we’re gonna kill you now. And here’s the document,’” Harcourt said. “‘You can sit down in your cell all by yourself in isolation on death row with nobody there but you in your 9×8 cell. And why don’t you just read that a little bit?’ That’s just really striking.”

Never mentioning, of course, that we wouldn’t do this to a pet squirrel.

I’m not saying this is cruel and unusual punishment. At this point, it’s not unusual at all.

John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner for AL.com.