In the early hours of 2 September 1983, a man named Jimmy Lee Gray sat strapped to a metal chair in Mississippi’s gas chamber. Within minutes, he would become the first person executed in the state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. What happened in that chamber would shock witnesses, provoke national outrage, and ultimately lead to a historic change in how Mississippi carried out executions. But to understand how Gray arrived at that moment, we need to go back t

The year is 1988 and the Iron Curtain is slowly crumbling. The Soviet Union, a nation long known for its austere ideology and strict social codes, suddenly got a dose of glitz, glamour, and glimmering tiaras. While Mikhail Gorbachev was shaking hands with Ronald Reagan over a well-orchestrated dinner in Washington D.C., back home in Moscow, preparations were underway for something the USSR hadn’t seen in over three decades: a beauty pageant. This wasn’t just any contest. It w

While the grim history of capital punishment is filled with clinical efficiency and tragic inevitability there are also rare and strange...