Spotting polarities is simple and fun. Good and evil. Black and white. Just, unjust. For journalists, covering evil can feel positively noble when it appears in a subject that is weighty and viscerally provocative.

It was widely reported that evil was afoot as state and federal judges from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama gathered with lawyers recently to talk about perhaps the most divisive and certainly the most somber area of American jurisprudence: death penalty law.