Let the Lord Sort Them by Maurice Chammah

The story moves kaleidoscopically among prosecutors, prison wardens, executioners, politicians, judges, jurors, defense lawyers, anti-death-penalty advocates, victims and their families, and a panoply of defendants-facing capital charges, living on death row, executed, and exonerated-as well as their families. Chammah lets his (many!) interviewees do the talking, and readers are left to draw their own conclusions.Ĭhammah’s portrait of the Texas death penalty’s roller-coaster ride is a crowded tableau, filled with a broad and diverse cast of characters. The result is an excellent book that brings a truly extraordinary and unexpected story to life with nuance and color, while refraining from offering opinions or proposing policy changes. Rather, Chammah brings a journalist’s distinctive cool eye for dispassionate observation and dramatic flair for narrative to the task, with the many benefits as well as the occasional frustrations that such an approach entails. Chammah does not do a deep dive into the constitutional law regulating capital punishment as we did in Courting Death nor does he conduct empirical studies to attempt to identify the factors that that contributed to the dramatic decline in the death penalty as Garrett did in End of Its Rope. Supreme Court’s revival of capital punishment in 1976, after its temporary invalidation of the practice four years previously, and the equally extraordinary decline in the use of the death penalty starting around 2000 and continuing through the present.Ĭhammah’s take differs from scholarly approaches to contemporary death penalty issues, such as my own (along with my brother and co-author, Jordan Steiker) in our 2016 book, Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment, or Brandon Garrett’s approach in his 2017 book, End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, which I reviewed in these pages. As his title suggests, Chammah explores the extraordinary rise of the death penalty in Texas in the decades following the U.S. Let the Lord Sort Them, Chammah’s first book, is a journalist’s take on the recent history of the death penalty in the state of Texas-ground zero for the American death penalty, responsible for more than a third of the roughly 1,500 executions conducted in the United States over the past 50 years. Maurice Chammah is a Texas-based journalist and staff writer for The Marshall Project, a Pulitzer-prize-winning news organization that focuses on criminal law and policy, with a progressive, reform-minded approach.

Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty

Let the Lord Sort Them by Maurice Chammah