CUTBANK CONVERSATIONS: Interview with Maurice Chammah and Emily Collins

2/24/21

By Emily Collins

In his new book, Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, Maurice Chammah explores the history of the U.S. death penalty with an in-depth focus on Texas’ capital sentencing procedures. Since 1976, Texas has executed a third of the total 1,532 executions in the U.S. yet public support for capital punishment is near historic lows. Chammah expertly weaves the historical, legal, and cultural influences behind America’s capital punishment system.  

In his work we meet lawyers, activists, family members, and more who are challenging the ways we view crime and punishment in America. Though the book rarely veers into the first-person, Chammah writes of trauma and failed systems with grace and fresh insight. 

Emily Collins: Let the Lord Sort Them charts the history of the U.S. death penalty through the experiences of real people directly affected by this public policy. Public opinion polls show that support for the death penalty is in decline. Yet, last year five states and the federal government carried out seventeen executions. I’ve heard the death penalty called everything from a grotesque aberration to a moral obligation, but I’ve never heard from those directly transformed and affected by it. What inspired you to write about the death penalty from those whose experiences “illustrate the system’s day-to-day reality?”

Maurice Chammah: Before I got into journalism, I worked for a small non-profit called the Texas After Violence Project, which has been building an archive of personal stories of people who had been affected by murder and the death penalty, especially family members on both sides of these cases. I drove throughout Texas and conducted these interviews, and then spent hours and hours transcribing them, and as I did so, I was constantly looking up the cases and legal issues people were talking about. It seemed like a lot of what I read discussed the death penalty in big, abstract terms. It was always a kind of high school debate topic: for or against. But at the same time, I was finding plenty of journalism — especially in Texas Monthly and The Texas Observer, and of course national publications like The New Yorker and The Atlantic — that tried to humanize various areas of public policy by telling very specific, concrete stories. So, as I learned how to be a journalist, I was continually drawn to writing about death penalty cases, and because of that oral history research, I knew that every case had all these different participants who weren't always approached by reporters. Eventually, I'd done enough reporting that I felt I could tell this bigger story but also pick the individual people who I thought could convey the larger themes to readers. And I felt it would be valuable for people to break out of the simple "for vs. against" framing.

EC:  In capturing the rise and fall of the death penalty, you focus on Texas and its ingrained frontier mentality. You mention this mentality was defined by historian T. R. Fehrenbach. Of Texas, Fehrenbach writes,“Its almost theatrical codes and courtesies, its incipient feudalism, its touch independence and determined self-reliance, its—exaggerated as it seemed to more crowded cultures—individual self-importance and its tribal territoriality.” Since 1982, Texas has executed over five hundred people while other states continue to advocate for humane forms of retribution. Do you think Texas will ever hop on the conveyer belt away from the death penalty for good?

MC: I think I find those cultural descriptions of Texans so fascinating because I grew up here and they just don't ring with my own lived experience. I've spent the majority of my life in Austin, which like many college towns gets portrayed as not being really representative of the greater state, but the whole state really is far more diverse than the 'Fehrenbachian' description, from the Mexican culture closer to the border and in San Antonio, to the Chinese and Jewish and other communities in Houston. It's just not a monolithic place, and yet there is a certain nostalgia for the idea that it is, that Texans all fit a certain type, a type which favors the death penalty. Throughout my life, Texas has become even more urban, and our cities are now largely run by Democrats. I can certainly imagine a future in which Texas abandons executions, but I don't think it will be soon. I think it's more likely there will be fewer and fewer cases every year, and the occasional execution will feel like a relic. 

EC: Let the Lord Sort Them is rich in devastating and surprising details. You’ve written extensively about the criminal justice system for The Marshall Project and various publications. I hear your book was ten years in the making. Did you always know you were working on a longer work or did it happen organically?

MC: I have memories of thinking 'all this death penalty research could be a book someday' back in 2010, but my conception of it was very different. In college I'd read a lot of anthropology books that had 5 or 6 very long chapters, each of which was like an academic journal article. At The Marshall Project, there is an incredibly rigorous emphasis on reporting, on doing extensive research even for short articles, because it's through all that digging that you end up finding the specific stories and little, surprising details that make depressing and complex policy subjects feel accessible to readers. I started there in 2014, and that culture absolutely shaped my approach to the book, so by the time I formally pitched it to publishers in 2016, I had organically come to some really different ideas about what form it could take. I was also reading more and more non-academic nonfiction, like Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Sons and Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower. A major development around that time was realizing not only that the book should focus on individual peoples' experiences, but also that a few key people could carry readers through the entire book. There are two lawyers whose careers I think of as 'trees,' with lots of legal cases and other people's lives as connecting branches. 

EC: Early in the book we meet Danalynn Recer, a Texas investigator turned lawyer who spent her college years exposing state myths venerated in part by white psychology. She goes on to fight the death penalty in Texas for many years. In her college thesis, she writes of "white Texans’ long-held perception of criminality as an immutable characteristic of black men.” Fortunately, these long-held perceptions are being challenged by larger movements. Do you think there’s a connection between Black Lives Matter and the decline of the death penalty? If so, what else can be done to diminish the alarming aspects of our justice system?

MC: The death penalty declined for lots and lots of reasons, including its high cost, fears of innocent people being executed, expanding notions of forgiveness and mercy, and a declining crime rate. But I also think another reason has been a growing awareness, at least in some circles, that it has fallen harder on people of color, and that it has deep ties to the history of Jim Crow and the illegal lynchings that marked that era. Bryan Stevenson has done a lot to make this connection to a wide audience, through a museum and memorial in Alabama, as well as the book and film Just Mercy. His work coincided with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which is generally more focused on policing, but also makes the case that racism permeates the criminal justice system. In 2020, Democrats running for president all came out against the death penalty, and many of them connected it to racism in the justice system as a whole. This is a seismic shift from a generation ago, and I think that's due in part to the way Black Lives Matter put this whole suite of criminal justice issues at the front of the national conversation. I think the key question going forward is whether some of the lessons of the death penalty's decline — including the emphasis on the idea that people who commit crimes can be seen with a sense of mercy rather than a sense of retribution — are brought to the larger justice system. 

EC: In an interview with NPR’s Scott Simon, you admit to wondering whether or not you could’ve told a richer story had you witnessed an execution yourself. Journalist Elizabeth Bruenig also uses her perspective as a Texan to weigh in on the moral and political issues of the death penalty. She recently wrote about her experience witnessing Alfred Bourgeois’ execution. In The New York Times she writes, “The idea of execution promises catharsis. The reality of it delivers the opposite, a nauseating sense of shame and regret.” You mention that the stories told in Let The Lord Sort Them are telling us something larger about ourselves. Can you speak to how their stories have impacted you as a journalist?

MC: I have never witnessed an execution, but I was traumatized in small ways by spending so much time learning about the trauma of others. There were a few times working on this book I found myself overwhelmed and anxious, and when I drilled down into my emotions I realized I was experiencing a kind of vicarious trauma from talking to so many people for hours about violence and pain and grief. I have been really on the fence about how much to talk about that, because I don't want to make myself the focus. The book has virtually no first-person in it, although in other contexts I'm all for including yourself in nonfiction writing. But I think being aware of my own emotions has made me a better interviewer. I want to further study how to interview people who have been impacted by trauma; I still don't feel like I'm good at it, but I think I'm more aware now how important it is to be sensitive and careful. I also think the stories in this book have made me look at the world in a more nuanced way. The defense lawyers I interviewed don't see anyone as evil, and are always looking for the ways trauma produces tragedies. In a much more limited way, I find myself hearing about people being mean, thoughtless, arrogant, etc., just in small, daily interactions, and increasingly my instinct is to wonder about their trauma.