BOOKS: ​“Let The Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty”

In his new book, Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty, jour­nal­ist Maurice Chammah presages the death of America’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem. Chammah expert­ly weaves togeth­er sys­temic issues with indi­vid­ual, human­iz­ing case details to illus­trate the efforts of lawyers, orga­ni­za­tions, and activists who are chal­leng­ing the foun­da­tions of the sys­tem with the goal of abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty. The New York Times called it ​“a case study that speaks more broad­ly to our cur­rent moment, about build­ing mon­u­men­tal change brick by brick.”

Chammah, a staff writer for The Marshall Project, grew up sur­round­ed by the pol­i­tics of the death penal­ty in the state of Texas, which is respon­si­ble for over one third of the total 1,532 exe­cu­tions in the U.S. since 1976. He focus­es his report­ing on Texas, exam­in­ing the cul­tur­al and legal forces that have made it the most pro­lif­ic user of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the U.S. In an inter­view with NPR’s Scott Simon, Chammah not­ed that the decline of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is evi­dent even in Texas, say­ing, ​“Texas will like­ly be one of the last states to give up the death penal­ty. It’s so ingrained here. But that said, every year, pros­e­cu­tors seek few­er and few­er death sen­tences against defen­dants. It’s now less than 10 per year. And even­tu­al­ly, there will be, you know, so few peo­ple on death row that exe­cu­tions will be a much, much more rare event.” That theme of grad­ual ero­sion echoes through­out the book, which describes the decline of the death penal­ty as a process of slow­ly chip­ping away the worst aspects of the sys­tem, like exe­cu­tions of juve­niles or peo­ple with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty or seri­ous mental illness. 

Let the Lord Sort Them — which won the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Book Award — begins its his­tor­i­cal analy­sis of the mod­ern death penal­ty with Jurek v. Texas, the land­mark 1976 U.S. Supreme Court deci­sion that upheld the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of Texas’ unique cap­i­tal sentencing procedures. 

Jurek’s lawyers argued both that the death penal­ty inher­ent­ly con­sti­tut­ed ​“cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment” in vio­la­tion of the Eighth Amendment and that the approach Texas took to cap­i­tal sen­tenc­ing was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. The statute attempt­ed to chan­nel the jury’s sen­tenc­ing dis­cre­tion by hav­ing them answer ques­tions about whether a mur­der was pre­med­i­tat­ed or in response to aggres­sion by the vic­tim and whether the defen­dant posed a future dan­ger to soci­ety. The Court allowed the statute to stand, paving the way for Texas’ expan­sive appli­ca­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and unleash­ing decades of lit­i­ga­tion over whether the statute was arbi­trary and freak­ish as applied in indi­vid­ual cas­es or to par­tic­u­lar class­es of defendants.

Discussing the issues through the per­son­al nar­ra­tives of death row pris­on­ers, their fam­i­lies, lawyers, pros­e­cu­tors, and com­mu­ni­ties, Chammah explores eth­i­cal ques­tions that he says are at the heart of the debate on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment: ​“Can a per­son be ​‘evil’? What does ​‘jus­tice’ mean?” 

In the inter­view with Simon, Chammah said, ​“The idea of the book was to explain these big-pic­ture his­tor­i­cal changes that have tak­en place but to do it through the sort of expe­ri­ences of real peo­ple because I want­ed peo­ple to under­stand that although this issue may seem like a kind of abstract polit­i­cal, even a kind of cul­ture-war issue that we fight about, the num­ber of peo­ple whose real lives are sort of trans­formed and affect­ed in very pro­found ways by it is sort of a piece of this pub­lic pol­i­cy that we don’t spend enough time looking at.”

Beyond human­iz­ing the his­to­ry of the mod­ern era of the death penal­ty, Chammah illu­mi­nates the con­nec­tions between deep-root­ed racial injus­tices and the cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem. In an inter­view for Texas Monthly, Chammah told Rose Cahalan, ​“It’s inter­est­ing that it’s a lit­tle side­ways, that it’s not about the race of the defen­dant so much as it’s about the race of the vic­tim… The death penal­ty dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly affects Black peo­ple, but there have been many, many white peo­ple sen­tenced to death… You end up hav­ing this harsh­er, more debil­i­tat­ing jus­tice sys­tem that falls along lines of class for poor­er Americans. And that ends up affect­ing plen­ty of white peo­ple, but dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly Black Americans.” The Death Penalty Information Center’s report, Enduring Injustice: the Persistence of Racial Discrimination in the U.S. Death Penalty, looks beyond Texas in explor­ing the unjust influ­ence of sys­temic racism in decid­ing who is executed. 

With his wife, Chammah co-orga­nizes a writ­ing con­test for those who are incar­cer­at­ed, called The Insider Prize. Chammah believes that ampli­fy­ing the voic­es of peo­ple liv­ing on death row is vital in por­tray­ing the unjust, bro­ken sys­tem of the death penal­ty in the U.S. Chammah writes about the impor­tance of the indi­vid­u­als who have been exe­cut­ed, exon­er­at­ed, and are liv­ing on death row, ​“If you look close­ly you’ll see the sto­ries they are telling us about ourselves.”