Kevin Free’s approachable narration of Chammah’s multifaceted historical investigation of the death penalty makes the topic easier to bear while simultaneously delivering a gut punch as one realizes the horror of it all. In 1972, SCOTUS found the nation’s death penalty laws to be unconstitutional, prompting states to rewrite them. Chammah explores the sentence’s racist origins, the waxing and waning of public opinion, and the increasing difficulty of acquiring the drugs used. With excellent timing and a varied cadence, Free is compelling as he smoothly navigates the complex discussion. Chammah delves into the human impacts—on prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, prison guards, chaplains, death row inmates, and even the journalists covering the executions—and Free expresses the myriad complicated emotions with empathy and nuance. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty
Narrated by Kevin R. Free
Maurice ChammahUnabridged — 11 hours, 25 minutes
Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty
Narrated by Kevin R. Free
Maurice ChammahUnabridged — 11 hours, 25 minutes
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Overview
“If you're one of those people who despair that nothing changes, and dream that something can, this is a story of how it does.”-Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times Book Review
WINNER OF THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS AWARD
In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country's death penalty system violated the Constitution. The backlash was swift, especially in Texas, where executions were considered part of the cultural fabric, and a dark history of lynching was masked by gauzy visions of a tough-on-crime frontier. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. Then, amid a larger wave of criminal justice reform, came the death penalty's decline, a trend so durable that even in Texas the punishment appears again close to extinction.
In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. We meet Elsa Alcala, the orphaned daughter of a Mexican American family who found her calling as a prosecutor in the nation's death penalty capital, before becoming a judge on the state's highest court. We meet Danalynn Recer, a lawyer who became obsessively devoted to unearthing the life stories of men who committed terrible crimes, and fought for mercy in courtrooms across the state. We meet death row prisoners-many of them once-famous figures like Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Graham, and Karla Faye Tucker-along with their families and the families of their victims. And we meet the executioners, who struggle openly with what society has asked them to do. In tracing these interconnected lives against the rise of mass incarceration in Texas and the country as a whole, Chammah explores what the persistence of the death penalty tells us about forgiveness and retribution, fairness and justice, history and myth.
Written with intimacy and grace, Let the Lord Sort Them is the definitive portrait of a particularly American institution.
Editorial Reviews
10/05/2020
Journalist Chammah debuts with a nuanced and deeply reported account of evolving attitudes toward the death penalty in America. Focusing on Texas, Chammah describes how pride in the state’s “frontier” brand of justice, coupled with a requirement that juries consider a defendant’s “future dangerousness” in capital cases, have led to more than 500 of the roughly 1,500 executions carried out in the U.S. since the 1970s taking place in Texas. He revisits headline-grabbing executions (Cameron Todd Willingham, Karla Faye Tucker, Gary Graham); reviews Supreme Court decisions prohibiting the death sentence for juveniles and the intellectually disabled; and discusses the history of “racially motivated lynchings.” The book weighs the human toll of the death penalty through profiles of defense lawyers, prosecutors, and judges; wardens, guards, and prison chaplains who oversee executions; death row inmates; and, to a lesser extent, the families of victims. Chammah complements his wide-angled perspective with deep dives into such specifics as the process of obtaining execution drugs, though readers may lose track of the many different cases and political and legislative battles he chronicles. Still, this is a thorough, finely written, and unflinching look at one of the most controversial aspects of the American justice system. (Jan.)
Maurice Chammah’s book comes at an important time. . . . Chammah embeds well-wrought cultural analysis within the ins and outs of historical narrative. . . . Chammah zeroes in on one detail at a time, but his intent to provide both texture and breadth is evident. . . . The accumulation of moments and personalities in the story of the death penalty in America is exactly what makes Chammah’s account so compelling.”—The Christian Century
“A searing history of the rise and fall of capital punishment . . . Let the Lord Sort Them urges readers to reckon with the ugliest aspects of Texas history, and with how the political debate over the death penalty has elided the long-lasting trauma that executions inflict on everyone involved.”—Texas Monthly
“It’s a book pitched straight into the gulf between universal theory and individual experience.”—Josephine Livingstone, The New Republic
“Maurice Chammah has given us an indispensable history of how the debate over capital punishment has taken shape in our courts. And by centering the book deep in the heart of Texas, ‘the epicenter of the death penalty,’ he lays bare the human experience of litigating these heartrending cases through remarkably intimate, fair-minded, and trustworthy reporting on the people arguing over the fate of human life.”—Robert Kolker, New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
“When we arrogate to ourselves the prerogatives of the gods, the inconsistencies and stupidities of our behaviors become more glaring and more disturbing. In this magisterial study, Maurice Chammah is here to tell us about our failures, and how we can do better.”—Errol Morris, director of The Thin Blue Line
“An extraordinarily hopeful glimpse of a future in which we are finally beginning to imagine a very different version of justice—one in which the immediate and generational fallout is not so devastating.”—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
“Superbly reported and beautifully written, Let the Lord Sort Them shines a bright light in the darkest corners of the criminal justice system. It is a masterwork of nonfiction that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading.”—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America
“Texas and the death penalty have a history, as they say. Melding intimate portraits with sweeping scholarship, he reveals the lies we tell ourselves in the name of justice.”—Ken Armstrong, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and co-author of Unbelievable
“A wonderfully written blend of history and reportage, delivered with sensitivity and grace.”—Nate Blakeslee, New York Times bestselling author of American Wolf and Tulia
12/01/2020
Chammah, staff writer for The Marshall Project, uses Texas (which led the nation in the number of executions in the last decades of the 20th century) as the focus of his history of the death penalty in the United States. He weaves personal stories in with deft legal and political analysis of criminal trials and state court and Supreme Court rulings. In addition to riveting profiles of death-row inmates, the book focuses on the lives of lawyers, such as Anthony Amsterdam, Craig Washington, and Steven Reis, who devote their careers to fighting against the death penalty. Two fascinating women are also highlighted in this narrative: Danalynn Recer, who began her career with the Texas Resource Center, and Elsa Alcala, a prosecutor who became a judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. Their changing views on capital punishment mirror the changes that were happening throughout the country. Chammah also examines how several high-profile Texas executions, especially that of Karla Faye Tucker in 1998, factored into George W. Bush's campaign for the presidency in 2000. In the epilogue, he discusses recent shifts on the U. S. Supreme Court regarding the death penalty. VERDICT A readable, well-documented legal history that will appeal to a broad audience.—Thomas Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA
Kevin Free’s approachable narration of Chammah’s multifaceted historical investigation of the death penalty makes the topic easier to bear while simultaneously delivering a gut punch as one realizes the horror of it all. In 1972, SCOTUS found the nation’s death penalty laws to be unconstitutional, prompting states to rewrite them. Chammah explores the sentence’s racist origins, the waxing and waning of public opinion, and the increasing difficulty of acquiring the drugs used. With excellent timing and a varied cadence, Free is compelling as he smoothly navigates the complex discussion. Chammah delves into the human impacts—on prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, prison guards, chaplains, death row inmates, and even the journalists covering the executions—and Free expresses the myriad complicated emotions with empathy and nuance. A.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
2020-10-27
The evolution of capital punishment in America.
Austin-based journalist Chammah, a staff writer for the Marshall Project, effectively splits his report between a history of the death penalty and its incremental downfall in recent decades. He focuses predominantly on Texas, an ultraconservative state at the epicenter of the debate, and examines how public opinion has shifted to embrace other punishments, such as life without parole. The author first charts the historical rise of executions from the early 1970s, corresponding with a dramatic rise in violent crime. In Texas, the political conversation has been focused on the types of crime that warrant it as well as consideration of a defendant’s “future dangerousness.” The state’s long history of “frontier justice” has meant that “of the roughly fifteen hundred executions that Americans have carried out since the 1970s, Texas has been responsible for more than five hundred.” Chammah profiles several key figures, including Elsa Alcala, a former assistant district attorney and judge on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals; and Danalynn Recer, a lawyer and prominent death penalty opponent. In dramatic fashion, the author also interweaves details about high-profile capital crime cases. Among others, he thoroughly examines the executions of Karla Faye Tucker (1998) and Shaka Sankofa (2000), looking at the cases from multiple angles. Throughout, the author keenly probes critical perspectives on whether compassion is warranted for death row convicts or if the act of fitting the punishment with the crime is sufficient. “Both sides,” he writes, “need to downplay and amplify free will, only at different moments in their narratives.” With great conviction, Chammah presents an expansive portrait of the death penalty through the perspectives of opponents, defenders, families of the executed, and the sentenced themselves, illuminating a passionately debated issue with cleareyed impartiality. The author’s inclusion of so many legal cases detracts from the narrative but doesn't weaken its premise or impact.
A hard-hitting, meaningful, and debate-inspiring exposé on one of the darkest elements of the criminal justice system.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940177802084 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 01/26/2021 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Sales rank: | 1,005,213 |
Read an Excerpt
1
On a Thursday morning in June 1972, a decade before the execution of Charlie Brooks, hundreds of death row prisoners across the country laughed and whooped and rattled their cell doors. They had spent months and even years waiting for the day they’d be led to an electric chair or gas chamber or firing squad or noose, but now the shocking news was making its way down the runs: The Supreme Court had ruled that every death penalty law in the country was unconstitutional; all of their death sentences had been thrown out. In Florida, a prisoner wrapped a guard in a bear hug. In Tennessee, one placed his hands on his hips and scowled as a news photographer snapped his picture next to the electric chair, as though he had conquered this dusty pile of wood and leather.
In Texas, a wave of applause rang through the Ellis Unit in Huntsville, and when Elmer Branch received the evening issue of the Houston Chronicle, he stretched his arms out of his cell to show it to his neighbors. The next morning, Branch himself would be above the fold in newspapers across the country, pictured sitting on his neatly made prison cot and gazing through the cell bars. Many of the papers noted his crime: the rape of an elderly white woman. “If I ever get out, I’ll try to find a job,” Branch, who was black, told a reporter. “I would go somewhere where I could make something of myself.”
The Supreme Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia—which had been joined by Branch’s own case, Branch v. Texas—appeared to represent the end of the death penalty in the United States. It was the culmination of a long decline. Since the 1800s, a number of states had been removing capital punishment from their laws or limiting it to rare crimes. In 1959, there had been 124 murders in Harris County, Texas, which encompassed Houston, but only three people sentenced to death, and a candidate for district attorney there openly questioned capital punishment. By 1963, the year a Texan became president, polls showed less than half the country favored the practice, and Lyndon Johnson appointed an attorney general who openly opposed it. The news of American military atrocities in Vietnam—along with the discovery of German death camps a generation before—gave new power to the argument that governments should be restrained in their authority over life and death. Many European countries were abandoning executions as well.
Amid this broad cultural and political shift, there were people nudging history along. In Manhattan, lawyers with the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People spent the 1960s mounting an assault on capital punishment, believing the institution to be deeply linked to the history of racial injustice. Their leader in this effort was Anthony Amsterdam. A tall and lanky law professor, his eyes sunken but demanding, Amsterdam was famous for working twenty-hour days and appearing to survive on thin cigars, coffee, and diet soda. He was the kind of lawyer who could dictate a brief from memory over the phone and argue in court without notes. In one oft-repeated story, he cited an obscure old case by volume and page number. The judge looked it up and couldn’t find it on the page, and Amsterdam brazenly suggested the judge’s copy of the volume must be bound incorrectly; he turned out to be right.
In 1963, Amsterdam and the LDF received a signal that they were uniquely prepared to interpret. In response to an appeal from an Alabama prisoner, three Supreme Court justices signed a brief statement saying the Court should decide whether it violated the Constitution to execute someone for the crime of rape. The justices rejected the vast majority of appeals without writing publicly, so this statement was a quiet bombshell. It implied that if the LDF lawyers challenged the death penalty in the courts, they might succeed.
After the opinion came out, the LDF sent law students across the South to gather data about capital punishment, while Amsterdam himself wrote up “Last Aid Kits,” collections of legal briefs that any lawyer could file to stop an execution. These briefs rarely changed the ultimate outcome of a case, but that wasn’t the only goal: The other, perhaps principal, goal was to gum up the legal system. The strategy worked. In part because of their efforts, executions slowed to a halt in 1967. “For each year the United States went without executions,” one of Amsterdam’s colleagues recalled, “the more hollow would ring claims that the American people could not do without them.” At the end of the decade, the Supreme Court reinforced the trend by giving the LDF a series of victories: In one decision, the justices struck down a federal law that allowed the death penalty for kidnapping, and in another they declared that citizens who had “conscientious scruples” about the punishment should be allowed to sit on juries, even if this gave defense lawyers an edge.
Amsterdam and the LDF knew their successes might not last. In 1968, Richard Nixon took the White House after declaring, “Time is running out for the merchants of crime and corruption in American society,” and when the chief justice of the Supreme Court retired, Nixon nominated Warren Burger, a judge known for siding with law enforcement. In 1971, Burger’s court ruled against a death row prisoner in California who had argued that his jury had been given no clear legal guidance on how to decide his fate. “This is an oblique attack on capital punishment,” Burger fumed to his colleagues. It seemed the Court was done with limiting the death penalty.
So it was all the more surprising when, a few months later, the justices agreed to hear arguments on whether the death penalty as a whole was “cruel and unusual.” The move was driven not by those who opposed the death penalty but by those who, like Burger, thought it was perfectly constitutional and wanted to say so, once and for all. Still, they had given Amsterdam and his colleagues a once-in-a-generation opportunity to persuade the Court to do the opposite—to end the death penalty for good.
The justices accepted the appeals of three death row prisoners, which would be argued all together under the banner of the lead case, Furman v. Georgia. William Henry Furman had been convicted of murdering William Joseph Micke, Jr., a twenty-nine-year-old father of five. The bullet had gone through a closed plywood door before hitting Micke; Furman claimed to have tripped over a wire, which had caused his gun to go off. He seemed to have little in common with the era’s scariest figures, men with epithets instead of names: the Zodiac Killer, the Boston Strangler.
As he stood before the justices at oral argument, Amsterdam made sweeping arguments about his fellow Americans: Although many might say they believed in the death penalty, he said, in practice they almost never handed it out. If the government started executing “any reasonable proportions” of the people who qualified for the punishment, Americans would be sickened, and it violated the Constitution to execute the random handful who were unlucky enough to wind up in the electric chair.
Even worse, Amsterdam added, that handful wasn’t entirely random: The few who were executed were “disproportionately the pariahs, the poor and racial minorities.” Amsterdam had the rhetorical skill to pull listeners through a dense argument before slamming on the brakes. “The figures are perfectly plain,” he said. “Georgia executes black people.” Another lawyer, who argued on behalf of Elmer Branch, the Texas prisoner facing the death penalty for rape, offered proof: A black man convicted of rape in Texas had an 88 percent chance of being sentenced to death, versus 22 percent for other races.
In June, the Court ruled in favor of the prisoners, freeing Furman and Branch and hundreds of other men from their death sentences. Although Branch himself was all smiles when he heard the news, thinking he might now be released, others on Texas death row were apprehensive and even gloomy, realizing they would all likely spend the rest of their lives in prison. Many would have preferred death to such a fate.
Right before the men on Florida’s death row learned about Furman v. Georgia, they had gathered in a gym to watch the movie Dirty Harry. It was an ironic choice. In the 1971 film, a steely-eyed Clint Eastwood struggles to catch a serial killer. He is stymied at every turn, not just by the killer himself, but by his own superiors in the police department, who care—too much, the film suggests—about all the rights guaranteed to criminals by the courts. (At one point, the villain is freed from jail because Harry seized evidence without a warrant.) After the movie ended, the prisoners received word of the Furman decision and celebrated, but outside the prison, the public responded just as Dirty Harry himself might have, with righteous indignation.
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