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Title details for Let the Lord Sort Them by Maurice Chammah - Available

Let the Lord Sort Them

The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty

by Maurice Chammah
Kevin R. Free
Audiobook
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NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas—and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America
“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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 26, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593295625
      • File size: 328915 KB
      • Duration: 11:25:14

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 5, 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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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