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Winner of the 2021 Nonfiction Book Award from the Writers’ League of Texas, and the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and the Columbia Journalism School
Published by Crown
Read a review in the New York Times
Read an excerpt at The Marshall Project
“In a season of American life when so many want to get big things done and few seem to get anywhere, this story of the slow slaying of the death penalty — one that flies against many of my own intuitions — serves as a vaccine against the virus of fatalism.” - Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times
A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas — and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America
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.