In 1994, public approval for capital punishment was around 80 %. Today it's below 50 %.
Maurice Chammah’s “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty” is a work of non-fiction, which bears stating because every so often a character passes through the book almost as caricature, outfitted with a Stetson, a handlebar mustache and a powerful persuasion with colorfully articulated straight-shooter notions about the value of frontier justice.
A staff writer for “The Marshall Project,” Chammah spent years researching and conducting interviews for “Let the Lord Sort Them” resulting in a dark and complicated history that touches on life and death, processes and politics, myth and fact, crime and punishment. The book also shows the sharp evolution of public opinion. In 1994, public approval for capital punishment was around 80 %. Today it’s below 50 %.
“There has definitely been a sea change over the past 25 years,” Chammah says. “Not that long ago people who opposed it seemed like outsiders and zealots and eccentrics. They were the prehistory of this movement. What we’ve seen is people slowly building the case for a justice system that was out of control. Now we have more people who support criminal justice reform.”
Austin-based Chammah fielded a few questions about some of the people on all sides of the law, whose lives were and are connected to a practice that is trending toward obsolescence.
Q: It makes sense that much of this deals with Texas. The state has a hearty mythology and notions of justice are tied up in it.
A: Yes, and a lot of that didn’t even make it into the book. But Texas is unique among states in the way it considers its mythology. And that flows into this story, because Houston attracted hundreds of thousands of new residents flooding in the Sunbelt wave. And Texas had something that attracted people that was different compared to Florida or Arizona, which don’t have that same mythology. You see it some there, but I don’t think you have as many public officials with that Old West swagger. Johnny Holmes (former Houston district attorney) was very much a big city DA seen as small town sheriff. He’s a smart guy and he knows it, so he used that as a natural part of his personality. He used language about personal responsibility, harsh punishment. Houston wants to play this role in the mythology of Texas, whether it’s with a big rodeo or cowboy churches or the death penalty. Harris County produced more executions than entire states. And it produced some of the largest personalities to match.
Q: Houston certainly wasn’t lacking crime when it increased the number of people it executed . . .
A: Houston had a lot of crime. And the death penalty became a symbolic way of showing that you were doing something about it. Reducing crime is hard to do, frankly. It’s systemic, and it’s hard to get your arms around it. People get elected by convincing others they’re going to do something about it, and the death penalty became a clear illustration of that. The rhetoric became that we were using the death penalty to deal with violence, this old West frontier heritage that couldn’t be less true for a city like Houston.
Q: The book brings up a judge in the Panhandle who just three years ago made a “tree and a rope” comment and insisted he spoke without racial implications. The mythology runs deep.
A: Mythology allows us to not even worry about reckoning with reality. That judge made a comment about a tree and rope, and I don’t think he was just lying that he didn’t intend for it to be about race. But cultural mythology allows these cultural biases and problems to get subterranean, so to speak. Fortunately scholars are increasingly studying the death penalty, and finding problems like implicit biases. There was the case of Duane Buck, whose guilt wasn’t disputed, but he was sentenced to death because jurors were told he was likely to commit a violent crime again because he was Black.
Q: I believe that was a case of an expert witness offering less than expert data — which is a thread that runs through this. Expert testimony in the Cameron Todd Willingham case has been questioned. And the forensic psychiatrist Jim Grigson — some of his testimony was outrageous.
A: It was both funny and shocking to revisit these strange anecdotes from the past. He was creative, but lives were in danger because of his testimony. But this man developed an “expertise” that could make absolutely anybody look like a psychopath. And he did. So many criminal forensic ideas that helped lead to convictions have been thoroughly debunked. Bad forensics all kinds of cases, and the same goes for bad psychology. You have people making gut decisions about an accused criminal’s possible future behavior based on psychological science that doesn’t exist. And the stakes are the highest: life and death.
Q: Perception of George W. Bush has grown warmer in recent years. I had filed and forgotten the zeal he expressed for this system. And I’d forgotten the interview in which he mocked Karla Faye Tucker.
A: He came along at a key moment when the death penalty peaked in American life, and it was just starting to turn where people were questioning it or at least ambivalent about it. He didn’t choose when to come along, but his career as governor found him riding a wave. It went both ways: there was a callousness when he mocked Tucker. But he also defended the death penalty in the case of the men who dragged James Byrd to death in Jasper. He projected this swagger. But in his memoir, he did express this idea that he was tortured by these decisions and took them seriously. Times were changing faster than consultants could manage them. And for a long time in Texas, the death penalty played well. Ann Richards, by all accounts, didn’t support the death penalty personally, but she had to publicly.
Q: The portrait of Carroll Pickett, a chaplain at Huntsville, was affecting.
A: Yes, yes, yes. He wrote a wonderful memoir. I like to intellectualize storytelling, so his story just ran in my head over and over and over. I couldn’t stop trying to reverse engineer why that was. His ambivalence conveys a larger ambivalence I think we all feel. Even if you support capital punishment, it’s hard to look at it up close. But it’s also incumbent upon us to look at it up close and wonder why we’re so ambivalent.
Q: Did you set out to make the book cinematic? I feel like the people you focused on — Danalynn Recer, Elsa Alcala, Craig Washington — move in and out like characters in a film.
A: That’s totally what I wanted to do. I was obsessed with the craft element of it. My favorite fiction makes you care about a character, then they dip away and slowly come back. You have some momentum when you see them again. And you learn more about them when they return.
Source: Houston Chronicle, Andrew Dansby, January 20, 2021
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde