Maurice Chammah

We're excited to welcome Maurice Chammah in store to discuss his book, LET THE LORD SORT THEM: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE DEATH PENALTY, with Michael Mooney, reporter for Axios and author of THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF CHRIS KYLE. Join us Thursday, May 12th at 6:00pm! Buy his book below and have it signed at the event. See you there!


DESCRIPTION

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.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maurice Chammah is a journalist and staff writer for The Marshall Project. His reporting on the criminal justice system has been published by The New Yorker, The New York TimesThe AtlanticEsquire, and Mother Jones. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he and his wife Emily Chammah co-organize The Insider Prize, a fiction and essay contest for incarcerated writers sponsored by American Short Fiction.

 

Thursday, May 12th, 6:00PM
Event address: 
5600 W. Lovers Ln
# 142
Dallas, TX 75209

            

Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty

By Maurice Chammah

Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty By Maurice Chammah Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9781524760281
Availability: NOT IN STOCK - Usually arrives in 7 - 14 business days
Published: Crown - January 18th, 2022

Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty By Maurice Chammah Cover Image
$18.00
ISBN: 9781524760281
Availability: NOT IN STOCK - Usually arrives in 7 - 14 business days
Published: Crown - January 18th, 2022

Homepage Blurb: 
LET THE LORD SORT THEM on Thursday, 5/12 at 6:00pm with author Maurice Chammah, in conversation with Michael Mooney! In-Store Discussion and Signing