Book Review: "Let the Lord Sort Them" by Maurice Chammah

Four years' ago I reviewed a book called Let the Lord Sort Them by Maurice Chammah and I'm back revisiting that text in a bit more detail. It is a fantastic book about the death penalty and teaches the reader about why perhaps it is not the best way of dealing with things. If you would like to know my stance, I am entirely against the death penalty because of a) the cost and b) it basically is the chicken's way out. Someone who has committed a crime should have all their freedoms taken away. The death penalty isn't really justice at all. But let's see what Maurice Chammah has to teach us about why the death penalty is ineffective.

It's post-1976 America and the Supreme Court has reinstated the death penalty. Texas takes the lead on being the country's most avid execution state. But at the opening of the book, we are in the 1980s and we meet Carroll Pickett, a chaplain in the prison. His job is to minimise the risk of protest of the death penalty inmates, offering some sort of solace in words and emotions. The author looks at a grand amount of executions featuring this chaplain doing his work. It does show us how the emotional toll of an execution hits everyone who works within the system. There is definitely a routine to it even though it is emotionally excruciating.

Elsa Alcala is another person featured in the book. She goes from being someone who wants to use the death penalty to someone who seeks to not use it. She begins to see cracks in the trials when people are being judged upon the death penalty, looking at the systemic difficulties that arise when we take a closer look at it all. The movement away from being someone who once was an aggressive user of the death penalty to someone who does not believe it should be used at all is a mircocosm of the public attitudes, which do not side with the death penalty in the majority.

Danalynn Recer is another person we meet - a lawyer who sees the people as human beings rather than ruthless monsters not worth saving. An advocate for mercy, she is probably still one of the only people who actually believes this. We can see on social media alone that the court of public opinion sides with the loud and the stupid. But if COVID taught us anything is that being locked away for months at a time with no access to rehabilitation turns people crazier than before. So maybe she's on to something. She works with the Texas Resource Centre to investigate the entirety of the histories of these people, trying to see them as complex individuals - people who are more than just a crime.

I think everyone and their pet dog knows that race and economics skews the statistics of the death penalty. Black people and poor people are more likely to receive the death penalty for the same crime that a middle-class white person may commit. Tracing it back, Chammah looks at the way that the death penalty in Texas, with its 88% Black statistic, is probably influenced by the state's fervour for lynching Black people back in the earlier half of the century.

As the turn of the century comes to dawn on Texas, execution fever starts to die down and becomes a point of contention rather than something celebrated. We learn about the traumas of others involved in the process. There's a man called Fred Allen who strapped inmates to the gurneys who experienced emotional trauma after it was all done. These accounts plus studies into the possibility of innocence and the sentencing of the intellectually disabled start to turn the tide on how Texas used the death penalty. The public opinion started to shift with it.

All in all, this book is a picture completed with first-hand testimonies about how effective the death penalty truly is and whether it is effective at all. There is an even bigger question though that is addressed throughout the text: can the government be trusted with people's lives? If we were to look at the question relative to anything else except the death penalty, the answer would be 'no'. So what makes this any different?