Maurice Chammah: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty
In 2016, it looked to lawyers and activists like the nation’s general ambivalence toward the death penalty had brought an end to its practice. No federal death row prisoners had been executed for nearly seventeen years. Then Donald Trump was elected president. Since July 2020, thirteen people have been executed by the Trump administration, an extraordinary number and concentration of federal killings. In his new book, Let the Lord Sort Them (out January 26), Maurice Chammah recounts the rise and fall of the death penalty in the US from the vantage of Texas, his home state and “the epicenter of the death penalty over the past fifty years,” Chammah told me, where “history is rife with heavy symbolism about violence and honor and justice.” He is a staff writer at The Marshall Project and a former Fulbright scholar who lives with his wife in Austin. I’ve known Chammah since 2012, when his work was published at The Revealer, where I was editor-in-chief.
We spoke by phone in the first week of January, as white nationalists were storming the Capitol, waving Confederate and “Stop the Steal” flags in the rotunda, beating cops in its hallways, and erecting a gallows on the nearby plaza. At the same time, in Terre Haute, Indiana, defense lawyers were working feverishly to save the life of fifty-two-year-old Lisa Montgomery, who had been sentenced to death for brutally killing a pregnant woman, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, and cutting the fetus from her body. What Montgomery’s lawyers failed to reveal during their client’s 2007 trial were the horrifying experiences that had defined much of her life. As a child, Montgomery was prostituted by her mother to pay the bills and repeatedly raped by her stepfather and his friends—for hours, often three at a time, in a room built onto the side of the family’s trailer for that purpose. As an adult, Montgomery had multiple abusive relationships. She suffered brain damage and dysfunction,
