“I was trying to get readers to see how much power they have as voters when it comes to the criminal justice system…. I want people to feel a sense of responsibility and culpability for this system we have —and for the work to produce a new one.”
— Maurice Chammah
Today's Rebuilding the Republic event features Maurice Chammah, journalist and staff writer for The Marshall Project who has reported on the criminal justice system for the New Yorker, New York Times, Atlantic, Esquire, and Mother Jones.
His new book is Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty. Pulitzer-winning author Gilbert King (Devil in the Grove) said “Superbly reported and beautifully written, Let the Lord Sort Them shines a bright light in the darkest corners of the criminal justice system. It is a masterwork of nonfiction that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading.”
Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer winner for Blood in the Water, called it, “an extraordinarily hopeful glimpse of a future in which we are finally beginning to imagine a very different version of justice—one in which the immediate and generational fallout is not so devastating.”
A former Fulbright fellow in Cairo, he also plays the violin and is an assistant editor at American Short Fiction. He lives in Austin, Texas.
This event is produced in partnership with the National Death Penalty Archive at the University at Albany and cosponsored by the University Libraries and School of Criminal Justice at UAlbany.
Buy the book from the local, independent Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza
Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty: https://www.bhny.com/book/9781524760267
Links of interest
Maurice Chammah articles at The Marshall Project | The Atlantic | The New York Times
From the archives: Interview with Sister Helen Prejean, activist and author of Dead Man Walking
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