![]() ![]() 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. In Let the Lord Sort Them, Maurice Chammah charts the rise and fall of capital punishment through the eyes of those it touched. ![]() 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. When executions resumed, Texas quickly became the nationwide leader in carrying out the punishment. 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. ANTHONY LUKAS WORK-IN-PROGRESS AWARD In 1972, the United States Supreme Court made a surprising ruling: the country's death penalty system violated the Constitution. A deeply reported, searingly honest portrait of the death penalty in Texas-and what it tells us about crime and punishment in America “Remarkably intimate, fair-minded, and trustworthy reporting on the people arguing over the fate of human life.”-Robert Kolker, New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family WINNER OF THE J. ![]()
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