Rethinking the Power To Take a Life: America's approach to capital punishment changed in the 1970s. It's time for another look.

• Author: Ciaramella, C.J.
• Position: Maurice Chammah's "Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty"

GRUESOME COINCIDENCE HAS made Maurice Chammah's Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty timely. In the final months of Donald Trump's presidency, shortly before this book was released, the Justice Department rushed through eight executions after a 17-year pause in use of the federal death penalty. The historic killing spree reignited a well-worn debate about capital punishment. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden campaigned on eliminating the federal death penalty. Criminal justice advocates are now urging the White House to commute the death sentences of those remaining on federal death row. And in March, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) signed legislation to end capital punishment in the state that has carried out more executions than any other in U.S. history.

Chammah--a reporter at The Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to criminal justice coverage--arrives just in time to explain how we got here.

Let the Lord Sort Them opens with the U.S. Supreme Court's momentous 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, which struck down every state's death penalty scheme as unconstitutionally arbitrary and discriminatory. This sent lawmakers in 37 states scrambling to salvage capital punishment, whose popularity rose in public opinion polls by nearly 10 points after the ruling. Chammah focuses largely on Texas. This is a logical choice: The Lone Star State is the geographic and cultural center of the death penalty in America.

In the wake of Furman, Texas instituted an unusual system. When states retooled their death penalties to placate the Supreme Court, they tended to choose one of two basic schemes. One, pursued by North Carolina and Louisiana, instituted mandatory death sentences for first-degree murder. If everyone is executed, they reasoned, that would remove any whiff of bias. Equal justice under the law, indeed. Other states, such as Florida and Georgia, required juries to consider aggravating and mitigating factors at a separate sentencing stage for capital trials. Did the killers show remorse? Were they mentally competent? What was their upbringing?

Texas attempted to split the difference. The death penalty would be mandatory for certain murders if a jury answered yes to three questions at sentencing: Was the murder unprovoked? Was it deliberate? And was there a "probability that the defendant would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society"?

When the Supreme Court heard...