August 5, 2021 • 34 mins
Maurice Chammah, a staff writer at the Marshall Project, shares the good news of his latest book, LET THE LORD SORT THEM; THE RISE AND FALL OF THE DEATH PENALTY.
About the book, Publishers weekly wrote, “A nuanced and deeply reported account of evolving attitudes toward the death penalty in America… a thorough, finely written, and unflinching look at on of the most controversial aspects of the American justice system.”
If you’d like to support Jarvis Masters’s cause, please considering signing a petition on his behalf at www.freejarvis.org
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Dear Governor is a production of I Heart Media and
three Months Media. If you are moved by Jarvis Masters
and his thirty years struggle on San Quentin's Death Row,
and you'd like to support his cause, please consider signing
a petition on his behalf. Visit free Jarvis dot org
Slash podcast to sign your name to. An open letter
(00:20):
to California Governor Gavin Newsom, Dear Governor Newsom, Dear Mr
Governor Newsom. This is an open letter to Governor Gavin Newsom.
Dear Governor Newsom. When we launched Season one of Dear Governor,
(00:45):
soon after Gavin Newsom put a moratorium on the practice
in California, there were seven hundred and thirty seven men
on San Quentin's death Row. Flash forward a little over
a year and now there are only seven hundred and
seven men living on death row. Third, Americans died not
from executions, but from the unconscionable outbreak of COVID nineteen
(01:06):
at San Quentin, as well as death by suicide brought
about by the hopelessness on condemned row. When we started
helping to amplify Jervis's story, our team had a thimblefull
of knowledge about the practice of capital punishment. Jarvis has
taught us what it's like on the inside of death row.
But one of our most trusted resources on the outside
(01:26):
that we've relied on endlessly is The Martial Project, a
nonprofit news organization whose mission is to demystify our criminal
justice system. So when Maurice Schama, a staff writer at
The Marshall Project, published his in depth tome on the
history and future of the death penalty, we invited him
to visit the podcast of his book, Let the Lords
(01:47):
Sort Them, The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty.
Publishers Weekly wrote a nuanced and deeply reported account of
evolving attitudes towards the death penalty in America, a thorough,
finally written, an unflinching look at one of the most
controversial aspects of the American justice system. I read that
(02:09):
book and it's jam packed with with research and stories.
I'm curious how long, because I know it was a
long process for you to write the book. How long
into the process of compiling your work did you realize
that you would be writing about the rise and the
fall of the death penalty? Actually, fairly early on, so
I first started learning about the death penalty in round
(02:30):
two thousen. One of my first jobs after college was
at a small nonprofit that was doing oral history research
on the death penalty, and this involved driving around Texas
and interviewing family members of murder victims and people who
had been executed, and prosecutors and defense attorneys, and a
(02:51):
lot of those people we interviewed talked about the nineteen
nineties as a kind of heyday of the death penalty,
and I dimly remembered this for many years before, you know,
I had grown up in Texas. I had remembered an
era in which we were so strongly associated with the
death penalty in Texas, especially when George W. Bush, who
was the governor of the state, was running for president
(03:13):
and the death penalty seemed to be in the news
a lot because he had overseen so many executions. But
even by two thousand and ten, it was clear that
the death penalty had sort of lost its cultural hold.
I didn't at that point know that the fall of
the death penalty could could also be told, you know,
in terms of numbers, that the number of executions and
death sentences was going down. But even by you know,
(03:35):
about ten years ago, there was a sense that we
were past the culture war heyday of the death penalty,
where it dominated presidential debate stages and gubernatorial campaigns and
didn't even dinner table conversations. We sort of moved on
to other issues, and so there was the sense that
already the death penalty kind of hold on America was
(03:58):
a bit in the past. And then as I continued
as a journalist, getting into the death penalty as a
subject area and reporting on cases, I started to learn
about the big systemic reasons why the death penalty had
been disappearing. Did the influx of executions by Trump at
all make you think that you're hypothesis might not be right?
(04:18):
It's a great question. So the fall of the death
penalty is something that you can see in sheer numbers.
You know, there were almost a hundred executions per year
at the end of the nineties into the year two
thousand and now, even with Trump's executions, you're seeing roughly
twenty or less every year. The coronavirus brought those numbers
(04:41):
down even further. But even aside from from these sort
of big, you know, one year forces like the Trump
executions or or the coronavirus, um you're just seeing fewer
executions year by year, and even more dramatically, you're seeing
a fewer new people sentenced to death. There were three
hundred and fifty death sentences handed down in the United
(05:02):
States in nine six, and there were thirty four handed
down in twenty nineteen. The drop is also dramatic. In Texas,
where I live and which was the epicenter of the
death penalty, there were forty death sentences in ninety six
and four in twenty nineteen, so really really huge drops.
And that means that eventually there will be so few
(05:22):
people sentenced to death that there will sort of be
no one left to execute if you follow these numbers
out to their logical conclusion. Now, the reasons for that
are complex, and there's a lot of them. Um. One
of them is simply that crime disappeared. The rate of
violent crime in the United States was much higher in
the nineteen eighties and nineties than it is today. That
means that there's fewer cases where the death penalty is
(05:44):
an option by law. But it also means that crime
is not the political issue that it once was. I mean,
I think the death penalty came so much of the
foreground partially because elected officials had an interest in using
it as a way to show that they were doing
something about crime. Whether or not it really does do
something about crime is a separate question. But governors, prosecutors, judges, presidents,
(06:08):
all of these are elected positions where appearing to be
tough on crime is important and addressing crime is difficult,
But the death penalty is sort of an easy way
to say, look, I'm really doing something. So over the
course of the early two thousand nine, really the nineties
and early two thousand's, you started to see a handful
of high profile cases of innocent people exonerated from death row.
(06:32):
He started to see d n A testing grow and
sophistication and and be able to prove that some people
who had been sentenced to death were, you know, truly innocent.
And this really shook people's confidence in the death penalty.
One thing I write about in the book is how
it kind of cast a new light on old problems.
So you may have heard that, you know, somebody was
(06:53):
given a really terrible lawyer who fell asleep during the trial.
But if you ultimately think that everyone is guilty and
deserve the death penalty anyway than a sleeping lawyer doesn't
feel like a big deal. But if innocent people are
being sentenced to death, then a sleeping lawyer feels like
a really big deal. So I think innocence kind of
cast a lot of old problems into a new light
(07:13):
because it raised the stakes in how this system produces injustice. Yeah. Jervis,
whom this podcast is really focused on, speaks very eloquently
about that innocent people change his mind. It has in
every state. You will probably see that change. The death
pilling is because they found too many innocent people on
death row. The money didn't do it. The more consciousness
(07:37):
of the communities in the state didn't do it. They
did not want their tax dollars to kill an innocent
man period. I can imagine seven people in an auditorium
and they all talk about their experiences of being seconds
away from being executed. That would turn people a gives
(07:59):
the pilly in my opinion, very fast, sery fast, because
we're looking at seven human beings that we paid to
be executed. That really gets to the consciousness of people.
Let's see what happens. I think most people in America
(08:20):
would say, Wow, this is not for me. No, no, no, no, no,
you guys got this all wrong. Jarvis says. The more
people see that that is a reality, that that will
fundamentally change our our dialogue. It's true, it has really
changed the dialogue. It used to be that it was
just assumed that everyone in the Republican Party supported the
death penalty, and most of or many of the people
(08:43):
in the Democratic Party as supported the death penalty too.
I mean, famously, Bill Clinton flew to Arkansas from the
campaign trail in two to oversee and execution so that
he could bolster his sense of being tough on crime.
Fast forward to today, and you're seeing bills to repeal
the death penalty brought to state legislatures by Republican lawmakers
(09:04):
joined by Democrats. And there's no longer a sense that
you are imperiling yourself at the ballot box by coming
out against the death penalty. And I think a big
reason for that has been that these innocence cases have
shaken people's confidence and made them see that the system
is rife with human error all the way through. And
(09:24):
I should also say on that score that innocence doesn't
only affect innocent prisoners, by which I mean, you know,
if lawmakers are worried about innocence, and then they increase
the funding for defense lawyers, for example, or they give
more forms of appeal to people on death row. That
also helps people who are guilty of the crimes but
(09:46):
maybe have arguments like that they suffered a constitutional violation
at their trial, or that they're mentally ill, or that
they suffered trauma as a child that was ignored by
the jury and the judge the and that should have
been you know, more fully developed and discussed, and that
their death sentency knows unjust because of these horrors in
(10:07):
their own past. So in a sense, it was sort
of a kind of a way into a lot of
broader issues about the death penalties, kind of systemic human
based problems. You know, as we are recording this interview,
(10:37):
there are over two million votes to recall Governor Newsome.
And UM, I'm wondering what you think because he was
the one who put the moratorium, um, the death penalty
in California. And is there a reason in your mind
for for San Quentin death row people to be nervous
at this point. Yeah, I do think that the death
penalty historically has obeyed what I sometimes call a law
(11:02):
of backlash, so the death penalty was disappearing in uh
popularity in use in the nineteen sixties, and then in
the seventy two the Supreme Court ruled that all death
penalty laws around the country were unconstitutional and needed to
be rewritten. And it was actually that decision that sparked
(11:22):
a big rise in support for the death penalty in
polls and a lot of political pressure on leaders to
come out for the death penalty. And it's almost as
if people don't realize that they like the death penalty
until they feel deprived of it. And I think that
you're seeing a similar dynamic in California, where you know,
(11:44):
Governor Newsome kind of went out on a limb. He
dismantled the death chamber, which is a very visually symbolic
thing to do. You know, Newsome dismantled the death chamber
and issue this moratorium, and that made the news and
was very dramatic. But it was not like CALIFORNI. You
had been carrying out lots and lots of executions before that.
The death penalty in California had been this very kind
(12:05):
of quiet punishman, at least in comparison to states like Texas, Georgia, Florida.
I mean, California was famous for having hundreds and hundreds
of people on death row and very few executions because
it seemed like there was very little political appetite to
actually carry them out. But then by going out on
a limb and making a big symbolic gesture as Newsom did,
(12:27):
he kind of set things up for a backlash for
people to say, wait a minute, we do want the
death penalty. And and we didn't even really realize we
were being deprived of it before because we weren't paying attention.
But now since you've dismantled the death chamber, we're paying
attention and we're mad oft. I think people believe it.
(12:47):
If you stand in line, you vote on the death
pailly and then fold is discredited and taken away from
people are upset and they voted for the death pilty,
it keep believe it. They will stolen and the victim's
handle right to have this bill taken someone like that,
(13:08):
and that is a response to the governor. There's a
lot of people who get ready spent a lot of
money to put the defilty back in action. I think
a lot of death row prisoners and definitely their lawyers
would prefer for some of these issues to just remain
(13:28):
out of the public eye because they know that when
they're in the public eye, it puts all of them
in a in a kind of danger that was sort
of on the firing line, so to speak, the ultimate
of unintended consequences. I guess absolutely absolutely. You know, others
have have compared it to Roe v. Wade, where the
sort of drama of that Supreme Court decision then spurred
(13:48):
this whole kind of conservative movement to to limit abortion,
and history may have, you know, played out differently had
it just you know, abortion had a history that was
much quieter and sort of behind the scenes. Um so, yeah,
history does not move in a straight line. What do
you think about the fact that the Supreme Court has
been completely changed and altered based on Trump? Is that
(14:11):
going to impact how capital punishment is looked at at
that level with so many conservative judges on the High Court.
It is we are already seeing that the Supreme Court
is much more hostile to the claims of death throat
prisoners than they had been even five years ago. Five
years ago, there was even a moment in which defense
lawyers who opposed the death penalty thought there was some
(14:34):
chance that the Court could go their way and rule
to abolish the death penalty once and for all. It
really all came down to Anthony Kennedy's vote. There was
this feeling that along with Kennedy there were four liberals
who could strike down the punishment. Then, of course Trump
was elected, and he eventually came to a point three
people to the court. And now the Supreme Court has
(14:54):
had a series of opportunities to stop executions and has
basically taken none of them. This was most dramatically visible
during the run of executions under President Trump. He oversaw
thirteen executions and all of those prisoners brought claims to
the Supreme Court at the last minute, and all of
them were rejected by the Court. And what this suggests
(15:16):
to me is that the death penalty is it's still
in decline, as I've said before, but the Supreme Court's
lack of interest sort of changes the arena where the
fights are going to happen. So it's going to be
less in the courts, less the Supreme Court, and it's
going to be more in state legislatures and in Congress.
Where As I said, you know, you're seeing moves to
repeal the death penalty or to limit it. Ohio now
(15:38):
has a bill with bipartisan backing to abolished the death penalty,
and even Wyoming, which by all accounts is a very
red state, has a bill to abolished death penalty and
a conversation going on there that it would have been
unthinkable five years ago. So I think that the Supreme Court,
by supporting the death penalty so strongly, has sort of
taken itself out of the real debate about the punishment's future.
(16:00):
Got it. You know? I read a review of your book,
Let the Lord Start Them in the New York Times,
and in it they referenced Texas is to America what
America is to the world, because your focus is on
the Texas capital punishment system. I thought that was a
really interesting line. And you know, that New York Times
review of my book had analysis in it that even
(16:20):
I had not reached. And it was a kind of
really pleasant moment of thinking, while you do all this
research and you write a book, but that's not the
last word, because other people will sort of see things
in what you're doing, but even you can't see I
had picked Texas to focus on in the book, because
it has been the epicenter of executions in the United
States over the last forty years. So there have been,
(16:41):
you know, a little more than executions, and more than
five hundred of them have been here in Texas. So
the state really punches above its way by any metric.
And even more than that, Texas has a cultural association
with the death penalty. Once I started noticing this, I
started seeing it everywhere. I found at the pisodes of
The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live that referenced Texas as
(17:04):
particular zeal for the death penalty. A comedian Ron White
always had this joke about you know, you come to
Texas and kill somebody, we will kill you back, and
you would always be lass for that line, right, very
dark By years and and then even further in the weeds,
I would read journalism articles about the death penalty and
other states, maybe states where the death penalty didn't exist
(17:25):
or was less popular, and you would see a victims
family member, you know, in a murder case, say I
wish we were in Texas because if we were in Texas,
this guy would be on you know, the conveyor belt
to death row, and that's that would be justice and
you know, I'm mad that I'm in Michigan or Massachusetts
and we don't have the death penalty. So Texas plays
this role, and it's it's sort of where Americans look
(17:48):
when we, you know, want to think about the part
of ourselves that is very retributive. It is very punitive
and revenge oriented when it comes to crime. You know, people,
every human being has these differ for an sorts of
impulses about how we react to shocking information. And so
when there's a murder, there's a part of ourselves that
is maybe interested in revenge, and there's a part of
(18:10):
ourselves that thinks, well, this person who who committed murder,
maybe there's more to them, maybe they had a mental illness,
maybe there's an explanation for this, or maybe they're innocent.
But when we orient ourselves towards the kind of punitive,
revenge oriented way of thinking, we often sort of looked
to Texas as the place that's bringing that impulse into
its full form, right where the whole judicial system is
(18:31):
sort of oriented around that impulse. And it's almost a
kind of self reinforcing feedback loop where Texas here people
in other states say that and they say, yeah, that's right,
that is who we are. And I you know, growing
up in Texas always heard California used as the kind
of foil of like, oh, well, there's a bunch of
liberal cities in California, But us in Texas where the
where the strong conservatives who who execute murders. Um. So
(18:55):
I think you know that line Texas is to America,
in America is to the world. Similar early people around
the world kind of look to America as having a
particularly harsh, revenge oriented justice system, and and then within America,
Texas kind of plays that cultural role for all of us.
Is that kind of the wild wild West mentality it is?
It's it's based on this idea. I think that partially
(19:18):
stems back historically to the frontier, the idea that in
you know, early American settlement of the West, you didn't
have time to have a full trial and you needed
to just you know, string up the cattle rustler from
the nearest tree. Um. This is the image we get
in a lot of old Western films that are often
set in Texas. And we don't necessarily as a country
want to return fully to that, but there is a
(19:39):
kind of nostalgia for it this idea that, oh, it's
too bad it had to be that way, But we
were the rough and tumble frontier cowboys that that just
had to like take justice into our own hands. I
read a lot in the book about how I think
that that was a bit of a smoke screen for
the actual history of extra judicial justice. Right of taking
justice into our own hands, It was much more often
(20:01):
a way of reinforcing racial oppression. Right. It was much
more often a way of white mobs of people, you know,
not waiting for a trial and taking up black man
who had been accused of a crime and hanging him
or burning him in the public square. Lynch mob is exactly.
And we can kind of paper over that history by saying, oh, well,
(20:22):
let's watch the movie, the miniseries Lonesome Dove, you know,
or or some John Wayne movies. It wasn't really about race.
It was just about some cattle wrestlers. And I think
that all of that kind of deep cultural material is
sort of there in the back of our minds as
we debate the contemporary death penalty. Yeah, about the lawyers
(20:52):
litigating the death penalty in the book, you you write,
whether they know it or not, they lay out the
cold facts and legal principles. They are also helping us
answer some of our deepest questions. Can a person be evil?
What does justice mean? Now you have dug into this
for the last decade, what is your feeling how you
answer those questions? Can a person be evil? I think
(21:15):
the research for this book it really changed me as
a person in the sense that it forced me to
really reckon with some of these deeper questions that I
had never reckoned with before. And so, you know, I
had always just had the kind of um simplistic categories
of good and evil that they're you know, good people
and evil people, and you know they're heroes and villains
(21:36):
as we see in movies. But what I learned through
the research is that you end up kind of getting
to where you want to get based on the way
that you end up sort of the way that you
start looking at the situation. And that sounds very abstract,
but what I mean is, you know, I interviewed these
(21:56):
defense lawyers who would start off by saying, I don't
anyone is evil. I don't think you know, there are
obviously evil acts, but you know who come from a
place that's very much hate the sin and love the sinner,
and they think that anyone who commits a really atrocious
murder there must be sort of some damage in their
earlier life that produced that evil, terrible impulse in them
(22:16):
that lead to a terrible crime. And then these defense
lawyers go and they and they research the life history
of the person they representing, and they end up finding
out usually that they're right, that there's all kinds of trauma,
sexual abuse, poverty, addiction, the entire laundry list of horrors
that one can go through in their life. You almost
(22:36):
always see those in the life stories of people who
are facing their penalty and who commit really atrocious crimes.
And so they ended up kind of teaching me over
the course of the book, research and bringing me along,
I think to that point of view, not the point
of view that the death penalty is unjust as a
sort of separate question, but the idea that there's no
such thing as an inherently evil person, right, that these
(22:58):
categories that we have they're useful, and that they allow
us to to see the world clearly, but they can
also obscure things and make as see that nobody kind
of commits a terrible crime in a vacuum out of nowhere,
just sort of wakes up one day and decides to
do it. Almost always, there's going to be all kinds
of horrible things in that person's life that kind of
(23:18):
produced that evil outcome. And those evils aren't just about
that one person. They're the evils of poverty, of addiction,
of our society's failure to deal with mental health adequately.
Um And those are evils that are ultimately kind of
on all of us as opposed to on the individual
who committed the crime. On the show, we talked a
lot about how the death penalty obviously doesn't just impact
(23:40):
those people that are on death row, but their family members,
their friends, the correctional officers, and so forth. But you
right and dedicate a lot of the time in the
book to Chaplain Carol Pickett, and he oversaw what almost
a hundred executions, And I'm wondering, how does a man
of faith come to terms with that kind of a responsibility.
(24:03):
What did you observe in him through all of his experiences.
I opened the book with Carol Pickett, who, as you say,
was the chaplain who oversaw and worked on all these executions,
and what that meant was that he would get to
know the man who was going to be executed, usually
on the day of the execution, and try to help
him get his spiritual affairs in order. And I opened
(24:27):
the book with him partially because I felt like there
was something very relatable. And you know, not every reader
and certainly not I are are people of the cloth,
but we, I think can identify with his, you know,
competing impulses. That he went to work for the prison
system because he wanted to help people, and then suddenly
he's being asked to minister them before their death, and
(24:48):
he felt very torn about that. He eventually came to
terms with it by saying, you know, at the very least,
I could be somebody who, you know, gave some care
to this person in their worst hours and their final hours,
and I could sort of provide the service and be
someone who doesn't stand in judgment of them, you know,
be a non judgmental kind of calming force for them
(25:08):
as they deal with this, because ultimately, this system is
going to exist with or without me as an individual.
But then as time went on, he started to feel
I think very co opted by that system, this idea
that it was kind of contorting him and traumatizing him
as well. Carol Pickett writes very movingly about the idea
that a particular man named Carlos de Luna who was
executed was totally innocent of the crime, and pick It
(25:30):
really couldn't shake that. And then even as he was
dealing with his own trauma, other men who worked on
the executions started to come to him and talk about
the trauma they were experiencing, that they were seeing the
faces of the people they had helped to execute when
they tried to go to sleep at night, that they
were shaking and crying and having almost something like a
panic attack when they would hear about executions on the radio.
(25:52):
And Carol Pickett, over the course of his long career,
came to oppose the death penalty. When I interviewed him
a few years ago, he had been retired for quite
a while, and I got the sense that the death
penalty had really, you know, broken a piece of him
and and really taken a lot out of him in
his life. When I would ask him these questions about
the death penalty, he just frankly seems kind of exhausted
(26:15):
by the idea that he had been privy to so
much trauma through the course of witnessing all of these
executions and meeting all of these men before their death,
and I think that really drove home for me the
idea that even if you believe the death penalty is
moral and just, and even if every single person who
is executed is completely guilty and guilty of a really
(26:37):
horrendous crime that everyone can agree on, even then the
death penalty has some serious problems in the way that
it produces trauma for the people who have to carry
it out right, that it's going to have to involve
humans at various stages of the process, not just you know,
of course executioners and chaplains, but jurors have to decide
to send someone to death row. Judges have to, you know,
(26:59):
rule these cases. Prosecutors have to pursue them. And I
saw that you can't have that system without it traumatizing
and hurting a lot of people, even beyond the immediate
circle of people closest to the execution. Yeah, do you
believe in redemption that the people were executing maybe different
(27:21):
from the person who committed the crime. I do, And
particularly because there have just been so many examples where
you see a really transformed person. One case that really
sticks with me, and I think sticks with a lot
of Americans who still remember it because it was so
haunting on this score was the case of Carla fay Tucker.
She was executed in she had committed a really atrocious
(27:45):
murder where she had left a pick axe in one
of her victims. But while on death row, she had
a really dramatic conversion to Christianity. She became born again,
and she wanted to devote her life to helping other
women in prison. She had no, you know, idea that
she was ever going to be released, but she thought
I could spend the rest of my life in prison
(28:06):
serving as a kind of mentor to people. And I
never met Carlia fay Tucker, but in the course of
my reporting on the criminal justice system, I've met a
lot of both death row prisoners and also just life
sentenced prisoners who committed a murder when they were quite
young and now are tremendously transformed as people and really
want to devote their lives to helping. You know, the
(28:29):
young men and women who maybe come through prison for
a year or two or five years kind of transform
themselves so that when they go back out into the
free world, they can rebuild their lives and avoid the
sorts of decisions that led them down a path of
committing crime. And I've seen a lot of cases where
it seemed like by executing somebody we kind of lost
that human potential for them to be a mentor and
(28:52):
a helper to other people. Can you describe to me
what you think justice looks like to really really complet question?
Isn't it? It is? But I mean you brought it
up and in I mean, what's the answer because I
struggle with that as well, like l life without the
possibility of parole is it sounds like a heinous punishment
(29:13):
And at the same time, obviously execution is as well.
I see you see the decline in the death penalty.
Will we ever see a decline in life without parole?
I think that's the question that we now all face,
you know, as Americans. I think that's the moment that
we're in. There's this moment where and this was part
(29:35):
of the um I think for me, the idea of
writing this book now was that we've we have seen
a decline in the death penalty, but we've also seen
a rise in life without parole, and it has also
proven very difficult to reduce the number of people in
prison even as a wider society. We um, there's been
an acknowledgement, both on the right and the left, that
(29:56):
too many people are in prison for too long. Um
you'll see it kind of by a partisan consensus around
that idea. But then when you get into the weeds
and really start talking about releasing people earlier, especially for
violent crimes, which many many people are in prison for,
there's a pause, right, and there's a fear that we're
somehow undermining justice. I do think that I have learned
through all of this research that for me personally, justice
(30:20):
has to mean something more than just punishment. It also
has to mean reparation. And by that I mean that
when someone is murdered, they leave behind a family and
loved ones who are seeking something in exchange for the
trauma and horror that they went through. And for many,
many years, our logic has been that punishment for the
(30:43):
person who committed the murder is that thing that we
give back to that victim family. But you now also
see victim family members who say, no, justice for us,
isn't locking this person up forever? And throwing away the key.
And it's not executing them, it's allowing us, for example,
to speak to that person through a process of these
(31:03):
sorts of programs that are called restorative justice, or it's
it's for us to know that some policy changes are
being made so that this is never going to happen
again to anyone else's loved one, not just because this
person goes to prison, but because we address our mental
health system to try to prevent future crimes, or we
(31:23):
address our our gun laws because of the availability of
this a r fIF team that this young man had
when he committed the murder. I mean, every case is different,
but there are always going to be systemic sort of
issues and and and larger narratives that get brought into
the discussion when you look at why a crime happens.
(31:44):
And I think that justice has to be understood in
a very in a more complex, bigger, and more three
dimensional way to mean not just what do we do
to this person who committed this crime, but also how
do we deliver some kind of healing for the people
who suffered this trauma? What does that look like and
(32:06):
and does that involve something bigger than just putting this
person away. I do think that sort of where in
this really exciting in a way moment. I mean, everything
I've just talked about is very doom and gloom, but
there is a lot of really exciting experimentation and the
criminal justice system. I've written a lot over the last
few years about prison officials in the United States who
(32:27):
have gone to Germany and Norway and have come back
and have been trying to implement their ideas ideas to
make American prisons more rehabilitative. I mentioned before that older
prisoners who were in prison for life off become mentors
to young men, and in Connecticut there's actually like a
formalized program now where they live together, and these older
prisoners are enlisted by the prison officials to figure out,
(32:49):
like what do these young men need? How do we
prevent future crime? And all of that is tremendously exciting,
and so I definitely plan to keep reporting on this
sort of rich world of experimentation as we sort of
grapple uncertainly forward in trying to figure out what justice
is going to mean for us as Americans. Maurice's book
(33:10):
is Let the Lords Sort Them. The Rise and Fall
of the Death Penalty next week. The Awake Network and
Shambla Publications recently hosted a free online event, the Black
and Buddhist Summit, that attracted over ten thousand participants. Jarvis
was a keynote speaker, talking about race transformation and the
experience of being black while Buddhist on Death Row. This
(33:33):
episode was written and produced by Donna Fazzari and myself,
Corny Cole. Our theme song sentenced is compliments of the
band Stick Figure from their album Set in Stone. Stu
Sternbach composed the original music. Nate Dufort did the sound design.
For more information on Jarvis and to find out how
you can follow his case and support his cause, please
(33:55):
visit free Jarvis dot org. For more podcasts. For my
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M h
m hm
Dear Governor is a production of I Heart Media and
three Months Media. If you are moved by Jarvis Masters
and his thirty years struggle on San Quentin's Death Row,
and you'd like to support his cause, please consider signing
a petition on his behalf. Visit free Jarvis dot org
Slash podcast to sign your name to. An open letter
(00:20):
to California Governor Gavin Newsom, Dear Governor Newsom, Dear Mr
Governor Newsom. This is an open letter to Governor Gavin Newsom.
Dear Governor Newsom. When we launched Season one of Dear Governor,
(00:45):
soon after Gavin Newsom put a moratorium on the practice
in California, there were seven hundred and thirty seven men
on San Quentin's death Row. Flash forward a little over
a year and now there are only seven hundred and
seven men living on death row. Third, Americans died not
from executions, but from the unconscionable outbreak of COVID nineteen
(01:06):
at San Quentin, as well as death by suicide brought
about by the hopelessness on condemned row. When we started
helping to amplify Jervis's story, our team had a thimblefull
of knowledge about the practice of capital punishment. Jarvis has
taught us what it's like on the inside of death row.
But one of our most trusted resources on the outside
(01:26):
that we've relied on endlessly is The Martial Project, a
nonprofit news organization whose mission is to demystify our criminal
justice system. So when Maurice Schama, a staff writer at
The Marshall Project, published his in depth tome on the
history and future of the death penalty, we invited him
to visit the podcast of his book, Let the Lords
(01:47):
Sort Them, The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty.
Publishers Weekly wrote a nuanced and deeply reported account of
evolving attitudes towards the death penalty in America, a thorough,
finally written, an unflinching look at one of the most
controversial aspects of the American justice system. I read that
(02:09):
book and it's jam packed with with research and stories.
I'm curious how long, because I know it was a
long process for you to write the book. How long
into the process of compiling your work did you realize
that you would be writing about the rise and the
fall of the death penalty? Actually, fairly early on, so
I first started learning about the death penalty in round
(02:30):
two thousen. One of my first jobs after college was
at a small nonprofit that was doing oral history research
on the death penalty, and this involved driving around Texas
and interviewing family members of murder victims and people who
had been executed, and prosecutors and defense attorneys, and a
(02:51):
lot of those people we interviewed talked about the nineteen
nineties as a kind of heyday of the death penalty,
and I dimly remembered this for many years before, you know,
I had grown up in Texas. I had remembered an
era in which we were so strongly associated with the
death penalty in Texas, especially when George W. Bush, who
was the governor of the state, was running for president
(03:13):
and the death penalty seemed to be in the news
a lot because he had overseen so many executions. But
even by two thousand and ten, it was clear that
the death penalty had sort of lost its cultural hold.
I didn't at that point know that the fall of
the death penalty could could also be told, you know,
in terms of numbers, that the number of executions and
death sentences was going down. But even by you know,
(03:35):
about ten years ago, there was a sense that we
were past the culture war heyday of the death penalty,
where it dominated presidential debate stages and gubernatorial campaigns and
didn't even dinner table conversations. We sort of moved on
to other issues, and so there was the sense that
already the death penalty kind of hold on America was
(03:58):
a bit in the past. And then as I continued
as a journalist, getting into the death penalty as a
subject area and reporting on cases, I started to learn
about the big systemic reasons why the death penalty had
been disappearing. Did the influx of executions by Trump at
all make you think that you're hypothesis might not be right?
(04:18):
It's a great question. So the fall of the death
penalty is something that you can see in sheer numbers.
You know, there were almost a hundred executions per year
at the end of the nineties into the year two
thousand and now, even with Trump's executions, you're seeing roughly
twenty or less every year. The coronavirus brought those numbers
(04:41):
down even further. But even aside from from these sort
of big, you know, one year forces like the Trump
executions or or the coronavirus, um you're just seeing fewer
executions year by year, and even more dramatically, you're seeing
a fewer new people sentenced to death. There were three
hundred and fifty death sentences handed down in the United
(05:02):
States in nine six, and there were thirty four handed
down in twenty nineteen. The drop is also dramatic. In Texas,
where I live and which was the epicenter of the
death penalty, there were forty death sentences in ninety six
and four in twenty nineteen, so really really huge drops.
And that means that eventually there will be so few
(05:22):
people sentenced to death that there will sort of be
no one left to execute if you follow these numbers
out to their logical conclusion. Now, the reasons for that
are complex, and there's a lot of them. Um. One
of them is simply that crime disappeared. The rate of
violent crime in the United States was much higher in
the nineteen eighties and nineties than it is today. That
means that there's fewer cases where the death penalty is
(05:44):
an option by law. But it also means that crime
is not the political issue that it once was. I mean,
I think the death penalty came so much of the
foreground partially because elected officials had an interest in using
it as a way to show that they were doing
something about crime. Whether or not it really does do
something about crime is a separate question. But governors, prosecutors, judges, presidents,
(06:08):
all of these are elected positions where appearing to be
tough on crime is important and addressing crime is difficult,
But the death penalty is sort of an easy way
to say, look, I'm really doing something. So over the
course of the early two thousand nine, really the nineties
and early two thousand's, you started to see a handful
of high profile cases of innocent people exonerated from death row.
(06:32):
He started to see d n A testing grow and
sophistication and and be able to prove that some people
who had been sentenced to death were, you know, truly innocent.
And this really shook people's confidence in the death penalty.
One thing I write about in the book is how
it kind of cast a new light on old problems.
So you may have heard that, you know, somebody was
(06:53):
given a really terrible lawyer who fell asleep during the trial.
But if you ultimately think that everyone is guilty and
deserve the death penalty anyway than a sleeping lawyer doesn't
feel like a big deal. But if innocent people are
being sentenced to death, then a sleeping lawyer feels like
a really big deal. So I think innocence kind of
cast a lot of old problems into a new light
(07:13):
because it raised the stakes in how this system produces injustice. Yeah. Jervis,
whom this podcast is really focused on, speaks very eloquently
about that innocent people change his mind. It has in
every state. You will probably see that change. The death
pilling is because they found too many innocent people on
death row. The money didn't do it. The more consciousness
(07:37):
of the communities in the state didn't do it. They
did not want their tax dollars to kill an innocent
man period. I can imagine seven people in an auditorium
and they all talk about their experiences of being seconds
away from being executed. That would turn people a gives
(07:59):
the pilly in my opinion, very fast, sery fast, because
we're looking at seven human beings that we paid to
be executed. That really gets to the consciousness of people.
Let's see what happens. I think most people in America
(08:20):
would say, Wow, this is not for me. No, no, no, no, no,
you guys got this all wrong. Jarvis says. The more
people see that that is a reality, that that will
fundamentally change our our dialogue. It's true, it has really
changed the dialogue. It used to be that it was
just assumed that everyone in the Republican Party supported the
death penalty, and most of or many of the people
(08:43):
in the Democratic Party as supported the death penalty too.
I mean, famously, Bill Clinton flew to Arkansas from the
campaign trail in two to oversee and execution so that
he could bolster his sense of being tough on crime.
Fast forward to today, and you're seeing bills to repeal
the death penalty brought to state legislatures by Republican lawmakers
(09:04):
joined by Democrats. And there's no longer a sense that
you are imperiling yourself at the ballot box by coming
out against the death penalty. And I think a big
reason for that has been that these innocence cases have
shaken people's confidence and made them see that the system
is rife with human error all the way through. And
(09:24):
I should also say on that score that innocence doesn't
only affect innocent prisoners, by which I mean, you know,
if lawmakers are worried about innocence, and then they increase
the funding for defense lawyers, for example, or they give
more forms of appeal to people on death row. That
also helps people who are guilty of the crimes but
(09:46):
maybe have arguments like that they suffered a constitutional violation
at their trial, or that they're mentally ill, or that
they suffered trauma as a child that was ignored by
the jury and the judge the and that should have
been you know, more fully developed and discussed, and that
their death sentency knows unjust because of these horrors in
(10:07):
their own past. So in a sense, it was sort
of a kind of a way into a lot of
broader issues about the death penalties, kind of systemic human
based problems. You know, as we are recording this interview,
(10:37):
there are over two million votes to recall Governor Newsome.
And UM, I'm wondering what you think because he was
the one who put the moratorium, um, the death penalty
in California. And is there a reason in your mind
for for San Quentin death row people to be nervous
at this point. Yeah, I do think that the death
penalty historically has obeyed what I sometimes call a law
(11:02):
of backlash, so the death penalty was disappearing in uh
popularity in use in the nineteen sixties, and then in
the seventy two the Supreme Court ruled that all death
penalty laws around the country were unconstitutional and needed to
be rewritten. And it was actually that decision that sparked
(11:22):
a big rise in support for the death penalty in
polls and a lot of political pressure on leaders to
come out for the death penalty. And it's almost as
if people don't realize that they like the death penalty
until they feel deprived of it. And I think that
you're seeing a similar dynamic in California, where you know,
(11:44):
Governor Newsome kind of went out on a limb. He
dismantled the death chamber, which is a very visually symbolic
thing to do. You know, Newsome dismantled the death chamber
and issue this moratorium, and that made the news and
was very dramatic. But it was not like CALIFORNI. You
had been carrying out lots and lots of executions before that.
The death penalty in California had been this very kind
(12:05):
of quiet punishman, at least in comparison to states like Texas, Georgia, Florida.
I mean, California was famous for having hundreds and hundreds
of people on death row and very few executions because
it seemed like there was very little political appetite to
actually carry them out. But then by going out on
a limb and making a big symbolic gesture as Newsom did,
(12:27):
he kind of set things up for a backlash for
people to say, wait a minute, we do want the
death penalty. And and we didn't even really realize we
were being deprived of it before because we weren't paying attention.
But now since you've dismantled the death chamber, we're paying
attention and we're mad oft. I think people believe it.
(12:47):
If you stand in line, you vote on the death
pailly and then fold is discredited and taken away from
people are upset and they voted for the death pilty,
it keep believe it. They will stolen and the victim's
handle right to have this bill taken someone like that,
(13:08):
and that is a response to the governor. There's a
lot of people who get ready spent a lot of
money to put the defilty back in action. I think
a lot of death row prisoners and definitely their lawyers
would prefer for some of these issues to just remain
(13:28):
out of the public eye because they know that when
they're in the public eye, it puts all of them
in a in a kind of danger that was sort
of on the firing line, so to speak, the ultimate
of unintended consequences. I guess absolutely absolutely. You know, others
have have compared it to Roe v. Wade, where the
sort of drama of that Supreme Court decision then spurred
(13:48):
this whole kind of conservative movement to to limit abortion,
and history may have, you know, played out differently had
it just you know, abortion had a history that was
much quieter and sort of behind the scenes. Um so, yeah,
history does not move in a straight line. What do
you think about the fact that the Supreme Court has
been completely changed and altered based on Trump? Is that
(14:11):
going to impact how capital punishment is looked at at
that level with so many conservative judges on the High Court.
It is we are already seeing that the Supreme Court
is much more hostile to the claims of death throat
prisoners than they had been even five years ago. Five
years ago, there was even a moment in which defense
lawyers who opposed the death penalty thought there was some
(14:34):
chance that the Court could go their way and rule
to abolish the death penalty once and for all. It
really all came down to Anthony Kennedy's vote. There was
this feeling that along with Kennedy there were four liberals
who could strike down the punishment. Then, of course Trump
was elected, and he eventually came to a point three
people to the court. And now the Supreme Court has
(14:54):
had a series of opportunities to stop executions and has
basically taken none of them. This was most dramatically visible
during the run of executions under President Trump. He oversaw
thirteen executions and all of those prisoners brought claims to
the Supreme Court at the last minute, and all of
them were rejected by the Court. And what this suggests
(15:16):
to me is that the death penalty is it's still
in decline, as I've said before, but the Supreme Court's
lack of interest sort of changes the arena where the
fights are going to happen. So it's going to be
less in the courts, less the Supreme Court, and it's
going to be more in state legislatures and in Congress.
Where As I said, you know, you're seeing moves to
repeal the death penalty or to limit it. Ohio now
(15:38):
has a bill with bipartisan backing to abolished the death penalty,
and even Wyoming, which by all accounts is a very
red state, has a bill to abolished death penalty and
a conversation going on there that it would have been
unthinkable five years ago. So I think that the Supreme Court,
by supporting the death penalty so strongly, has sort of
taken itself out of the real debate about the punishment's future.
(16:00):
Got it. You know? I read a review of your book,
Let the Lord Start Them in the New York Times,
and in it they referenced Texas is to America what
America is to the world, because your focus is on
the Texas capital punishment system. I thought that was a
really interesting line. And you know, that New York Times
review of my book had analysis in it that even
(16:20):
I had not reached. And it was a kind of
really pleasant moment of thinking, while you do all this
research and you write a book, but that's not the
last word, because other people will sort of see things
in what you're doing, but even you can't see I
had picked Texas to focus on in the book, because
it has been the epicenter of executions in the United
States over the last forty years. So there have been,
(16:41):
you know, a little more than executions, and more than
five hundred of them have been here in Texas. So
the state really punches above its way by any metric.
And even more than that, Texas has a cultural association
with the death penalty. Once I started noticing this, I
started seeing it everywhere. I found at the pisodes of
The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live that referenced Texas as
(17:04):
particular zeal for the death penalty. A comedian Ron White
always had this joke about you know, you come to
Texas and kill somebody, we will kill you back, and
you would always be lass for that line, right, very
dark By years and and then even further in the weeds,
I would read journalism articles about the death penalty and
other states, maybe states where the death penalty didn't exist
(17:25):
or was less popular, and you would see a victims
family member, you know, in a murder case, say I
wish we were in Texas because if we were in Texas,
this guy would be on you know, the conveyor belt
to death row, and that's that would be justice and
you know, I'm mad that I'm in Michigan or Massachusetts
and we don't have the death penalty. So Texas plays
this role, and it's it's sort of where Americans look
(17:48):
when we, you know, want to think about the part
of ourselves that is very retributive. It is very punitive
and revenge oriented when it comes to crime. You know, people,
every human being has these differ for an sorts of
impulses about how we react to shocking information. And so
when there's a murder, there's a part of ourselves that
is maybe interested in revenge, and there's a part of
(18:10):
ourselves that thinks, well, this person who who committed murder,
maybe there's more to them, maybe they had a mental illness,
maybe there's an explanation for this, or maybe they're innocent.
But when we orient ourselves towards the kind of punitive,
revenge oriented way of thinking, we often sort of looked
to Texas as the place that's bringing that impulse into
its full form, right where the whole judicial system is
(18:31):
sort of oriented around that impulse. And it's almost a
kind of self reinforcing feedback loop where Texas here people
in other states say that and they say, yeah, that's right,
that is who we are. And I you know, growing
up in Texas always heard California used as the kind
of foil of like, oh, well, there's a bunch of
liberal cities in California, But us in Texas where the
where the strong conservatives who who execute murders. Um. So
(18:55):
I think you know that line Texas is to America,
in America is to the world. Similar early people around
the world kind of look to America as having a
particularly harsh, revenge oriented justice system, and and then within America,
Texas kind of plays that cultural role for all of us.
Is that kind of the wild wild West mentality it is?
It's it's based on this idea. I think that partially
(19:18):
stems back historically to the frontier, the idea that in
you know, early American settlement of the West, you didn't
have time to have a full trial and you needed
to just you know, string up the cattle rustler from
the nearest tree. Um. This is the image we get
in a lot of old Western films that are often
set in Texas. And we don't necessarily as a country
want to return fully to that, but there is a
(19:39):
kind of nostalgia for it this idea that, oh, it's
too bad it had to be that way, But we
were the rough and tumble frontier cowboys that that just
had to like take justice into our own hands. I
read a lot in the book about how I think
that that was a bit of a smoke screen for
the actual history of extra judicial justice. Right of taking
justice into our own hands, It was much more often
(20:01):
a way of reinforcing racial oppression. Right. It was much
more often a way of white mobs of people, you know,
not waiting for a trial and taking up black man
who had been accused of a crime and hanging him
or burning him in the public square. Lynch mob is exactly.
And we can kind of paper over that history by saying, oh, well,
(20:22):
let's watch the movie, the miniseries Lonesome Dove, you know,
or or some John Wayne movies. It wasn't really about race.
It was just about some cattle wrestlers. And I think
that all of that kind of deep cultural material is
sort of there in the back of our minds as
we debate the contemporary death penalty. Yeah, about the lawyers
(20:52):
litigating the death penalty in the book, you you write,
whether they know it or not, they lay out the
cold facts and legal principles. They are also helping us
answer some of our deepest questions. Can a person be evil?
What does justice mean? Now you have dug into this
for the last decade, what is your feeling how you
answer those questions? Can a person be evil? I think
(21:15):
the research for this book it really changed me as
a person in the sense that it forced me to
really reckon with some of these deeper questions that I
had never reckoned with before. And so, you know, I
had always just had the kind of um simplistic categories
of good and evil that they're you know, good people
and evil people, and you know they're heroes and villains
(21:36):
as we see in movies. But what I learned through
the research is that you end up kind of getting
to where you want to get based on the way
that you end up sort of the way that you
start looking at the situation. And that sounds very abstract,
but what I mean is, you know, I interviewed these
(21:56):
defense lawyers who would start off by saying, I don't
anyone is evil. I don't think you know, there are
obviously evil acts, but you know who come from a
place that's very much hate the sin and love the sinner,
and they think that anyone who commits a really atrocious
murder there must be sort of some damage in their
earlier life that produced that evil, terrible impulse in them
(22:16):
that lead to a terrible crime. And then these defense
lawyers go and they and they research the life history
of the person they representing, and they end up finding
out usually that they're right, that there's all kinds of trauma,
sexual abuse, poverty, addiction, the entire laundry list of horrors
that one can go through in their life. You almost
(22:36):
always see those in the life stories of people who
are facing their penalty and who commit really atrocious crimes.
And so they ended up kind of teaching me over
the course of the book, research and bringing me along,
I think to that point of view, not the point
of view that the death penalty is unjust as a
sort of separate question, but the idea that there's no
such thing as an inherently evil person, right, that these
(22:58):
categories that we have they're useful, and that they allow
us to to see the world clearly, but they can
also obscure things and make as see that nobody kind
of commits a terrible crime in a vacuum out of nowhere,
just sort of wakes up one day and decides to
do it. Almost always, there's going to be all kinds
of horrible things in that person's life that kind of
(23:18):
produced that evil outcome. And those evils aren't just about
that one person. They're the evils of poverty, of addiction,
of our society's failure to deal with mental health adequately.
Um And those are evils that are ultimately kind of
on all of us as opposed to on the individual
who committed the crime. On the show, we talked a
lot about how the death penalty obviously doesn't just impact
(23:40):
those people that are on death row, but their family members,
their friends, the correctional officers, and so forth. But you
right and dedicate a lot of the time in the
book to Chaplain Carol Pickett, and he oversaw what almost
a hundred executions, And I'm wondering, how does a man
of faith come to terms with that kind of a responsibility.
(24:03):
What did you observe in him through all of his experiences.
I opened the book with Carol Pickett, who, as you say,
was the chaplain who oversaw and worked on all these executions,
and what that meant was that he would get to
know the man who was going to be executed, usually
on the day of the execution, and try to help
him get his spiritual affairs in order. And I opened
(24:27):
the book with him partially because I felt like there
was something very relatable. And you know, not every reader
and certainly not I are are people of the cloth,
but we, I think can identify with his, you know,
competing impulses. That he went to work for the prison
system because he wanted to help people, and then suddenly
he's being asked to minister them before their death, and
(24:48):
he felt very torn about that. He eventually came to
terms with it by saying, you know, at the very least,
I could be somebody who, you know, gave some care
to this person in their worst hours and their final hours,
and I could sort of provide the service and be
someone who doesn't stand in judgment of them, you know,
be a non judgmental kind of calming force for them
(25:08):
as they deal with this, because ultimately, this system is
going to exist with or without me as an individual.
But then as time went on, he started to feel
I think very co opted by that system, this idea
that it was kind of contorting him and traumatizing him
as well. Carol Pickett writes very movingly about the idea
that a particular man named Carlos de Luna who was
executed was totally innocent of the crime, and pick It
(25:30):
really couldn't shake that. And then even as he was
dealing with his own trauma, other men who worked on
the executions started to come to him and talk about
the trauma they were experiencing, that they were seeing the
faces of the people they had helped to execute when
they tried to go to sleep at night, that they
were shaking and crying and having almost something like a
panic attack when they would hear about executions on the radio.
(25:52):
And Carol Pickett, over the course of his long career,
came to oppose the death penalty. When I interviewed him
a few years ago, he had been retired for quite
a while, and I got the sense that the death
penalty had really, you know, broken a piece of him
and and really taken a lot out of him in
his life. When I would ask him these questions about
the death penalty, he just frankly seems kind of exhausted
(26:15):
by the idea that he had been privy to so
much trauma through the course of witnessing all of these
executions and meeting all of these men before their death,
and I think that really drove home for me the
idea that even if you believe the death penalty is
moral and just, and even if every single person who
is executed is completely guilty and guilty of a really
(26:37):
horrendous crime that everyone can agree on, even then the
death penalty has some serious problems in the way that
it produces trauma for the people who have to carry
it out right, that it's going to have to involve
humans at various stages of the process, not just you know,
of course executioners and chaplains, but jurors have to decide
to send someone to death row. Judges have to, you know,
(26:59):
rule these cases. Prosecutors have to pursue them. And I
saw that you can't have that system without it traumatizing
and hurting a lot of people, even beyond the immediate
circle of people closest to the execution. Yeah, do you
believe in redemption that the people were executing maybe different
(27:21):
from the person who committed the crime. I do, And
particularly because there have just been so many examples where
you see a really transformed person. One case that really
sticks with me, and I think sticks with a lot
of Americans who still remember it because it was so
haunting on this score was the case of Carla fay Tucker.
She was executed in she had committed a really atrocious
(27:45):
murder where she had left a pick axe in one
of her victims. But while on death row, she had
a really dramatic conversion to Christianity. She became born again,
and she wanted to devote her life to helping other
women in prison. She had no, you know, idea that
she was ever going to be released, but she thought
I could spend the rest of my life in prison
(28:06):
serving as a kind of mentor to people. And I
never met Carlia fay Tucker, but in the course of
my reporting on the criminal justice system, I've met a
lot of both death row prisoners and also just life
sentenced prisoners who committed a murder when they were quite
young and now are tremendously transformed as people and really
want to devote their lives to helping. You know, the
(28:29):
young men and women who maybe come through prison for
a year or two or five years kind of transform
themselves so that when they go back out into the
free world, they can rebuild their lives and avoid the
sorts of decisions that led them down a path of
committing crime. And I've seen a lot of cases where
it seemed like by executing somebody we kind of lost
that human potential for them to be a mentor and
(28:52):
a helper to other people. Can you describe to me
what you think justice looks like to really really complet question?
Isn't it? It is? But I mean you brought it
up and in I mean, what's the answer because I
struggle with that as well, like l life without the
possibility of parole is it sounds like a heinous punishment
(29:13):
And at the same time, obviously execution is as well.
I see you see the decline in the death penalty.
Will we ever see a decline in life without parole?
I think that's the question that we now all face,
you know, as Americans. I think that's the moment that
we're in. There's this moment where and this was part
(29:35):
of the um I think for me, the idea of
writing this book now was that we've we have seen
a decline in the death penalty, but we've also seen
a rise in life without parole, and it has also
proven very difficult to reduce the number of people in
prison even as a wider society. We um, there's been
an acknowledgement, both on the right and the left, that
(29:56):
too many people are in prison for too long. Um
you'll see it kind of by a partisan consensus around
that idea. But then when you get into the weeds
and really start talking about releasing people earlier, especially for
violent crimes, which many many people are in prison for,
there's a pause, right, and there's a fear that we're
somehow undermining justice. I do think that I have learned
through all of this research that for me personally, justice
(30:20):
has to mean something more than just punishment. It also
has to mean reparation. And by that I mean that
when someone is murdered, they leave behind a family and
loved ones who are seeking something in exchange for the
trauma and horror that they went through. And for many,
many years, our logic has been that punishment for the
(30:43):
person who committed the murder is that thing that we
give back to that victim family. But you now also
see victim family members who say, no, justice for us,
isn't locking this person up forever? And throwing away the key.
And it's not executing them, it's allowing us, for example,
to speak to that person through a process of these
(31:03):
sorts of programs that are called restorative justice, or it's
it's for us to know that some policy changes are
being made so that this is never going to happen
again to anyone else's loved one, not just because this
person goes to prison, but because we address our mental
health system to try to prevent future crimes, or we
(31:23):
address our our gun laws because of the availability of
this a r fIF team that this young man had
when he committed the murder. I mean, every case is different,
but there are always going to be systemic sort of
issues and and and larger narratives that get brought into
the discussion when you look at why a crime happens.
(31:44):
And I think that justice has to be understood in
a very in a more complex, bigger, and more three
dimensional way to mean not just what do we do
to this person who committed this crime, but also how
do we deliver some kind of healing for the people
who suffered this trauma? What does that look like and
(32:06):
and does that involve something bigger than just putting this
person away. I do think that sort of where in
this really exciting in a way moment. I mean, everything
I've just talked about is very doom and gloom, but
there is a lot of really exciting experimentation and the
criminal justice system. I've written a lot over the last
few years about prison officials in the United States who
(32:27):
have gone to Germany and Norway and have come back
and have been trying to implement their ideas ideas to
make American prisons more rehabilitative. I mentioned before that older
prisoners who were in prison for life off become mentors
to young men, and in Connecticut there's actually like a
formalized program now where they live together, and these older
prisoners are enlisted by the prison officials to figure out,
(32:49):
like what do these young men need? How do we
prevent future crime? And all of that is tremendously exciting,
and so I definitely plan to keep reporting on this
sort of rich world of experimentation as we sort of
grapple uncertainly forward in trying to figure out what justice
is going to mean for us as Americans. Maurice's book
(33:10):
is Let the Lords Sort Them. The Rise and Fall
of the Death Penalty next week. The Awake Network and
Shambla Publications recently hosted a free online event, the Black
and Buddhist Summit, that attracted over ten thousand participants. Jarvis
was a keynote speaker, talking about race transformation and the
experience of being black while Buddhist on Death Row. This
(33:33):
episode was written and produced by Donna Fazzari and myself,
Corny Cole. Our theme song sentenced is compliments of the
band Stick Figure from their album Set in Stone. Stu
Sternbach composed the original music. Nate Dufort did the sound design.
For more information on Jarvis and to find out how
you can follow his case and support his cause, please
(33:55):
visit free Jarvis dot org. For more podcasts. For my
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M h
m hm
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