Works of Justice 117 - Maurice Chammah

PEN America

In this episode of our Works of Justice series, we had the pleasure of speaking with Maurice Chammah, a journalist and staff writer at The Marshall Project whose reporting on the criminal justice system has been published by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, and Mother Jones, among others. His first book, Let the Lord Sort Them, was just released. Haunting and absorbing, Let the Lord Sort Them traces the rise and fall of the death penalty in the United States by focusing on Texas as a microcosm of our country's preoccupation with capital punishment. In this interview, in addition to sharing his professional and writing trajectories through and beyond the book, Maurice spoke in depth about his experience as a Writing for Justice mentor for Fellow Thomas Bartlett Whitaker, and about how his relationship with Thomas impacted his own work. Hosted by Frances Keohane Researched, written and produced by Frances Keohane with guidance from Caits Meissner, Robert Pollock, and Stephen Fee