How? Not through big ideas in Washington, D.C., but through tedious grass-roots whittling. Not through purity tests but through unlikely coalitions of the righteous, the tainted and the grappling. Not by raising an issue’s visibility but by keeping its profile down.
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When the Supreme Court finally ruled in 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, it didn’t declare execution unconstitutional in principle. Rather, a divided court found capital punishment to be ruled by caprice, irregularity and discrimination, and thus, as Justice Potter Stewart put it, a “cruel and unusual” violation of the Eighth Amendment.
And what you have to understand about America, and about the state Chammah focuses on, Texas — which is to America what America is to the world — is that many interpreted this historic ruling not as an invitation to step back and reimagine the justice system but as an invitation to retool the death penalty to get those heartbeats stopping again.
The ensuing rise and fall of “the death,” as some inmates are known to call it, is a national phenomenon, but Chammah homes in on Texas, because of what can be called its exceptionalism, as captured by the historian T. R. Fehrenbach: “its almost theatrical codes and courtesies, its incipient feudalism, its touchy independence and determined self-reliance, its — exaggerated as it seemed to more crowded cultures — individual self-importance and its tribal territoriality.”
