TAVP at SXSW: A Review of Incendiary: The Willingham Case

TAVP at SXSW: A Review of Incendiary: The Willingham Case
by Maurice Chammah

I often forget in the course of the work we do that narratives surrounding the death penalty are not always the stories of those involved as direct participants. A unique set of famous cases take on a cultural life more a matter popular folklore than legal or social history. Many remember Gary Gilmore not for himself or the direct witnesses to his life, but rather for Tommy Lee Jones' depiction of him in the film The Executioner's Song. Randall Dale Adams shows up in the documentary about his wrongful conviction, Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line, but in that film Adams becomes an almost fictionalized protagonist, journeying through the fallibility of eyewitness testimony, the problems associated with the investigation of murder cases, and the corruption of Dallas' law enforcement. Karla Faye Tucker's life, in the media, has become the mythic story of competing forces of Born Again mercy and distrustful retribution. The cultural phenomenon fuels the story, invents holy grails (justice, innocence, madness, the death penalty itself), and follows the persona of the convicted through their trials and tribulations.

Reading Empathetically: A Review of David R. Dow's The Autobiography of an Execution

Reading Empathetically: A Review of David R. Dow's The Autobiography of an Execution 

by Maurice Chammah

Although the phrase "listening without judgment" has a noble, gentle ring to it, enacting it practically and living it physically seldom feel like "gentle" tasks. The urge to respond to a lawyer, an activist, and even at our weakest moments, a survivor of violence, and shout "That's not what I would have done!" can be more than just a nagging sensation. It can be, two hours into a harrowing narrative, all consuming.

At the same time, the sheer complexity of the death penalty system in any state, and certainly Texas, can make it similarly easy to shut down and throw one's hands up in the air in a kind of informed apathy. The process of litigation, as it unsteadily lopes through state courts, federal courts, the executive branch, and multiple other offices is so complicated and aggravating that all of the emotional aspects of the process, the fact that it is fundamentally about retribution for a murder, can get lost in the language of "evidentiary limits," "procedural requisites," hearings, briefs, stays, and a whole mess of Latin.