Maurice Chammah has had a unique vantage point of the U.S. capital punishment system for the past decade, reporting multiple stories for news outlets and writing a highly regarded book in 2022.
He has learned that decisions of life and death don’t turn on a sober look at the complete case.
“I was surprised by how often it felt like the evidence that was being brought to court turned on these individual moments in the field that could have gone in a number of different directions, and the fact that it went where it did suggests just kind of the chaos of the world, the arbitrariness of these sorts of events,” said Chammah, an Austin-based journalist now reporting for The Marshall Project, which investigates the criminal justice system…