In 2008, just after college, I spent the summer traveling across Texas in a midnight-blue Corolla with a crooked “Yes We Can!” Obama bumper sticker. I’d been hired by a new organization called the Texas After Violence Project, founded by Walter Long, a veteran capital defense attorney who could no longer stand to watch people destroyed by trials, death sentences, years of appeals, and eventually, executions. His idea was to use oral histories to reveal the widespread traumatic impacts of the death penalty on the loved ones of people sentenced to death, the loved ones of murder victims, defense attorneys, prosecutors, jurors, and corrections officers. Walter wanted to open space for people to share their experiences with the death penalty in their own words, on their own terms. He hoped that building an archive of stories that showed the destruction the death penalty caused in every life it touched would urge Texans to confront the impacts of our deep-rooted love for revenge and retribution.
The Corolla’s driver was the organization’s first director, an activist and lawyer named Virginia Raymond, who taught me that summer how to listen deeply with empathy and compassion to people as they recounted their experiences of loss and survival. Virginia often reminded me that, in documenting these stories, we weren’t just documenting facts; we were documenting what literary critic Shoshana Felman called “fragile evidence”—testimony of tragedy and suffering that carries the power to imprint collective memory.
That summer, we conducted several interviews a week, sometimes two in one day. Our first interview was with the father of a young Black man executed for murdering a prominent white businessman in East Texas. He told us about how the white prosecutors described his son as a predator hunting his victim. How the all-white jury, including a juror who was president of the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, sentenced
