Maurice Chammah on the Country's Ambivalence Toward Democratized Killing January 26, 2021 In every death penalty case, before Charlie Brooks and since, you will find the family members, the lawyers, the journalists, the prison workers—each of them touched, in ways large and small, observable and invisible, by the moment a person takes a life, the moment the state takes a life, and the many moments in between. To everyone else, the death penalty can feel like an abstraction, a source of dinner table quarrels that reemerge when a major case hits the news and we marshal the arguments we’ve h...