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…