firm: what it is like to work here, what it is like to be them, and how we do things around here. If you knew what kind of culture great companies had, you could attempt to instill that same culture in your own organization and become great as well. In the search for what made some companies excellent, organizational culture was recognized as the primary factor.
Better performance through better cultures was a main area of focus, but some ethnographers simply sought to describe what it is like inside an institution for the sake of knowing, without an agenda of improving performance. For example, ethnographers described what it’s like to work in an auto factory, to serve in a police force, or to work in a slaughterhouse, to name just a few. They sought to reveal the inner workings and culture of these groups by becoming insiders in these contexts. For example, cops had their own language and informal yet powerful codes for their behavior.2 Strong norms dictated how cops should cover for one another and have each other’s back, both on and off duty.
I joined the death penalty defense team and became a member of that tribe so I could watch and learn and participate as much as possible as an insider. One of my main research aims was to describe the inner workings of the death penalty and how it worked in practice. This understanding would eventually become crucial in changing how it worked.
The team wanted to change the way the institution of the death penalty worked, and I agreed to help organize the team. I observed their work, went everywhere they went, and participated in any way I could. For instance, I strategized on cases, visited defendants, met with DAs and judges, and shadowed team members to learn their roles in defending against the death penalty. Ethnographers often attempt to remain invisible, studying social interaction from an arm’s length to minimize influencing what they observe. In some ethnographic practices, researchers are encouraged to maintain objectivity and keep some social distance between themselves and research subjects. For lots of reasons, being a fly-on-the-wall observer would not do this time. Once we decided to rewrite the ways things are done in death penalty defense by constructing a collective narrative that the team would use in their daily work, it became impossible for me to maintain any distance. Ethnography of this type required me to get close to the culture to understand it. If we were going into battle together, I would have to become an insider.
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Stares from around the room cajoled me to begin. Earlier that morning I had laid out a blank slate, with dozens of sheets of paper torn from giant flip charts. The pages were spread neatly across several folding tables, and I squeezed a fistful of markers to keep my hands from shaking. I began to speak. At the end of that day, our budding narrative was strewn all over the room, with more ink than white space on any piece of paper.
After hours of creative discussion and excited conversation, the room was finally quiet. I could hear the florescent lights hum above me. Exhausted, I crawled around on the floor, trying to put into order what amounted to a collective brain dump. Alone in the room, I made additional notes and sorted through all the pages we had filled. Every tattered page contained some kind of list, diagram, or scribbling about how we planned to fight the death penalty. The new narratives we would create from this material were the seeds for change.
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My whirlwind encounter with the death penalty began with a cold call; I was asked to help design and build the country’s first permanent death penalty defense team. I conducted a six-year ethnographic study of how the death penalty operates in practice, seeking to understand its inner workings and strategizing new ways to change the way things are done. All of my theoretical ideas about change were put to a real-world test. The stakes were life and death. I never became comfortable with the task, but I think that’s a good thing.
We pursued a risky strategy using an innovative methodology I developed called narrative construction. We created a narrative to organize the team, to determine the work they would do, and to change the way the death penalty operates. A narrative perspective also helped us understand and make sense of what others did, such as district attorneys. Instead of a typical structure and strategy, our team used narratives to guide our actions and to decide what tactics to pursue in death penalty cases.
Skipping ahead six years, our ragtag team has stopped more than one hundred executions against nearly insurmountable odds. We also expanded the office, covering almost all of Texas. By the time my research engagement ended, we had lost only once. Today Texas sentences very few people to death (figure 1.1). In the years before I got the call, Texas sentenced more than forty people to death each year. In the past two years, only three people have been sentenced to death. Several factors have been at work, but our team has been a major component of this change. We have managed to change the way things work.
Figure 1.1 Death sentences in Texas, 1999–2016
Source: Chart by the author
Seth Rose killed two people in Arkansas, stole their truck and some guns, and drove across Texas, heading for Mexico. He stopped for gas in the Panhandle in the middle of the night, and instead of getting back on the highway, he drove down a farm road into the darkness. Seth pulled up to a random farmhouse, went in with an AK-47, and killed the entire family of five; only one young boy, who played dead, survived. Seth shot the boy as he dove for his bed, blasting his body into the wall. He landed still and lifeless.
Seth got back in the truck and crossed the border into Mexico. Seth cannot really articulate why he went to Mexico, except that he knew that was where people went when they were on the run. Seth was going by a popular narrative. After Seth got to Mexico, he stayed in Juarez and simply drove around for a few hours. Inexplicably, Seth then headed back to Arkansas. As he crossed back into the United States, border agents in El Paso searched the truck and found the guns, and the officers discovered that the truck and guns were registered to the murdered couple in Arkansas.
Seth reached a plea bargain and was sentenced to two consecutive life without parole terms for the Arkansas murders. He later told guards in the Arkansas prison that he was probably also wanted in Texas for killing a family there. They ignored him at first, and if not for Seth’s persistence in confessing, the farmhouse murders would never have been solved.
Texas extradited Seth to face the death penalty. If Seth was sentenced to death there, Texas could kill him. If he got life without parole in Texas, Seth would be sent back to Arkansas to serve his two consecutive life sentences without parole there before serving his life sentence without parole in Texas. This really meant that Texas was hell-bent on killing Seth and was willing to waste a bunch of money trying to do so.
The trial was moved to Lubbock, and I consulted and assisted the defense team. On the first day of trial, the prosecution played the boy’s 9-1-1 call. Through every kind of pain, the eleven-year-old struggled to describe the gruesome scene. His entire family, including the dog, had been killed.
After trial that day, I stayed behind in the empty courtroom with Seth, Seth’s attorney, Andy, and the sheriff’s deputies assigned to guard Seth. Seth sat in a chair we had moved to the center of the courtroom, just in front of the judge’s desk. We needed to cut Seth’s greasy mullet so he would look more presentable to the jury. For security reasons, the guards would not let us use scissors. Andy brought in a pair of electric clippers and a comb, and I commandeered an empty trash bag from under the judge’s desk. Seth’s mullet went halfway down his back. As Andy fumbled with the clippers, I held
