David R. Dow explains his legal and ethical dilemma even before he begins his story: “A lawyer’s obligation to keep his client’s secrets confidential remains even after the client has died.”
Most of his clients die. He knows most of them are guilty.
Dow, University Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston Law Center, is a death-penalty lawyer in Texas. He founded the Texas Innocence Network, and he is the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service. Over the last 20 years he has handled more than 100 cases where his clients are facing the death penalty, appealing the death penalty, or desperately seeking last-minute legal action to delay or halt their execution.
Dow offers the caveat that he has changed names, altered or compressed some details, and tried to eliminate any references that could clearly identify his clients. Indignation and outrage radiate from virtually every page of The Autobiography of an Execution (Twelve/Hachette Book Group, NY 2010; ISBN 978-0-446-56206-5).
Whether you favor or oppose the death penalty, you must read this book. If you are at all a thinking person, you will never view the death penalty in the same way regardless of your starting position.
Writing episodically, Dow intertwines descriptions of his clients and their cases with his often-interrupted life at home. He calls his wife, Katya, and their young son, Lincoln, his “pillars.” He is candid about his frequent use of bourbon as a palliative when every day leads to a defeat. Dow notes that when you lose most of the time, you find new definitions for victories: an extra month of life in a cell after a 30-day stay of execution; a client dying of AIDS while on death row, avoiding the final penalty of lethal injection.
Executions In Texas
At one point, Dow looks at his calendar over the next month and sees three dates marked for death penalty hearings or trials. He notes that the total is about average in Texas.
Texas has executed 450 death-row inmates since 1982, with highs of 37 in 1997 (35.1 percent were black) and 40 in 2000 (40 percent black). George W. Bush was governor of Texas from 1995-2000. Governors, Dow emphasizes, have the power to commute a condemned prisoner or order a stay of execution.
In court, Dow has witnessed police who lie; attorneys and judges who are incompetent; prosecutors who hide evidence; politically-appointed judges who care first and foremost about their political agendas. In one case, Dow reports: “A judge on the court of appeals once wrote an article saying it was hard on him to be at dinner parties on the night of an execution, because the possibility that a last-minute appeal might be filed made it hard for him to enjoy himself.”
Dow was once in favor of the death penalty. His views changed, he says, with his awareness of an entrenched “lawless” system that values white skin more than it values dark skin; that executes the poor while the rich can literally get away with murder.
Injustice In The System
In theory, he says, the American justice system operates on presumption of innocence until proven guilty. His experience tells him the opposite is true: “Juries trust the police and the prosecutors, especially when all the jurors are middle-class white folks. . .They think that if someone gets arrested and goes on trial, there must be good reasons to believe that he did it.”
The stories of his clients, guilty or innocent, are poignantly disturbing. One man on death row describes a childhood where his father routinely whipped him with a switch cut from the branch of a pear tree in their front yard. His father liked that particular switch because it left deep welts. His father never beat him with his fists; his father didn’t want to hurt his hands.
Dow has no doubts about evil existing in the world. What always startles him is evil’s ordinary face: “Even after all these years, some part of me expects people who commit monstrous deeds to look like monsters. I meet them, and they look like me.”
Drugs In Lethal Injection
Dow threads the story of one client throughout the book. The man has been convicted of murdering his wife and two children. Dow is convinced he is innocent. Information from another inmate could support his innocence. Dow is thwarted at every turn. But Dow’s client is sanguine, almost serene bout his approaching death: “If your wife and family were dead,” he says, “and everybody thought you did it, would want to live?”
Execution by lethal injection, which Dow witnesses, comprises a series of three drugs: the first is a barbiturate that induces sleep; the second causes paralysis; the third induces cardiac arrest. The second drug, Dow knows, is given in consideration of the death-penalty witnesses; otherwise, they would see the thrashings and contortions of the inmate as he dies.
“I am always hopeful,” Dow says of one particular client. “Nothing ever works out, but I always think it’s going to. How else could I keep doing this work? I watched [his] execution because he wanted me to.”
Dow knows all too well that death is firmly imbued in his family’s consciousness. He describes this phone call: “Lincoln picked up the extension while I was talking to Katya. He said, ‘Hi, Dada. Did you have a good day at the death row?’”
Mike Perricone - For nearly a decade, I served as Senior Editor and science writer in the Office of Public Affairs at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory ...
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