David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

The night we learned about Lincoln, we saw American Beauty before meeting three other couples for dinner. We drank many martinis. At two in the morning, Katya was sick. She threw up food, then gastric juices, then dry heaves, then red foamy blood. I was terrified. She was too exhausted to be scared. I drove us to the hospital. Katya vomited twice more, walking from the car to the admitting area. Before we had finished filling out the paperwork, the nurse said, Kidney stone, sweetheart. Have you had them before?

They ran a sedative and an antinausea medicine through her IV. Her eyes slid shut. I asked whether I could have something. The nurse smiled. She thought I was joking. I said, Really.

At four the doctor walked in, glanced at her chart, and said he was virtually certain it was a kidney stone. But they would do an X-ray anyway, just to be sure. I felt myself sag with relief. They were wheeling her out of the cubicle when a nurse walked in with a piece of paper and stopped the doctor. He looked down and smiled like he was in a movie. Apparently, a routine pregnancy screen is part of the protocol. He said, Congratulations.

Two months after Lincoln was born, I had an argument in the court of appeals. The Sunday before I left for New Orleans, we were sitting on a bench in Hermann Park watching the paddleboats. You could feel the first hint of autumn. The air was thick with smoke from charcoal fires, and the smell of hamburgers grilling made me hungry. I was trying to get a new trial for an illegal immigrant because the prosecutors had kept all the blacks and Hispanics off the jury. My client had murdered a pregnant woman and her fourteen-year-old daughter. Those facts had absolutely nothing to do with the legal issues in the appeal, but there was no way the judges would overlook them. I was thinking, I’ve got no chance of winning this case.

Winona was lying at our feet. Lincoln was in a jogging stroller. Katya was pushing him forward, pulling him back. She was looking out at the water. She said, If you are not going to be with us when you’re with us, you might as well stay home.

WHEN LINCOLN WAS NEARLY TWO, I was making coffee in the kitchen one morning while Katya was getting him dressed. She called down to me to turn on the Today show. There on TV, talking to Katie Couric, was Lana Norris, the mother of Clay Peterson. Clay Peterson was dead. He had been murdered during a robbery of a convenience store by my client Johnny Martinez. Martinez had stabbed him eight times. The murder was caught on the store’s security camera, so Clay Peterson’s mother had watched a video of her son bleeding to death. She told me she had watched it at least a hundred times. It made her feel like she was close to her son, with him, as he lay dying. Norris was on TV because it was sweeps week on television, and she was a curiosity. A deeply religious person whose son had been saving money to study for the ministry when his life was cut short, Norris had met with Martinez for nearly four hours a week before his scheduled execution. After the meeting, Ms. Norris wrote a letter to the governor of Texas urging that Martinez’s life be spared.

Martinez’s own mother was a heroin addict who sold her kids’ possessions to support her drug habit. His neighbor made him masturbate while he filmed it. I think the video is still on the Internet. No court of law ever took Johnny away from his mother, but she couldn’t have been more absent. Martinez was raised by his grandmother. Lana Norris told me at the prison after her meeting with Johnny ended that she did not want Martinez’s grandmother to lose a child and be forced to go through what she had gone through herself. She told Katie Couric the same thing.

The governor in Texas cannot grant a reprieve unless the parole board authorizes him to. By a vote of 8–7, the board voted against commuting Martinez’s sentence from death to life in prison. One of the board members who voted in the minority called me to tell me the result of the vote before it was announced. He told me not to tell anyone that he had called. It was a breach of protocol. I could hear him softly crying.

Two hours before the execution I sat with Martinez in the holding cell. When the parole board member had called me the day before, he said, I just want to tell you that I do not think Mr. Martinez should die. I’ve been reading these petitions for ten years, hundreds of cases, and this is the first time I’ve voted to spare a life. I am impressed with who Mr. Martinez has become. I wish I could have convinced one more person. I really do. I’m sorry, sir. I repeated this conversation to Martinez. He nodded twice and stifled a sob. He said, It doesn’t make any sense, but I feel better that not everybody wants to kill me.

I was going to be witnessing the execution with his brother and sister. He did not want his mother there, but he asked me to be sure to tell her that he loved her. He knew his brother would not convey the message. The guard said it was time to go. Johnny’s hands were cuffed together and then shackled to a leather belt around his waist. He tried to lift his hand to shake mine. I hugged him and told him that I wished I had done more. He said, You did everything. You were the only one. Now go right home when you leave this hell and hug your son, okay? Hug Lincoln until he falls asleep tonight, will you? I had never told Martinez my son’s name. I’m not sure how he learned.

I said I would, but when I got home from watching Martinez die, Lincoln was already sleeping. I carried him from his bed into Katya’s and my bedroom and hugged him until I fell asleep myself. I thought that was close enough.

IWRITE DOWN MY DREAMS because they scare me. They scare me because I understand them.

The night Martinez got executed, I dreamed Lincoln and I were in a hotel room, waiting for room service. He opened the window. It was cold outside. I said, Close it, Lincoln. He ignored me and climbed out onto the ledge. He threatened to jump. Go ahead, I said. He looked at me, wounded. On the television the hotel safety video was playing on a loop, warning people not to use the elevators in case of a fire. I put my hand on the small of Lincoln’s back, meaning to hook my fingers through his belt, but before I could, he jumped. I heard only silence as he fell. Then a splash. He had fallen into the hotel pool. By the time I got downstairs, Lincoln was clinging to the side, and Katya was already there. I woke up, covered with sweat.

It was nearly 3:00 a.m. I started to shiver violently and could not go back to sleep. I put on a sweatshirt and checked to make sure Lincoln was fine. I kissed Katya on the cheek, went into the kitchen, and poured myself a drink. The dog thought it was time to go out. She followed me downstairs. But when she looked outside and saw it was still dark, she climbed back up the stairs and hopped into bed. I carried my drink into our library and, one by one, deleted all the Martinez files from my computer.

It is easier to forget failure if you don’t have the icons to remind you.

IN THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS , Freud sides with those who maintain conscience is silent in our dreams…. Ethical indifference reigns supreme . He was wrong, at least about me. In my dreams my conscience shouts until it wakes me and makes me too afraid to go back to bed. If you don’t want to be confronted with an aerial map of all the corners you’ve cut that day, you shouldn’t go to sleep.