David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

The case got assigned to Judge Dan Steele. Steele was a former marine. He served two tours in Vietnam before he went to law school. His law-and-order credentials were like early Clint Eastwood. But he had integrity. He ruled that the only reason the police found the gun was because they had beaten the suspect. So he concluded that the prosecutor couldn’t use the gun as evidence. Without the gun, there was no case. The shooter walked. Everybody was livid, especially the victims’-rights crowd. They made it their mission to defeat Steele in the next election, and they convinced Truesdale to run against him. She crushed him. Six months after she took the bar exam, she was a criminal court judge.

I said to Katya, There is no way this case has bothered her. Nothing bothers her. We once proved that a guy who had been convicted of rape in her court couldn’t have committed the crime, because the DNA didn’t match. You know that she said? She said, Maybe he did it and used a condom. She figures that even if the guy didn’t do what he was convicted of, he probably did something. There’s not a sympathetic bone in her body. I don’t buy it.

Katya said, You don’t know how you would react if I got murdered. You might think you do, but you don’t. Maybe her nephew is a delinquent. Maybe she found dope in her kids’ clothes. Maybe she found religion. Maybe she read a good book. Maybe she started listening to Bob Dylan. Maybe she had a dream. Maybe she just spent some time meditating. Maybe she finally met someone else. Who knows? But people do change their minds, you know. I bet it really did bother her. It’s a strange case.

Our food arrived. I waited until the waiter had left, then I said, Well. I still think she was just hitting on me.

Katya smiled. She said, The ego on you.

QUAKER WAS ALREADY in the cage when I got to the prison. He was eating a ham sandwich and a bag of tortilla chips. I asked him where he got the food. I was assuming he must have had a visitor I didn’t know about. He said, Nicole got it for me.

Nicole is a guard on death row. She’s notoriously tough. I didn’t think Quaker meant her. I said, Nicole the guard?

He said, Uh-huh. I looked at him. He said, She ain’t that bad. Got a tough reputation, that’s all. But you act right, she treats you right. I asked whether she buys him food very often. He said, Only when I ask her. I don’t ask too often. This is maybe the third time. I give her the money from my commissary; it ain’t like it’s her treat. I asked him whether there was anything he wanted to talk about. He said, Not really. You wanted to see me, right? He was in a sour mood. As someone who is in sour moods quite a lot, I am expert at recognizing them. Of course, he had a better excuse than I ever do. He lived twenty-three hours a day in a sixty-square-foot cell that had a cot and a stainless-steel toilet and a strip of clouded Plexiglas for a window. Guards passed him his meals through a slot in the solid-steel door. Breakfast at four, lunch at ten thirty, dinner at four. He had no television. His radio got two stations—a country music station in Huntsville and a Christian talk station in Livingston. For one hour a day, guards moved him from his cell into the so-called day area, a ten-by-ten-foot caged area where he got to exercise by himself, while another inmate exercised in an adjacent cage.

People think death-row inmates have it great, that they lift weights all morning and watch TV all night, with three square meals a day, access to computers and books, and an endless series of appeals. I’m not sure whether the people who constructed this myth are ignorant, or just cynical. Either way, it’s wrong in every respect. Death row is a cage at the pound. You might not have any problem with that. You might say that someone who kills someone should be kept in a cage. I don’t agree with that viewpoint, but I do understand it. One day we can have the debate where I take the position that a great nation built upon the rule of law ought not to treat prisoners the way the Iranians or the Chinese do. But that wasn’t the topic that day with Quaker. Instead, I needed to remember that at some point in the small remainder of every inmate’s life, the exterior cage becomes interior, too. Once that happens, your client reacts to stimuli that you cannot see. It’s like watching a musical without the sound. So much seems inappropriate, or inexplicable, and that makes me mad—well, not mad, exactly; impatient might be a better word.

I asked him whether he knew Ruben Cantu. He said he didn’t. I told him what Green had told us and about my conversation with Cantu. He said, I know Green. I wouldn’t believe a word he says. Anyway, I’m no lawyer, but it sounds to me like you don’t have that much, just a bunch of questions, not much else. I told him I agreed with him. He said, They kill dudes in here every day who have a hundred questions. A thousand, maybe.

I couldn’t argue with him about that. I said, Was Dorris depressed?

He didn’t answer right away. After a moment he said, If you were married to a guy who had secrets he couldn’t share and woke up every night drenched with sweat and sat around like a zombie and pushed you away when you tried to help, wouldn’t you be depressed?

I said, Was she depressed enough to kill herself ?

He shook his head violently. He leaned toward me. He said, She’d light herself on fire before she’d hurt those kids. I nodded.

He said, I got no interest in trying to help myself by making Dorris look bad, you understand what I’m saying? I told him I did. He said, A bunch of questions don’t prove that I’m innocent.

He dropped his eyes, looking at his fingers. He was strumming them on the table, like he was playing the piano. His face softened and his eyes got wet. I had this thought: I do not want to like this man. He said, I don’t know how you do what you do. Do you ever sleep?

I thought, My client Johnny Martinez asked me that very question. I said, What tune were you playing there?

Quaker played piano for the church from the time he was eight years old until the fire where he worked. On one of our earlier visits he had said to me, I ain’t too religious, but I do love the music. He smiled and his eyes lit up. I told him he reminded me a little bit of Bud Powell. He said, Yeah, Dorris told me that. And I talk to myself when I’m playin’, too, just like ole Bud.

He strummed his fingers some more. He said, I miss having a piano. I used to sleep good in here. It’s always noisy, but I slept okay, ten or eleven hours. Lately I ain’t been sleepin’ at all. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I filled out a form to get some medicine, something to knock me out. I nodded. From nowhere he smiled. He said, You don’t seem too interested in my problems.

I said, Most of your problems I can’t do anything about.

He said, I know. That’s okay.

I thought of a Zbigniew Herbert poem I’d been reading: I imagined your fingers / had faith in your eyes / the unstrung instrument / the arms without hands .

And many verses later: heroes did not return from the expedition / there were no heroes / the unworthy survived .

I said, I might not be able to do anything about any of your problems, but we have raised a lot of questions, and I think we can maybe get a stay.

It was the first time I had used the word stay , and it was electric, an acknowledgment of the proximity of death. No stay meant Quaker would die in a few weeks. A stay meant he would survive to fight on. Survive, not thrive. Someone who thrives looks forward to tomorrow. Tomorrow for someone who only survives is just one day closer to the end.