David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

She smiled. She said, So what’s it like always representing the bad guys?

I said, I’m pretty sure that one of my guys isn’t actually bad.

GARY CALLED. He and Harmon had gone to the house where I talked to Cantu. Gary said that the house was empty. There was a mattress on the bedroom floor, half a roll of toilet paper on the bathroom floor, two slices of leftover sausage pizza in the refrigerator, and a half-gallon carton of Tropicana orange juice, two-thirds gone, on the counter. That’s it. No clothes, nothing to read, no TV or radio, no towels, no beer. Cantu was gone.

While Gary looked through the house and took inventory, Melissa talked to the neighbors. No one knew his name. No one had any idea where he’d gone. I asked Gary to take the orange juice. Maybe Cantu drank from the carton. Maybe we could get some DNA. I didn’t have any idea what good it would do us, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.

As I was hanging up, Jerome, ever the meticulous one, came into my office waving a single piece of paper. I said, What’s that? He said he had been going through the file of Quaker’s trial lawyer. It was a page from Detective Wyatt’s report. I wondered how I had missed it. Probably because I read through the file before I knew who Cantu was. Either way, it was not exactly a confidence booster. The report indicated that Wyatt had interviewed Cantu. It didn’t say why. In the report Wyatt had noted that Cantu had an alibi. But it didn’t say what the alibi was, or why Wyatt had even bothered interviewing Cantu in the first place.

Most important of all, though, the fact that the report was in the trial lawyer’s file meant that the trial lawyer had it, and that meant we could not accuse the state of withholding relevant evidence. One of our legal claims had just disappeared.

I told Jerome what Gary had learned at Cantu’s former house.

He said, That’s too bad, but it really doesn’t matter. It’s not like he was all of a sudden going to admit to killing three people.

Jerome is also the guy in the office who can be counted on to remind me that the way our lives actually work is not how death-penalty cases get portrayed on TV. I said, I’ve got a story that ain’t got no moral. He looked at me oddly. I said, You know, let the bad guy win every once in a while? His look didn’t change. I said, It’s Billy Preston, man.

Jerome has an iPod that has something like fifteen thousand songs on it. He plays guitar in a garage band. He said, Who’s that?

I shook my head. He put the piece of paper on my desk and walked out.

GREEN’S LAWYER WAS Mark Roberts, one of the smartest, most aggressive death-penalty lawyers around. When Green first wrote asking to see me, I called Roberts to make sure it was okay with him. The fact that Green didn’t like him was yet another fact that made me feel better about my first instinct. I called Roberts and told him about Green’s claim of responsibility. I knew what he would say if I asked him to allow me to get a written statement from Green. He’d say no. The reason is that he had asked the parole board to commute Green’s sentence to life in prison, and he had filed another writ with the Supreme Court. Logically and legally speaking, whether Green did or did not tell Cantu to kill Tricia Cummings had no bearing on either one of those last-ditch efforts. Realistically speaking, it mattered a lot. If there was some parole-board member who was inclined toward leniency, or if there was some Supreme Court justice who was intrigued by Mark’s legal argument, the inclination and intrigue would give way to disgust and abhorrence if Green was connected to three more murders, especially when two of them were children. I asked him anyway. He said, Green is a piece of shit. I’m tempted. But sorry, Doc, no can do. I told him thanks anyway.

In Thursday’s mail I got a handwritten statement from Green, largely repeating what he had told me in person. His execution was a week away. I called Mark again. Green was a goner. There was no chance whatsoever that he would be alive the following Friday, so I made what I believed to be a costless offer. I wanted to get Green to tell his story while hooked up to a polygraph. Polygraph evidence is inadmissible in court, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking that if his confession held up, the parole board or the governor would feel safer granting Quaker relief. I said to Roberts, Here’s what I’d like to do. I’ll have Green polygraphed tomorrow, but I won’t use the results until after he’s executed.

Roberts said, You mean if he’s executed.

I said, Yeah, that’s what I mean. If he’s executed.

Roberts said, If it’s okay with Green, it’s okay with me.

THAT AFTERNOON I rode the Metro train from my office to the medical center to have Charlie look at my eye. I was reading some papers we planned to file the next day in the O’Neill case. I did not have my new glasses yet. I was holding the pages so close to my face that they were touching my nose. A thick Hispanic woman was breast-feeding an infant. Sitting next to her was a boy who looked to be about eight. He was beautiful, part Latino and part black. I looked down at what I was reading and heard him say, Mire, Mama. His mother said, Shh. The boy said, Mama, ese hombre es ciego. I looked up. The boy was pointing at me. I gave him a smile, waved surreptitiously with two fingers, then covered my eyes with my hands and peeked over them at him. He could tell his friends that he played peek-a-boo with a blind man. He smiled back, and his mother looked at me warmly.

Charlie had told me that I would be able to go back to work forty-eight hours after the surgery, but that I would get headaches for a while. He asked how I was doing. I told him I had a splitting headache. He said, Yes. I told you that would happen. It’s perfectly normal. He had been using an instrument to look at the back of my eye, where he had reattached the retina. He pushed back from the machine he had been looking through. He said, Well, the front of the eye still looks like hamburger, but the back looks beautiful. Your retina is better now than when you were born. I told him the headaches made it hard to concentrate, and I asked him how long they would last. He said, Buy a month’s worth of aspirin.

I said, A month? Are you serious?

He said, You’ve always been an impatient SOB.

I said, Yeah, but a grateful one. I shook his hand and left.

ITOOK THE TRAIN back to my office but decided not to go back upstairs. I got in my car intending to go home. Kassie had gotten special permission from the warden to polygraph Green the next morning. I needed to spend some time thinking about what questions to ask him.

I called Jerome to talk about O’Neill. O’Neill’s execution was four days away. We had asked the state court to halt the execution on the grounds that O’Neill had descended so deeply into the darkness of madness that he was immune from execution. The court denied our motion, saying we had waited too long to raise the issue of O’Neill’s sanity. We immediately filed a petition in federal court, but it was just sitting there. Jerome asked when I thought we’d hear something. I said, I’m guessing at about five forty-five on Monday. That means we can call him when we get denied and he’ll get a whole quarter hour to get ready to die. Jerome asked me if I would have time to visit with him when I was at the prison the next day.