David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

An original writ is an appeal filed directly in the U.S. Supreme Court. Most pleadings that are filed in the Supreme Court are appeals from a lower appellate court’s ruling. We had not filed anything in any lower court of appeals. We had placed all our eggs in one basket, the highly remote possibility that Judge Truesdale would do the right thing, and our million-to-one shot had paid off. If it had failed, we would have filed something. Once it succeeded, we relaxed. How many ways could we have been wrong? We didn’t expect to succeed. When we did, we didn’t expect the DA to appeal. When they did, we didn’t expect the court of appeals to intervene. When they did, we didn’t expect them to do the DA’s work for them. I had explanations for all these decisions, but as I tell my students at the law school, if you’re explaining, you’re losing. The bottom line is that there was nothing we could appeal to the Supreme Court, and it was too late to file anything in the lower courts. So in a way, Jerome was right. This is known as the mathematics of small numbers. When there is only one option, that option is the right answer.

I did not need to remind him that we were coming up on the hundred-year anniversary of the last time the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a death-row inmate on an original writ, because he already knew. Our lone option was a puny, shriveled, impotent protest.

I said, Go ahead. Tell the Court it’s coming. I’ll call the governor and tell them we’re filing a reprieve request. Then I’m going to the prison. Call me every ten minutes.

In several moments of realistic lucidity, anticipating this southern turn, I had drafted a letter to the governor, laying out the argument that Quaker was innocent, and would have been found innocent if his lawyer had not been inept. I asked Kassie and Gary to tinker with it and send it by e-mail. Gary was in Kassie’s office, his hand resting on her shoulder. They looked lovely together, and I thought I was going to cry. How could I know so little about the lives of these people with whom I spent so much time? To how much of the world was I utterly oblivious?

THE PRISON WAS two hours away. I did not have two hours. I had maybe an hour and a half. I had called and told the warden I was coming. I asked them not to move Quaker out of the holding cell until ten. That would still give them two hours to carry out their protocol, more than enough time. They told me they would wait until exactly ten, not a minute later.

During the daytime, the drive from Houston to Huntsville is beautiful. The piney forest presses against the interstate from both the east and the west. At night, it’s inky black. Once I got north of Conroe, the road was empty and dark. Kassie called every ten minutes, just as I had requested. Every call went like this: I’d answer by saying, Any news? She’d say, No, nothing yet. I’d say, Thanks for the update. Talk to you in ten.

I had no interest in being alone with my absence of ideas. I called Katya. I told Lincoln good night. I turned on a country music station. Katya once suspected that her iPod has a brain, because the random shuffles produce perfect juxtapositions. It’s just math, I said, not divine intervention. I wish she had been there with me. Gordon Lightfoot was singing about books you won’t read because the endings are too sad. It was too obvious to be ominous. I changed to a Motown station. There was Gladys Knight, right on cue to challenge my rationality, singing a song about saying good-bye. Proximity to death is religion’s most successful proselytizer.

When I was taking flying lessons, before my first solo flight, Quan—the instructor—and I headed out over the Katy Prairie. It was a perfect day, not a cloud in sight, not a whisper on the radar. I turned south and flew us toward the Gulf of Mexico. But summer weather on the Gulf Coast can be confounding, and a dense fog blew in fast. The typically calm Quan took the controls and said, a little too loudly, I’m flying the plane. You couldn’t see a thing. He was flying by the instruments, but they don’t help you see the runway. The wind was ferocious. I did not know enough to be scared, but when Quan finally flew us into visibility, he opened his window, lit a cigarette, and shook one out of the pack at me. I suddenly started shaking so hard that the cigarette fell from my mouth. It rolled under the seat. Quan said, Dive. I looked at him. He said, You’re flying now. Dive the plane. I did. The cigarette appeared. Quan reached over and picked it up, then he stuck it back in my mouth.

Lessons in life are context specific. Contexts are never the same. If there are no lessons you can use, does that mean there are actually no lessons? Driving to the prison, I struck a match to light a cigar and somehow dropped it. I couldn’t very well make a car dive. I reached down to put out the flame before my car caught fire, and when I did my front right tire briefly ran onto the shoulder. At nearly a hundred miles an hour, it made quite a racket. I yanked the car back into my lane. I almost laughed out loud, imagining killing myself on my way to an execution, imagining what the hell else could go wrong. That’s when the flashing lights appeared behind me.

IPULLED ONTO THE RIGHT-HAND SHOULDER and left the engine running. I was looking out my sideview mirror, hoping to get a measure of his attitude from his gait. The trooper managed to approach my car from the passenger side, completely out of my sight, and when he banged on the window, the surprise caused my bladder to leak. He asked for my license and proof of insurance and appeared ready to take his good old time. I handed them over, fighting the temptation to ask him to hurry up and write me a ticket. He asked if I knew why he had pulled me over. I didn’t have time to play this game. I said, I know I was speeding. Can you please just hurry up and write me the ticket. I have to get out of here. He was holding a flashlight he had been shining down at my license he had placed on a clipboard. He clenched his jaw and shone the light in my eyes. The bright beam reflected off my seething anger, and I felt no impulse to look away.

He said, What exactly is the hurry?

Recently on a stretch of highway near where I was a trooper had pulled over a young college student who was speeding his dog to an emergency veterinary clinic. The encounter was caught on the trooper’s dashboard-mounted video camera. While the driver pleaded with the trooper to let him get back on the road, the trooper took his time, telling the driver there were plenty of other dogs out there if his died. The dog did die. Sometimes I consider modifying my opposition to capital punishment where child and animal abusers are involved.

I said, Officer, I am a lawyer and I have an emergency. He waited for me to go on, skeptical there is such a thing as a legal emergency at nine o’clock at night in the middle of nowhere. I said, I am a death-penalty lawyer and there is an execution scheduled for right now.

He hadn’t heard that one before. He lowered the clipboard and shone his light at the ground. He said, Prosecution or defense?

If you’ve never been tempted to lie, you’ve never been in love. Truthfulness is overrated. The world works the way we want it to because of a thousand little innocent lies. I suddenly realized that in the back of my mind I had started fashioning my story as soon as I saw his strobe. Any story would do. I had to get out of here. My phone rang. I said to the trooper, It’s my office, and I answered. Still no news. He said, I asked whether you are prosecution or defense.