David Dow - The Autobiography of an Execution

I was tempted to go back over the quiz and change a few of my answers from yes to not sure so that my grade would accord with reality. But I couldn’t bring myself to lie.

Doesn’t that prove that I was right and she is wrong?

Maybe belief isn’t a choice after all. Maybe truth is.

IGOT HOME at a little after two. Winona was waiting for me in the kitchen and followed me up the stairs. Lincoln was sleeping on our bed. Katya was reading. She said, He asked if he could sleep in here so we could all be together.

I sat down next to her. I rested my head on her shoulder and stifled a sob and told her all of it. Lincoln woke up. He said, Hi, Dada. What time is it?

I said, It’s late, amigo. Go back to sleep.

Okay. Good night.

Katya and I held hands and watched him. I ran my fingers through her hair. Neither of us said anything. There wasn’t anything to say.

When I got out of the shower, Katya had fallen asleep with the book on her chest. Winona’s legs were twitching, her head on Lincoln’s hip. I poured brandy into a snifter and sat in the rocking chair at the foot of the bed. I picked up a book of Anne Carson poems. Anger is a bitter lock , she says. But you can turn it .

I turned off the lamp and closed the book. I sat there rocking, watching them sleep, hearing them breathe, my pillars.

Early the next morning, two hours before dawn, I got dressed in the dark and walked quietly downstairs. I swallowed four aspirins with a quart of water and left a note for Katya on the kitchen counter. I clipped a flashing reflector to my backpack, got on my bike, and headed back to work. We had another client set for execution the following week, and we had a lot to do.

At my office I couldn’t find the coffee. Usually by the time I arrive somebody’s already made it. It bothered me that I wasn’t sure who. I rode the elevator back downstairs and crossed the street to the coffee shop. There were workers inside, but the doors were still locked. I sat on a bench outside and waited. I watched two trains pass, a northbound crossing Buffalo Bayou toward the University of Houston, and one heading south to the medical center. Both were packed full of commuters. I could see their blank faces under the fluorescent glare. It was too light to see any stars, but there was Venus, sitting right beside the pockmarked crescent moon, winking at me from low in the western sky.

Henry Quaker had been dead almost six hours.

I bought a large americano with an extra shot and a navel orange. Back in front of my computer, I sipped the coffee as I read through yesterday’s e-mail, mostly condolences and a bit of spam. A couple were from people telling me he got what he deserved. I wrote them back and said, Thanks for your thoughtful note.

The weekend before the presidential election, my wife, brother, and I walked door-to-door in rural western Missouri canvassing for Obama. We bought sandwiches at a luncheonette where a skinny white guy squinted at our Obama buttons and whispered, I’m voting for him. Later we rang the bell at a dilapidated A-frame house set back far from a rutted dirt road. Three mangy dogs were chained out front to massive pines. A young pregnant woman holding a baby on her hip said she would never vote for someone who wouldn’t even put his hand on the Bible. Katya wanted to explain to her that she was confused, that Obama is a Christian. I whispered, Let’s go back to the car. People who form firm opinions with so little knowledge only pretend to be open-minded. They select their facts like food from a buffet.

In Executed on a Technicality , the book of mine Ezekiel Green said he read, my objective was to educate people about how the death penalty works. One reviewer said the book was about my cases, but not at all about me. She was exactly right. Maybe it was a mistake to write it that way, but it wasn’t accidental. I wanted to write about facts. My beliefs were irrelevant.

But it is your beliefs, not just facts, that determine who you are. Of the hundred or more death-row inmates I’ve represented, there are seven, including Quaker, I believe to be innocent. They get sentenced to death because they have incompetent or underpaid trial lawyers, and because human beings make mistakes. They get executed because my colleagues and I can’t find a way to stop it. Quaker won’t be the last. I tell young lawyers who want to be death-penalty lawyers that if it’s going to be disabling to watch your clients die, you need to find something else to do. Your clients are going to die. And it’s not a comfort to know that most of them are guilty. The inmate set to die the week after the Quaker execution had murdered a woman and raped her, in that order. But if you believe it’s wrong to kill, you believe it’s wrong to kill. When I first met him, he said to me, All praise be to Allah for sending me here. I was on the wrong path, and until I got here I didn’t know it. He believed he would not be executed. He thought it mattered that he had reformed. His older brother was a marine. He told me if he got paroled he wanted to go to Iraq and fight for his country.

Quaker and Winston and Green and all the rest are not their real names, but their cases are real. The courts and judges behaved in the manner I have described. I think some judges should be removed from the bench, but I don’t think Judge Truesdale did anything legally unethical, or I would have said so. I haven’t held much back. She cared about doing the right thing in the Quaker case. Lots of things are legal and also wrong.

As I was finishing this book, Katya, Lincoln, the dog, and I were in Park City, Utah. There were no executions scheduled in Texas for another month. We were hiking along Yellow Pine creek, up in the Uinta mountains, a few miles north of Kamas. We wanted to hike through the forest up to the lake, but three miles in, Lincoln said he was tired and asked if we could turn around. We said okay, and Lincoln took off sprinting, back toward the trailhead, the dog on his heels. We stopped to watch them.

I began talking to Katya about the book. I told her I felt like it was missing something, but I wasn’t sure what. I said, The book is as factually truthful as I am allowed to be, and as emotionally honest as I am capable of being.

Katya said, Without years of therapy, anyway.

I smiled. We walked on along the creek, craning to keep Lincoln in sight.

The cases I have written about are not unusual. My other cases, every death-penalty lawyer’s cases, are just like them. What’s missing is the proof that what you have just finished reading is mundane. The day after Henry Quaker got put to death, my colleagues and I went back to the office and did it all over again, and all the same things happened.

I realized what’s missing: all the other cases.

Lincoln waited for us to catch up at the edge of a pasture. A couple dozen cows were grazing and lowing loudly. The moms hustled to get between their young calves and us. Katya’s afraid of cows. She walked closer to me. Lincoln said, Mama, maybe you should get a baby cow and that way when it grows up you won’t be scared.

Lincoln and the dog ran ahead again. When we caught up to them, Lincoln was sitting on the ground, leaning against an aspen, and the dog was drinking from the creek. Dark clouds were forming in the west. The setting sun sank behind them and streaked the sky with wisps of purple and orange. The wind blew down from the north, and the air held a hint of chill. Lincoln asked whether we could make a fire when we got home.

In a couple of days, or maybe in a week, I’d have to start working on the next execution. But at that moment, as we walked slowly back toward where we had started, the three of us with the dog, all we talked about was what we would fix for dinner that night, and when we would come back to this spot, and about where we would go tomorrow.