Bill Moyers' Journal had a thoughtful conversation between Moyers and historian Thomas Cahill about the death penalty and the case of Dominique Green this weekend. Green was executed by Texas in 2004.
The video is available here.
More on Dominique Green is here.
"I am not angry, but I am disappointed that I was denied justice. But I am happy that I was afforded you all as family and friends. You all have been there for me; it's a miracle. I love you...I am not as strong as I thought I was going to be. But I guess it only hurts for a little while. You all are my family. Please keep my memory alive."--Dominique Green, Last Statement
At 7:59 PM on October 26, 2004, Dominique Green, 30, was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas.
He was arrested back in 1992, when he was 18, and convicted of fatally shooting Andrew Lastrapes Jr. during a robbery outside a Houston convenience store. Green admitted to taking part in the robbery but insisted he did not pull the trigger. The victim's family too opposed the sentence:
"All of us have forgiven Dominique for what happened and want to give him another chance at life. Everyone deserves another chance," wrote Bernatte Luckett Lastrapes, the victim's wife, to Texas Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.
And the extended conversation between Moyers and Cahill is here. This excerpt is from the setup piece and the beginning of a must-read conversation.
Here in the states he arranged for his friend Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa to visit Green at the prison in Texas. They talked for two hours in private and Tutu then issued a plea in behalf of Green, calling the death penalty 'an absurdity that brutalizes society.' It didn't matter. Dominique Green was put to death at 7:59 p.m. On October 26, 2004.
Dominique Green is the subject of Thomas Cahill's next book. Cahill's work chronicling the roots of western civilization is a pageant of events and personalities. But right now he is absorbed with the story of one man's life and death. Welcome to THE JOURNAL.
BILL MOYERS: Tom Cahill, thanks for joining me on the JOURNAL.
THOMAS CAHILL: Bill, it's always a pleasure to be invited.
BILL MOYERS: Tell me, what was Dominique Green's story? Where did he come from and where did he wind up?
THOMAS CAHILL: He came from an alcoholic drug-using household. He was sexually abused several times. He was put in juvenile homes. He was-- just about everything that could be done to him that anyone could imagine being done to a child, was done to him. When it says in the Old Testament that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the children into the third and fourth generation, I think that's correct, that these terrible things that go on in families go from one generation to another to another.
And one more exchange:
BILL MOYERS: Let me come back to Dominique Green's storyDid you find Dominique Green to have turned that prison cell and death row into a zone of peace?
THOMAS CAHILL: Well, you see in somebody's body and their face and their eyes, in the way they move what they're about. This was somebody who was deeply at peace with himself. Who was perfectly happy to go out toward another person and be in communication, who embraced you with his language if not with his body since he couldn't get through the glass partition.
BILL MOYERS: You've got to help me understand that. Because I'm imagining you seeing him through that glass partition. This is a man everybody down there thinks has killed another man. And something communicates itself to you through that glass partition.
BILL MOYERS: So, what struck you?
THOMAS CAHILL: Instead of talking about himself and --what the poor conditions he had to live in and all the things that I already knew about, he wanted desperately to talk about books and writing. And he had become a great reader in the 11 years that he had been in prison. The book that he had read most recently that he really cared deeply about was Desmond Tutu's book NO FUTURE WITHOUT FORGIVENESS, which is Archbishop Tutu's book about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But what also came out was that even though they're all in solitary confinement and you would think they can't communicate with one another, they manage. Because human beings are incredibly resourceful in situations like this. And Dominique was able to send that book after he had read it, up and down that death row.
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