More Book Reviews

David Dow wraps up author events with three events scheduled this week:

Tuesday, February 23rd – Book People – Austin, TX
Wednesday, February 24th – Barnes & Noble – San Antonio, TX
Saturday, February 27th – Politics & Prose – Washington, DC

Time.com has posted a Q&A with Dow, "The Death Penalty: Racist, Classist and Unfair."  The interview was conducted by  Laura Fitzpatrick.

Some two-thirds of Americans support the death penalty, but few are forced to confront it on a daily basis. As an appellate lawyer in Texas — which leads the U.S. in executions — David Dow has represented more than 100 death-row inmates over the past two decades. In The Autobiography of an Execution, he recounts what it's like to do the job and then come home to his family and his dog. He talked to TIME about why he keeps doing the work, the problem with juries and what it's like to look murderers in the eye.

You call the capital-punishment system "racist, classist, [and] unprincipled," but say you feel sympathy for people who support the death penalty. How can the two coexist?
On a regular basis, I'm sitting face-to-face with murderers. When I imagine sitting face-to-face with somebody who might have injured somebody I love or care about, I can imagine wanting to injure that person myself. I used to support the death penalty. [But] once I started doing the work, I became aware of the inequalities. I tell people that if you're going to commit murder, you want to be white, and you want to be wealthy — so that you can hire a first-class lawyer — and you want to kill a black person. And if [you are], the odds of your being sentenced to death are basically zero. It's one thing to say that rich people should be able to drive Ferraris and poor people should have to take the bus. It's very different to say that rich people should get treated one way by the state's criminal-justice system and poor people should get treated another way. But that is the system that we have.

And:

What do you think is the future of capital punishment in the U.S.?
My prediction is that we're going to get rid of it for economic reasons. We spend at least a million dollars more on a death penalty case than on a non-death-penalty case. In the U.S., where we've executed 1,200 people since the death penalty [was reinstated in 1976], that's $1.2 billion. I just think, gosh, with $1.2 billion, you could hire a lot of policemen. You could have a lot of educational programs inside of prisons so that when people come out of prison they know how to do something besides rob convenience stores and sell drugs. There are already counties in Texas, of all places, that have said, this is just not worth it: let's fix the schools and fill the potholes in the streets instead of squandering this money on a death-penalty case. You don't need to be a bleeding heart to make that argument.

Jordan Smith has posted, "Tinkering With Death," at the Austin Chronicle.

University of Houston law professor and Texas Defender Service litigation director David Dow's new memoir The Autobiography of an Execution (Twelve, $24.99) is a quietly written and devastating indictment of the death penalty in general, and of its practice in Texas in particular.

Although death sentences are down nationwide – and in 2009 just nine new sentences were handed out in Texas, the fewest since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 – the machinery of death in Texas is nonetheless fierce: Of the 1,749 executions in the U.S. since reinstatement, 449 of them have taken place in Texas. Sentencing someone to death here is not an idle threat.

Still, Dow (who will read from his book Tuesday night Feb. 23, at BookPeople) is not sanctimonious: He knows that the majority of his clients are guilty, even though there are seven (of the more than 100 he's represented) that he feels strongly were, in fact, innocent. Dow previously believed in the death penalty, but does not now. That is in part, at least, because experience has taught Dow that upholding the rights of murderers, to paraphrase the author, doesn't really concern those who deem the death penalty an appropriate form of punishment. Many involved in tinkering with the machinery of death would hold that the ends justify whatever means, even overlooking the truth.

And:

Indeed, in the end, Dow's recounting of his role in the machinery is haunting. It is bleak. It is sad. It isn't for reading before bed. But it is absolutely worth reading because it is also bluntly honest: Dow does not shrink from calling his own bluff – the ways in which he is often simply running to keep up with the relentless pace of death penalty work in Texas, and where he may at times play a role in its dysfunction.

The Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times carried two book reviews, one by Steve Weinberg of Dow's book, "Lawyer's angry look at death penalty."

In the Chicago area, already bedeviled by the implementation of the death penalty, a remarkable new book set in Texas seems sure to resonate.

Texas deserves its reputation as both the execution capital and the wrongful convictions capital of the United States. Texas lawyer David R. Dow doesn’t delve into the Cook County mess as part of The Autobiography of an Execution (Twelve, $24.99), but he knows plenty about the Illinois death penalty moratorium.

The Sun-Times also carried a review of Andrea Lyon's memoir Angel of Death Row.  The review, "Getting to know your death row inmate," was written by Thomas Frisbie.

Andrea D. Lyon would like to acquaint you with the kinds of people who face the death penalty.

Lyon, who handled 136 murder cases, many of them as a Cook County public defender, thinks people charged in capital cases too often are portrayed as inhuman. To add some insight into who they are, as well as to tell her own story, she wrote Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer (Kaplan, $24.94). The book ranges over her experiences, from her days as a would-be Atticus Finch eager in 1976 to get onto the public defender’s homicide task force, to an experienced litigator ready to hand over the torch to a younger generation of lawyers.

A theme throughout her memoir is her repeated discovery that the stories behind even brutal crimes can be more complex than they at first appear.

“People are a product of a lot of different forces, and they end up where they end up for a lot of different reasons,” Lyon said.

In Angel of Death Row, Lyon, who now is associate dean for clinical programs at the DePaul University College of Law, revisits memorable cases she handled while working in Cook County and later while on the faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In each case, as she investigates the backgrounds of the defendants she represents, she learns about poverty, childhood abuse, domestic violence or other factors.

But that often not is the image the public sees, she said.    

“They are cardboard cutouts of evil,” Lyon said. “I wanted to tell my own story, but I also wanted to tell, even more important, my clients’ stories, so people could see that they are human beings, whether they are innocent or guilty or somewhere in the middle.”

Earlier coverage of Dow's book is here; related items in the books index.