That's the title of Dave Mann's report in the current issue of the Texas Observer about David Dow's The Autobiography of an Execution. The article is subtitled, "In his new memoir, attorney David Dow offers a glimpse inside Texas’ death penalty machine." Here's the introduction to the conversation between Dow and Mann:
If you’re a death row inmate in Texas, you likely will spend the final hours of your life in a small holding cell about 10 feet from the execution chamber in Huntsville, waiting to hear if your final appeals will spare you. Your lawyer will call and, with few exceptions, say the courts and the governor have denied your clemency requests, and that you have minutes left to live.
David Dow has made many of these calls. A law professor at the University of Houston and a death penalty lawyer with the nonprofit Texas Defender Service, Dow has for two decades represented inmates facing execution. He often is one of the last people they talk to.
As Dow writes in his new memoir, The Autobiography of an Execution, these last calls are among the worst moments. What do you say to someone who’s about to die? Dow tries to avoid uttering the kinds of pat phrases common to normal conversation—see you soon; talk to you later; take care of yourself—that have no meaning to a condemned man.
And:
Texas Observer: There are several instances in the book where you take on someone’s case at the last minute, and it turns out their attorney had slept through the trial or their initial appellate attorney had done a terrible job and ignored obvious avenues of appeal. These things seem to come up again and again.Dow: They do. There was a famous case from Harris County involving a death row inmate by the name of Calvin Burdine, who was convicted and sentenced to death. He was ultimately moved off death row because his lawyer had been sleeping. A federal district judge ruled that he was therefore entitled to a new trial, and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that. Well, that’s great. But what goes unnoticed is that the same lawyer who represented Calvin Burdine and who fell asleep in Calvin Burdine’s trial had represented probably a dozen other people, and he’d fallen asleep in their trials, too. None of them got relief. In fact, almost all of them have been executed. So one of the things I try to do in the book is just reveal how common it is for these types of violations to occur, but also, despite how common it is for these types of violations to occur, how uncommon it is for death row inmates to get any legal relief.
Sunday's edition of the Newark Star-Ledger in New Jersey carried the book review, "Texas lawyer's front-row view of death row," by Barry Evenchick.
A significant majority of Americans reportedly continues to favor the death penalty, despite numerous studies demonstrating that it does not serve as a meaningful deterrent to crime, is viewed by many as cruel and inhuman, and oftentimes appears to be particularly directed at racial minorities.
In 2007, New Jersey became the first state to repeal its death penalty law since the restoration of the punishment by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976. The controversial subject remains actively under consideration in virtually every state.
David R. Dow, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, serves as the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit legal aid corporation that represents death-row inmates in the state that leads the country in executions. His book details cases in which he was either successful or unsuccessful in delaying or preventing the death penalty from being imposed.
Earlier coverage of The Autobiography of an Execution, begins with this post.
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