By David R. Dow, Distinguished University Professor, University of Houston Law Center & Litigation Director, Texas Defender Service, a non-profit law corporation that represents death row inmates.
My recent book, The Autobiography of an Execution, is about the death penalty, but it is not really a polemic. It is more a memoir about what it is like to be a death penalty lawyer - about how I try to not let days spent with murderers ruin me as a husband and a father. Before I wrote it, I had mixed feelings about memoirs. The entire genre seemed arrogant. But I discovered some things I wanted to say.
I was out having a drink with a colleague of mine. He asked me what I was working on. It was a typical case: a young black man had grown up without a dad and with a mentally unstable and abusive mom. When he was eight, his only brother, who was also his best friend, committed suicide. He joined a gang and started robbing people. One robbery included the brutal murder of an elderly white woman. His court-appointed lawyer went through the motions. When a poor black gang member kills a white woman, it's essentially inevitable. He wound up on death row.
In twenty years as a death penalty lawyer, I've represented more than a hundred death row inmates. All murders are tragic and irreparable, but you don't hear about most of them. There was no reason for my colleague to know anything about the case I was working on. It was not from the part of the state where we live; it was not high-profile. But I could tell from the look on his face that the case was familiar to him. Finally I realized why: He knew the murder victim and her family, and he was close to them.
I felt a need to tell him that I was not indifferent to the pain that the murder victim and her family had suffered, just because I was representing the man who was in part responsible for inflicting it. I didn't want him to think I cared more about my client than I cared about him. I know how easy it is to confuse the belief that murderers are entitled to vigorous legal defenses with the conclusion that the lawyers who provide that defense are insensitive to the injuries their clients have inflicted. I wanted to try to correct that mistake.
There was something else. I had a friend who was murdered. Years later the murderer asked me to represent him. He did not know that I knew his victim. I wrote him and said I couldn't help. I'm against the death penalty. I did not think the man who murdered my friend should be executed. But I was incapable of being the lawyer who tried to stop it. That's another reason I wrote this book: to try to communicate to death penalty supporters that I know what they feel. I know, because I feel it, too.
