The Life of a Death Penalty Lawyer

Toward the beginning of “The Auto­biography of an Execution,” David Dow relaxes after a speech with the celebrated death penalty abolitionist Sister Helen Prejean. (“It was the first time I went drinking with a nun.”) Prejean tells Dow, who has represented more than 100 death row inmates over 20 years, that “support for the death penalty is a mile wide, but just an inch deep.” Dow responds: “Well, Sister, I believe you can drown in an inch of water.” This book is Dow’s effort to drain the puddle.

Still, David Dow is in Texas, drowning in the death penalty. As he explains: “I understand the death penalty supporters. I used to be one. I can relate to the retributive impulse. I know people I want to kill.” But he devotes his life to fighting for his clients — many of whom he dislikes enormously, and all but seven of whom he believes to be guilty — because he’s certain that what Justice Harry A. Blackmun called the American “machinery of death” is broken. Cops fudge the truth. They coerce false testimony. Court-appointed lawyers sleep through trials. They miss deadlines. They fail to put on exculpatory evidence. Juries believe every word uttered by “expert” witnesses who opine on defendants they have never met. Jurors evade responsibility by hiding behind the other jurors. Judges evade responsibility by hiding behind jury verdicts, and appeals courts hide behind the trial courts. The Supreme Court can hide from a case by refusing to take it. Elected judges, particularly in Texas, must deliver convictions. Federal judges named to the federal bench because they are pals with a senator overlook deeply flawed trials. And by the time Dow comes into a case, the law will sometimes not permit him to help his client. As he explains: “Prosecutors and judges kowtow to family members of murder victims who demand an eye for an eye, and the lonely lawyer declaiming about proper procedures is a shouting lunatic in the asylum.”

Dow is a far cry from a shouting lunatic, and the farthest thing from a bleeding-heart abolitionist. He has a pickup truck, a taste for bourbon and a dog. “I do not want my clients to be killed, and I can’t stand them,” he writes. You’ll find Dow at least three stops past the Clint Eastwood mile marker on the Flinty Guy Highway. He is so bare-bones he won’t even use quotation marks.

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EXECUTION, By David R. Dow, 273 pp. Twelve. $24.99

Source: The New York Times, Feb. 11, 2010