A glimpse inside Texas’ death penalty machine

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.

The Observer recently spoke with Dow about his work, his memoir and the criminal justice system.

Texas Observer: There are several instances in your new book, The Autobiography of an Execution, 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.

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Source: Texas Observer, April 15, 2010