Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America's Death Row

by David R. Dow

Overview

When David Dow took his first capital case, he supported the death penalty. He changed his position as the men on death row became real people to him, and as he came to witness the profound injustices they endured: from coerced confessions to disconcertingly incompetent lawyers; from racist juries and backward judges to a highly arbitrary death penalty system.

It is these concrete accounts of the people Dow has known and represented that prove the death penalty is consistently unjust, and it's precisely this fundamental-and lethal-injustice, Dow argues, that should compel us to abandon the system altogether.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807044186
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	05/01/2005
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	268
Sales rank:	1,010,811
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

David R. Dow is professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center and an internationally recognized figure in the fight against the death penalty. He is the founder and director of the Texas Innocence Network and has represented more than thirty death row inmates.Regrularly quoted in publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post, Dow is the coeditor of Machinery of Death: The Reality of of America's Death Penalty Regime. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Editorial Reviews

The death penalty is wrong because it can't be meted out fairly, argues Dow (Law/Univ. of Houston). The standard argument against executions is that they are cruel, inhumane and somehow uncivilized: a rhetorical strategy that often runs aground on the hard retort that killers can't be punished enough and to feel sympathy for them is naive at best. Some death penalty abolitionists, like Sister Helen Prejean, will explain why certain death row inmates are actually innocent, but even though the author is director of the Texas Innocence Network, he thinks that's also the wrong angle to take. Dow systematically walks readers through the process by which states decide to execute criminals, a process that ultimately owes far more to a convict's race, class and caliber of attorney than to the crime's level of brutality, which is supposed to be the factor that determines whether a death penalty or life sentence is imposed. "The tiny handful that we execute is almost never the worst of the worst," writes Dow. "Instead, people are executed because eyewitnesses make mistakes, police lie, defense lawyers sleep, and judges do not care." He returns repeatedly to the subject of defense lawyers who slept through the trials of clients who later went to death row; in one unbelievable instance in Texas, six people who had been represented by one dozing lawyer were executed. It isn't just a bad defense that makes the system so unfair to the accused, the author asserts; it's also the simple fact that minorities are executed far more often than their white counterparts (regardless of the severity of the crime) and that higher courts are increasingly unwilling to hear appeals from those on death row. Though thecentral power of Dow's argument occasionally gets lost in a book that frequently reads like a dry legal brief, he succeeds in illuminating the horrific arbitrariness of a system that has abandoned blind justice for "the rule of the mob." An honorably dispassionate and logical broadside against a shameful practice.

Kirkus Reviews

An honorably dispassionate and logical broadside against a shameful practice.
—Kirkus Reviews

"Dow reveals the dirty little secret of American death-penalty litigation: procedure trumps innocence . . . [His book] is insightful and full of the kinds of revelations that may lead readers to reconsider their stand on the death penalty."—Steve Mills, Chicago Tribune

"Dow's book leaves all else behind. It is powerful, direct, informative, and told in compelling human terms. He makes us see that the issue is not sentiment or retribution or even innocence. It is justice."—Anthony Lewis, Pulitzer Prize-winning former columnist for the New York Times

David R. Dow is professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center and an internationally recognized figure in the fight against the death penalty. He is the founder and director of the Texas Innocence Network and has represented more than thirty death row inmates. Regularly quoted in publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post, Dow lives in Houston, Texas.

From the Publisher