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

by David R. Dow

Overview

When David Dow was first asked to represent death row inmates, he supported the death penalty. Capital punishment was an abstraction to him, and he imagined that death row was filled with characters like Charles Manson and Hannibal Lecter. Dow gradually realized that his perception of the death penalty and those on death row was completely incorrect. Dow began witnessing the profound injustices the inmates consistently endured: from confessions coerced by the police to bizarrely incompetent lawyers; from corrupt prosecutors and backward judges to racist juries. None of his clients was a serial killer; some had been unarmed and perhaps unwitting accomplices; most were repentant; one turned himself in; several were obviously innocent. Not one of them fit the media stereotype of the hardened, heartless murderer, incapable of rehabilitation, undeserving of even a modicum of justice. And yet these are the men Dow came to know as he fought, often unsuccessfully, for their lives. In the end, he is forced to concur with Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart's famous pronouncement that being sentenced to death in America is like being struck by lightning; capital punishment isn't reserved for the most heinous criminals but is meted out arbitrarily. The cases in this eye-opening book are those of the men on death row who changed Dow's mind about capital punishment forever. You'll meet Johnny Joe Martinez, for instance, who was executed despite the fact that Dow convinced the court that he had strong grounds for an appeal. Martinez had exhausted his right of appeal when his lawyer wrote a mere seventeen-line-long appeal; he was executed on a technicality. Roger Coleman was denied an appeal because, although his lawyers mailed the appeal notice on time, it was received literally one day too late; he was executed because his lawyers failed to use registered mail. Another inmate was executed despite his court-appointed lawyer's shocking and demonstrable incompetence: the lawyer arrived at the courtroom drunk and snorted cocaine in the bathroom during breaks in the testimony. All of these men were executed on technicalities. These concrete accounts of the people Dow has known and represented prove that the death penalty is consistently unjust, and it's precisely this fundamental-and lethal-injustice, Dow convincingly argues, that should compel us to abandon the system altogether.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807044193
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	05/01/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

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

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

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