A Saint on Death Row

by Thomas Cahill

  ALSO BY THOMAS CAHILL

  THE HINGES OF HISTORY™

  How the Irish Saved Civilization

  The Gifts of the Jews

  Desire of the Everlasting Hills

  Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

  Mysteries of the Middle Ages

  A Literary Guide to Ireland (with Susan Cahill)

  Jesus’ Little Instruction Book

  Pope John XXIII

  In memory of

  Raymond E. Brown

  Ursula M. Niebuhr

  Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

  kind, courageous friends

  If you are not loved, you do not exist.

  — MARIO MARAZZITI

  PROLOGUE

  I first met Dominique Green in December 2003. Right after our meeting, I wrote this account of my impressions.

  He moves with an athlete's grace; and his gestures, though economical, are expressive and dramatic. In repose his face has the dignity of a Benin bronze, and yet it is quickly animated by spontaneous displays of sympathy, humor, concern. Lights flash playfully in his dark eyes; he smiles and laughs easily. His quiet brow shows no effort or anxiety, but his eyes, when concentrating, seem to look beyond the present to a better world that only he can see. His countenance is suffused with an aura that, if one did not know something of the harshness of his history, might be mistaken for innocence. It's not innocence but goodness. His conversation is the most amazing thing about him: lively, liquid, without uncertainty, without cant or jargon, alive to the presence of his visitor but patiently pressing our dialogue in the direction of his own profound concerns. It is unusual—at least outside ancient literature—to come upon his combination of intelligence and simplicity, suggestive of an untrammeled soul. He seems a born leader with no hint of the trivial about him and so devoid of the mundane concerns that weigh down most of us that you would feel no surprise to hear someone predict that, mark my words, this fellow will one day take his place as chief justice of the United States or archbishop of Canterbury or secretary general of the United Nations.

  But Dominique Green can be none of these things. He is, rather, an inmate who lives in the solitary confinement of a six-by-nine-foot cell for twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours along the infamous Texas prison corridor called Death Row. When he is permitted a visitor, the visit must take place in one of a row of tiny visitors’ booths, each booth divided by a window of double glass through which prisoner and visitor may observe each other but never touch. In order to converse, the two must make use of telephone receivers attached to the walls.

  Dominique is where he is for two reasons only: because he is poor and because he is black. Raised in an alcoholic household by a mother whose idea of discipline was to burn the palms of her children's hands, living on the streets of Houston from the time he was fifteen, Dominique was no angel—nor should the society that failed him utterly expect him to have been. At eighteen he was involved, it would seem, in an armed robbery with three other boys. The victim pulled a knife. There was a struggle and one shot was fired, killing the victim. The only independent eyewitness did not identify Dominique as the killer. The police did a deal with one of the boys—the only white one—that left Dominique charged with, and soon convicted of, capital murder. The white boy, never charged with anything, went free, and the district attorney interfered with investigators attempting to interview him; the three blacks went to prison. Dominique alone was sentenced to death after testimony from a psychologist known to believe that African Americans and Latinos are more prone to violence than others are likely to be. This psychologist was chosen by Dominique's court-appointed attorneys, who appeared—even to the victim's wife—to work hand in glove with the prosecutors. These attorneys failed to introduce evidence that there had been a struggle (which would have led to a conviction for man slaughter, rather than murder), nor did they request DNA tests of any kind.

  Over the eleven years Dominique has lived on Death Row, where he will soon reach the end of his appeals, he has grown from a neglected and abused boy into a man of stature. At first, he was full of self-hatred and hatred toward all those who had helped land him where he was. But the year-in, year-out faithfulness of a young woman who refused to let Dominique sink into a cauldron of despair finally brought him to his senses. He began to look around him and to take inspiration from older inmates; he began to read, to write poetry, and to draw. His reading has brought him to every category of fiction and nonfiction. He dislikes only fantasy, an understandable prejudice for someone in his situation. He has become a man not only of learning but of wisdom.

  Not long ago, he read Archbishop Desmond Tutu's book No Future Without Forgiveness, about the archbishop's experience as chairman of South Africa's unique experiment, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, during whose sessions perpetrators of political violence were encouraged to tell the truth about what they had done in the course of the apartheid era, and the victims of that violence (and their families) were encouraged to forgive those who repented their violence. Dominique was deeply impressed by the book and realized that this was the path he and his fellow inmates must take. He pressed the archbishop's book on anyone who would have it. (You may wonder how it is possible for men in solitary confinement to converse with one another and to share things. Since it would be a transgression for me, who was told many things in confidence, to describe the prisoners’ methods, all I can say is that human beings are infinitely inventive.)

  Under Dominique's leadership many, perhaps even most, of the inmates on Death Row in the State of Texas have now forgiven everyone who has harmed them and, insofar as they can, have asked forgiveness from those they have harmed. Dominique is convinced that he has a vocation to inspire the kids who turn up on Death Row to drop their petty hatreds and to morph into larger, more generous human beings—in the same way that older inmates, since executed, once provided spiritual models for him to follow. Of course he would love to be free, but he also knows he has found his role—a meaning and purpose for his life that no one can take from him.

  When I visited Dominique this first time, it was mid-December. The prison was full of Christmas decorations and the sounds of staff and visitors wishing one another merry Christmas, happy New Year. I asked Dominique what Christmas was like along Death Row. For the only moment in our long conversation, his eyes filled with tears. We share with one another, he said, and those with no money to buy anything from the prison commissary are given gifts of food by more affluent inmates. (“Affluent” is an exceedingly relative term in this context: there are no millionaires along Death Row, nor will there ever be.) We even have a sort of feast with each one sitting by the door of his cell, surrounded by his gifts, as present to one another as we can be. In all, it is a wonderful day, said Dominique; and all of us, both givers and receivers, feel better about ourselves.

  Gifts. Good wishes for the future. Sharing what we have. Taking comfort and strength from the presence of others. Feeling better about ourselves. Surely, this sums up what everyone wants from Christmas. As I left Dominique and made my way along the metal corridors, waiting for each of several locked doors to spring open and bring me a step closer to freedom, I caught a glimpse through a pane of bulletproof glass of a tiny crèche displayed on a table: stable, donkey and cow, sheep and shepherds, and the central group of father, mother, and child—marginalized figures of poverty and ethnic disparagement in their time, forced to take a long, uncomfortable journey in the woman's ninth month of pregnancy in order to satisfy the state and its need to wrest from poor people the little they had. Then, having reached their goal of Bethlehem, there was no room for them anywhere and they were forced to spend the night of the child's birth in a cattle stall. Their world was harsh, a world where
men were crucified for no good reason (supposing there can be a good reason to crucify anyone), a practice that would one day claim the precious little baby the woman had just given birth to.

  Were they bitter, this man and this woman, bitter about the world they found themselves in, bitter about the lot they'd been assigned? Did they wonder if God had abandoned them to be permanently oppressed by the rich, the powerful, the careless, the unfeeling? No, I reflected, their lives were not confined to the politics or circumstances of the moment, however appalling. They had faith that, as the woman put it, God would one day “rout the proud of heart, pull the princes from their thrones and exalt the humble, fill the hungry with good things and send the rich away empty.” They were so sure this would happen that they lived as if it had already come to pass. And, besides, they had a brand-new baby, who made them so happy they could almost hear angels singing, “Peace on earth, good will to all.”

  That angels’ song, faintly discerned more than two thousand years ago in Bethlehem, may still be heard this Christmas, not perhaps in your local shopping mall or around your Christmas table or from the choir loft of your local church. These are the places where we try, usually unconvincingly, to reenact the first Christmas, the real Christmas. But without doubt it will be successfully reenacted at Polunsky Unit, Livingston, Texas, by forgiving people no one wants, who live bravely in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, comforted and encouraged onward by a man with a face both simple and luminous.

  1

  The man known to me as Dominique was born Dominic Jerome Green in Houston, Texas, on May 13, 1974, the first child of Emmitt and Stephanie Faye Smith Green. This was less than four months after my own first child was born. As in all our lives, the most important truths of our histories come to us through the uncertain lenses of remembrance, viewpoint, and self-justification. It is always hard, and often impossible, to sort out what actually happened from the way it is remembered either by the subject himself or by those closest to him. But having listened to several witnesses to Dominique's early life, I set down here the truest account I can frame of his early years.

  That Stephanie was a mother from hell seems to be taken for granted by everyone. But the truth of this portrait is open to question at least in some of its particulars. How did Dominique, who looked so much like her, who possessed her intelligence and even her cunning, evolve into the expansive human being he became if all his early experiences were negative? Mothers mold us more surely than do all others. In his earliest years, Dominique's mother was a different woman from the creature she became. Our most damning evidence against her comes from the 1980s, and there are no incidents related of her before 1981 that would force us to name her an abuser of children.

  I met Stephanie and spent several hours with her in mid-July of 2007. There can be no doubt that most people would find her evasive, narcissistic, and creepy. The row of gold-capped teeth that glint from the front of her mouth, combined with the quicksilver indirection of her responses, can almost leave the impression that you are speaking with an android, a counterfeit human being.

  Stephanie was brought up in a household that she claims was in league with the devil, a family devoted to the worship of Satan. Certainly, her mother was a practitioner of voodoo and believed she could put curses on other human beings and magically control them. Stephanie was forced as a child to have sexual relations with several, perhaps all, the mature males of the household and of her extended family. When she was barely into her teens, she gave birth to a baby girl, the result of one of these encounters. Her mother took the baby and raised it as her own and threw Stephanie out of the house before she was fifteen.

  Despite this terrible beginning, Stephanie was able to function as wife and mother at least for a while. From the first, she acted the part of the dominant parent, Emmitt always assuming the more passive role. Defining herself in contrast to her mother's grotesque religious practices, she attended her local Catholic church and had her children baptized there. Stephanie surely admired her first baby: “I remember this little guy about nine months old tottering across the floor on his feet. He's nine months old and he's walking, O.K.? I remember this little guy who used to have a beautiful smile. He was smart as a whip. He could do anything he set his mind to. He'd do it. He was always leading stuff.”

  In 1976, two years after Dominique's birth, his younger brother Marlon, another handsome child, was born. The two boys became inseparable companions and, soon enough, co-conspirators. Stephanie and Emmitt would have a third child, Hollingsworth, but not till 1985. By then, the cracks in their lives had become too obvious for anyone to miss.

  When Dominique was six, two supposed friends of Emmitt broke into the house, intending to rape Stephanie and kill Dominique and Marlon in retribution for a drug deal gone wrong. They did not succeed. But when Dominique was seven, another episode of violence left its invisible scars: Dominique was raped by a priest at St. Mary's, the Catholic school he attended in Houston. Though his mother withdrew him from the school, she failed to inform either the police or school or church authorities. She did not even tell Emmitt, nor did she arrange for a medical checkup for her son. From this time forward, the life of the Green family started to disintegrate as Stephanie, succumbing to the nightmares of her own history, began to ignore her children and enter into the world of destructive madness she has inhabited inconstantly ever since.

  It is a common experience of sexually abused children that they come to think of themselves as disposable beings of no account. That, after all, is what those closest to them have shown them they are worth, that is what society has reinforced by its silent nonintervention. All that is required is for such children to internalize this external judgment of others as the value they place on their own lives. They become zeros—and they begin to act out their own emptiness. This is why sexual abuse of children is often labeled “soul-murder.”

  Of course, this process can be short-circuited and even reversed if there are people in a child's life, especially parents, teachers, and similar figures of authority who stand up for him, telling the child—by word and especially by deed—that he is valuable, that the rape (or lesser abuse) was an evil exception that should not be factored into his own judgment of himself.

  It may be that Stephanie was whole enough, courageous enough, to ward off for a time the judgment that her family of origin had placed on her, but that an attempted rape and the attempted murder of her children, followed by the rape of her firstborn son by a sacral figure in whom she had placed her trust, was too much for her to withstand. The rape of Dominique, especially, may have so troubled her that she could not recover her equilibrium.

  She descended into alcoholism, began to prostitute herself for money—in full view of her children—and alternately ignored and persecuted them. She was especially hard on the eldest, who stood up to her and resisted her bizarre impositions and demands. She beat him, scorned him as weak, demeaned him as “the black sheep.” She had come to hate him, as she hated herself, for having been raped. Emmitt, never a bulwark but nonetheless a skilled musician who taught Dominique to play drums and guitar, turned into a full-fledged drug addict, absent in mind if not in body—a characteristic casualty of the 1980s. About this time, Emmitt's mother, Dominique's loving grandmother, died. She was the adult Dominique had been closest to and felt protected by. One would think that the familial landscape could hardly become more bleak.

  And yet, life continued to worsen. “Alcoholism,” Dominique would recall much later, “changed my mother. It ate up her mind and slowly destroyed her heart. No longer was she that loving and caring mother I once knew: she became very hateful, bitter, and unfortunately abusive. All the memories she'd repressed, all the things she went through in life, came back to haunt her in full force.” The household was now awash in booze and drugs, and unsavory visitors often lurked nearby or within the precincts. Phone calls were often received from pushers, pimps, and johns. When Dominique, who had just recently learned his let
ters, received one of these calls and failed to write out a message for his mother, she punished him by holding the palm of his right hand over a gas flame. It was a close replay of something her own mother had done to her. A few years later, Stephanie would punish Dominique in the same way again. Luckily Dominique was left-handed (which his mother bullied and taunted him for), but he carried the ugly scarring from these incidents into adulthood. When Dominique was nine, his father gave him a gun for self-protection.

  By the time he reached eighth grade, Dominique resolved to be known by the name he would bear from then on: he was no longer “Dominic,” the name his mother had given him at his birth; he was reborn as “Dominique,” the name he had given himself. It was a token of the growing resolve of this boy to take control of his life, to act as his own man.

  A year later, in 1989, Stephanie and Emmitt separated; in the same year, Stephanie suffered a head injury at the Nabisco factory where she worked and had to be hospitalized, after which her behavior deteriorated further. In one incident, she shot at Dominique with a pistol because she thought he had left a metal knife in her microwave, which then exploded. It was actually the five-year-old Hollingsworth who had done so, but Dominique, observing his mother's hopped-up condition, took the blame for the explosion. Before she went for the pistol, little Hollingsworth, foreseeing what would happen next, managed surreptitiously to empty the pistol of its bullets. Stephanie would attempt to shoot Dominique on one more occasion but succeed only in shooting up her own car, which was parked behind him—her sons finding this an occasion for hilarity.

  In 1990, Stephanie was admitted to a mental institution, the first of several such admissions, and she was diagnosed as schizophrenic. When her children visited her, she claimed not to recognize them. The children were left at home alone to cope as best they could. Dominique was then beginning to get into trouble with the law and found himself sentenced briefly to a juvenile detention facility because he had been found with a small quantity of marijuana and an illegal weapon. That summer, Stephanie, in one of her visits home, tried to have Dominique placed in juvenile detention again, along with Marlon, her middle child. Failing to achieve this objective, she kicked both boys out. In the same summer, Emmitt, at a new job after a spell of unemployment, roused himself at last and obtained custody of all three sons. But Dominique, “so hurt,” as he put it, refused to board with his father and, resolving to find a new way to manage, dropped out of sight.