The Autobiography of an Execution

by David R. Dow

  From the library Lincoln said, Hi, Dada. Mama said you would save the wisher bone for us to break in the morning when I have my breakfast. I said that sounded fine. He said, Will you read me a book now?

  The three of us climbed the stairs to his room. After a book and a bedtime story, before Katya and I told him good night, I said, Hey amigo, what are you going to wish for if you get the bigger piece of the wishbone tomorrow?

  He said, I’m not supposed to tell you, but I will anyway. I’m going to wish that I have a great life. And guess what, Dada? My wish already came true.

  I TOLD KATYA about Quaker’s letter. She said, You can’t force him to appeal if he doesn’t want to.

  I said, Actually, I think I can. He doesn’t have the right to let the state execute him for a crime he didn’t commit.

  She said, How are you going to prove that he’s innocent?

  Good question, I said. I told her about Quaker’s reference to Van Orman.

  She said, Van Orman is incapable of living outside an institution. If he weren’t in prison, he’d be in some other facility, or homeless. You didn’t betray him. You gave him the best life you could.

  I said, There’s been a load of compromisin’ on the road to my horizon.

  She said, Thanks for not singing it. Can we eat now?

  IN APRIL 1972, I was twelve. My Little League team, the Mets, played the Pirates in the championship game. Our pitcher was the only twelve-year-old in the league who could throw a slider. Lots of kids could throw a curveball, but Andrew Peters could throw a bona fide slider. He went to junior college to play baseball. He got drafted his sophomore year, dropped out, and pitched two years in the minor leagues before he ruined his arm and gave up on his dream and joined the Marines. He was killed in the first Gulf War. I know this because his son Timothy goes to law school where I teach, and he told me last week when he came by my office to introduce himself.

  I was the catcher on the Mets. Andrew was the coach’s son. The Peters family lived one street behind mine. When Andrew would make an error during a game, Coach Peters didn’t say anything. But at night, I would hear him screaming through the window.

  Coach Peters would call the pitches. He sent me a signal, and I would relay it to Andrew. It was the bottom of the last inning. They were batting. We were ahead 2–1. Their first hitter leaned out over the plate and got hit on the arm. Coach Peters was shouting at the umpire from the dugout that the player had walked into the pitch, but the umpire sent him to first base anyway. Their best hitter was next. Andrew threw two quick strikes. Coach Peters signaled a slider, and Andrew threw a beauty, right on the outside corner. The umpire called it a ball. Coach Peters raced out of the dugout screaming. The vein on the side of his neck looked like a dancing Gummi Bear. A short man, he had been an NCAA wrestling champion. There were pictures of him holding trophies hanging on the walls of their house.

  The umpire just stood there. Coach Peters walked back to the dugout, kicking at the dirt. When he got there he must have said something I didn’t hear, because the umpire pulled off his face mask, looked at Coach, and said, Cool it, Drew. Coach Peters picked up a bat and stared at the umpire. It seemed like a long time went by. Then he started walking toward the plate. The other team’s third-base coach tried to cut him off. Coach Peters swung the bat, and I heard the other coach’s ribs crack. Then there was mayhem. All the coaches, on their team and ours, and all the umpires jumped on Coach Peters. Years later I would recall the scene when watching videos showing five-man teams of helmeted prison guards rushing into a cell on death row to subdue one of my clients. They held Coach Peters there until two policemen arrived. The police put handcuffs on him and took him away. Andrew was crying hysterically, screaming, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. Coach Peters didn’t turn around. He sat in the backseat of the squad car for an hour, until the police let him go.

  Timothy said, My dad was friends with Henry Quaker. Before Dad went back to Iraq, Mr. Quaker helped him find a job. Timothy pronounced it “eye-wrack.” He said, Mr. Quaker had dinner at our house a few times. He would always bring me a book. I don’t believe Mr. Quaker did what they said he did. Timothy told me who his dad was. He said, You knew my dad, didn’t you? I told him we had grown up together, that we played ball on the same team. He said, I hear through the grapevine that you use students on your cases. If you need some students to help on Mr. Quaker’s case, I volunteer. I told him I’d think about it.

  DEPENDING ON WHOM you ask—Katya or me—we dated for somewhere between seven and two years before getting engaged. She teases me about why it took me so long. It’s because she’s exactly the type of person I never thought I’d marry. She’s beautiful, athletic, artistic, and understanding. I’m bookish, plodding, and unforgiving. Falling in love with her created in me a cognitive dissonance that took awhile to subside. I’m not a good enough writer to know how to say this without sounding corny, but the day I decided to propose was the day I realized I would never run out of things I wanted to talk to her about and I would never get tired of looking at her. Two and a half years into our marriage, she got pregnant.

  We were not trying not to have a kid, but we were not trying to have one, either. We liked our life. We saw a movie or two every week, we went to bars and restaurants, we talked about books. Once a month or so, Katya would go out dancing. (That she would do without me; as Dirty Harry said, a man has got to know his limitations.) We’d read stories from the newspaper to each other over breakfast.

  The night we learned about Lincoln, we saw American Beauty before meeting three other couples for dinner. We drank many martinis. At two in the morning, Katya was sick. She threw up food, then gastric juices, then dry heaves, then red foamy blood. I was terrified. She was too exhausted to be scared. I drove us to the hospital. Katya vomited twice more, walking from the car to the admitting area. Before we had finished filling out the paperwork, the nurse said, Kidney stone, sweetheart. Have you had them before?

  They ran a sedative and an antinausea medicine through her IV. Her eyes slid shut. I asked whether I could have something. The nurse smiled. She thought I was joking. I said, Really.

  At four the doctor walked in, glanced at her chart, and said he was virtually certain it was a kidney stone. But they would do an X-ray anyway, just to be sure. I felt myself sag with relief. They were wheeling her out of the cubicle when a nurse walked in with a piece of paper and stopped the doctor. He looked down and smiled like he was in a movie. Apparently, a routine pregnancy screen is part of the protocol. He said, Congratulations.

  Two months after Lincoln was born, I had an argument in the court of appeals. The Sunday before I left for New Orleans, we were sitting on a bench in Hermann Park watching the paddleboats. You could feel the first hint of autumn. The air was thick with smoke from charcoal fires, and the smell of hamburgers grilling made me hungry. I was trying to get a new trial for an illegal immigrant because the prosecutors had kept all the blacks and Hispanics off the jury. My client had murdered a pregnant woman and her fourteen-year-old daughter. Those facts had absolutely nothing to do with the legal issues in the appeal, but there was no way the judges would overlook them. I was thinking, I’ve got no chance of winning this case.

  Winona was lying at our feet. Lincoln was in a jogging stroller. Katya was pushing him forward, pulling him back. She was looking out at the water. She said, If you are not going to be with us when you’re with us, you might as well stay home.

  WHEN LINCOLN WAS NEARLY TWO, I was making coffee in the kitchen one morning while Katya was getting him dressed. She called down to me to turn on the Today show. There on TV, talking to Katie Couric, was Lana Norris, the mother of Clay Peterson. Clay Peterson was dead. He had been murdered during a robbery of a convenience store by my client Johnny Martinez. Martinez had stabbed him eight times. The murder was caught on the store’s security camera, so Clay Peterson’s mother had watched a video of her son bleeding to death. She told me she had watched it at least a hundred times. It made her feel l
ike she was close to her son, with him, as he lay dying. Norris was on TV because it was sweeps week on television, and she was a curiosity. A deeply religious person whose son had been saving money to study for the ministry when his life was cut short, Norris had met with Martinez for nearly four hours a week before his scheduled execution. After the meeting, Ms. Norris wrote a letter to the governor of Texas urging that Martinez’s life be spared.

  Martinez’s own mother was a heroin addict who sold her kids’ possessions to support her drug habit. His neighbor made him masturbate while he filmed it. I think the video is still on the Internet. No court of law ever took Johnny away from his mother, but she couldn’t have been more absent. Martinez was raised by his grandmother. Lana Norris told me at the prison after her meeting with Johnny ended that she did not want Martinez’s grandmother to lose a child and be forced to go through what she had gone through herself. She told Katie Couric the same thing.

  The governor in Texas cannot grant a reprieve unless the parole board authorizes him to. By a vote of 8–7, the board voted against commuting Martinez’s sentence from death to life in prison. One of the board members who voted in the minority called me to tell me the result of the vote before it was announced. He told me not to tell anyone that he had called. It was a breach of protocol. I could hear him softly crying.

  Two hours before the execution I sat with Martinez in the holding cell. When the parole board member had called me the day before, he said, I just want to tell you that I do not think Mr. Martinez should die. I’ve been reading these petitions for ten years, hundreds of cases, and this is the first time I’ve voted to spare a life. I am impressed with who Mr. Martinez has become. I wish I could have convinced one more person. I really do. I’m sorry, sir. I repeated this conversation to Martinez. He nodded twice and stifled a sob. He said, It doesn’t make any sense, but I feel better that not everybody wants to kill me.

  I was going to be witnessing the execution with his brother and sister. He did not want his mother there, but he asked me to be sure to tell her that he loved her. He knew his brother would not convey the message. The guard said it was time to go. Johnny’s hands were cuffed together and then shackled to a leather belt around his waist. He tried to lift his hand to shake mine. I hugged him and told him that I wished I had done more. He said, You did everything. You were the only one. Now go right home when you leave this hell and hug your son, okay? Hug Lincoln until he falls asleep tonight, will you? I had never told Martinez my son’s name. I’m not sure how he learned.

  I said I would, but when I got home from watching Martinez die, Lincoln was already sleeping. I carried him from his bed into Katya’s and my bedroom and hugged him until I fell asleep myself. I thought that was close enough.

  I WRITE DOWN MY DREAMS because they scare me. They scare me because I understand them.

  The night Martinez got executed, I dreamed Lincoln and I were in a hotel room, waiting for room service. He opened the window. It was cold outside. I said, Close it, Lincoln. He ignored me and climbed out onto the ledge. He threatened to jump. Go ahead, I said. He looked at me, wounded. On the television the hotel safety video was playing on a loop, warning people not to use the elevators in case of a fire. I put my hand on the small of Lincoln’s back, meaning to hook my fingers through his belt, but before I could, he jumped. I heard only silence as he fell. Then a splash. He had fallen into the hotel pool. By the time I got downstairs, Lincoln was clinging to the side, and Katya was already there. I woke up, covered with sweat.

  It was nearly 3:00 a.m. I started to shiver violently and could not go back to sleep. I put on a sweatshirt and checked to make sure Lincoln was fine. I kissed Katya on the cheek, went into the kitchen, and poured myself a drink. The dog thought it was time to go out. She followed me downstairs. But when she looked outside and saw it was still dark, she climbed back up the stairs and hopped into bed. I carried my drink into our library and, one by one, deleted all the Martinez files from my computer.

  It is easier to forget failure if you don’t have the icons to remind you.

  IN THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS, Freud sides with those who maintain conscience is silent in our dreams…. Ethical indifference reigns supreme. He was wrong, at least about me. In my dreams my conscience shouts until it wakes me and makes me too afraid to go back to bed. If you don’t want to be confronted with an aerial map of all the corners you’ve cut that day, you shouldn’t go to sleep.

  Katya and I had invited three couples over for dinner later that week. Two of my clients had been executed in the past ten days. She asked if I wanted to cancel. I said no. Cooking relaxes me. I pan-roasted a loin of venison with lots of thyme and garlic, and I deep-fried cauliflower dipped in beer batter. Over cocktails we were talking about the JonBenet Ramsay murder. Like everyone else, I suspected the mother. Our friend Sharon disagreed. She believed the intruder theory. She and her husband Tom are oncologists. We compared the futility of our work. Sharon said, My goal is to save my patients’ lives. Barring that, my goal is to extend their lives as long as I can. If I can’t do that either, at least I can struggle with them for as long as they have.

  I said, Exactly. Me too.

  Except my clients killed somebody. She asked me why I keep doing it. I paused to consider the answer. Katya said, Because he’s wracked with guilt when he even contemplates stopping, and he thinks doing anything else would be unfulfilling and self-indulgent. She took a sip of wine and looked at me. I rested my hand on her thigh. She said, Right?

  Your characteristics can explain your actions, but if there’s a persuasive explanation for the source of your characteristics, I’ve never heard it. I once fired a lawyer who left the office every day at five. He told me he was guarding against burnout. I understand people who say they need to take care of themselves. What I don’t understand is why they say it. The day I fired him, I stayed up all night working on a clemency petition for a death-row inmate I didn’t represent.

  When my clients ask me what I intend to do next, I don’t tell them that I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to figure it out, because tonight I have plans. Tonight I’m picking up a pizza and going home to play Scrabble and watch SpongeBob with my wife and son. When you’re careening toward death, you don’t want the only person who can pull the brake to look at his watch and decide it’s time for lunch.

  Here’s what Sharon’s and Tom’s patients have in common with my clients: no one wants her life to depend on a stranger who might have something else, or something better, to do. I understand my clients, and I understand how the patient’s reaction burdens the stranger.

  A WEEK LATER Katya and I were having martinis at the Downing Street pub. I was smoking a Cuban cigar I had brought back with me from Mexico. Katya was eating olives. She said, Do you think Quaker did it? I told her I didn’t have a clue. She said, Why would he?

  I said, Same answer.

  She said, I think you think he’s innocent, and you don’t want to say it out loud.

  I said, You think you know me, don’t you?

  I know a lot of lawyers who want to represent a death-row inmate who’s actually innocent. Prove he’s innocent, get him out, be a hero, go on TV, be adored, feel good about yourself. I understand the impulse, but I counsel them against it.

  I said, You know, K, when Jeremy Winston got executed on Halloween, he was truly remorseful. I could tell that when I first met him. At some level, he felt like he deserved to die. That’s why he didn’t care when I told him we weren’t going to win. He didn’t want to win.

  Winston had broken through a first-floor window and stolen Lucy Romer from her bed in the middle of the night on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Lucy’s mother found her empty bed at eight the next morning. There was blood on the window frame and glass on the bed. Police found Lucy later that afternoon. She had been vaginally and anally raped. She had been smothered. Her skull was crushed, probably from being run over. She was five years old.

  Winston’s dad had been murdered i
n front of Winston when the boy was eight. Over the next seven years, his mother lived with eleven different men. At least six of them beat Winston and his mother on a fairly regular basis. One of them fired a gun at Winston. Another beat him with a brick. A third sodomized him.

  Katya said, You wanted to keep Winston alive, but it wasn’t your doing that he died.

  I said, That rationalization hasn’t worked so well for me before, and if I start to believe that he’s innocent, it won’t work at all with Henry Quaker.

  She said, Whether you believe he’s innocent has nothing to do with it.

  I thought about that. I couldn’t be sure whether she had stressed the word you or the word believe. I didn’t see the need to sort it out. The point was the same.

  JEROME, GARY, KASSIE, AND I met to discuss our strategy. Jerome had read the transcripts. He noticed that when police arrived at the murder scene, they checked Dorris’s hands for gunpowder residue. The police reports did not say what the results of the test had been. But Jerome thought it was significant that they had even conducted a test. They had to have been thinking that she killed her two children and then committed suicide. But why would they think that, why would they check her hands, unless they had found a gun nearby? And if they had found a gun nearby, why wasn’t it mentioned anywhere in the file? I told the team that I’d have lunch with Detective Harmon to see what I could learn.

  Gary and Kassie thought we should take another run at Green. I asked what he could possibly know. Gary had figured out from jail records that Green had been in the county jail during Quaker’s trial. He could have heard just about anything. I warned them again about Green’s temper. Kassie said, Right, you tell the guy to have a nice life, and he’s the one with the temper.