The Autobiography of an Execution Read online

  My job as a lawyer, therefore, consisted mostly of planning the disposition of Derrick’s estate. Of course, he didn’t have an estate, meaning that my job was to arrange for the disposal of his body. (He did not want to be buried in a pauper’s grave right outside the prison gates in Huntsville, Texas.) Making funeral arrangements didn’t take very long either, so my job was really just to be his counselor, to listen to him, to send him books or magazines, to be sure he would not have to face death alone. My goal is to save my clients, but that objective is beyond my control. All I can control is whether I abandon them.

  I would visit Derrick once a week and talk to him by phone another day. He had a son, Dwayne, who was twelve when his dad arrived on death row and nineteen when Derrick was executed. I sat next to them as they struggled to connect. The Internet is ruining society because human relationships are inherently tactile. It’s hard to become close to a man you can’t touch, even (maybe especially) if he’s your dad. I told them I was hopeful that the Board of Pardons and Paroles and the governor would commute Derrick’s sentence, and I was. I am always hopeful. Nothing ever works out, but I always think that it’s going to. How else could you keep doing this work? I watched his execution because he asked me to.

  At 12:37 a.m. on Thursday, March 9, 1989, Derrick was put to death in front of me, Dwayne, and two local reporters. Afterward, I hugged Dwayne, got in my truck, and drove with my dog and a case of Jack Daniel’s to my cabin on Galveston Island. I sat on the deck watching the Gulf of Mexico and drinking. The moon was bright. The mullet were jumping in schools and I could see trout in wave curls feeding. I smelled the rain. I left the front door open so the dog could go outside when she needed to and dumped a week’s worth of food in her bowl. At dawn the sky blackened and the storm rolled in. I made sure my lounge chair was under the eave then closed my eyes and slept. When I’d wake up to use the toilet, I’d drink a shot of whiskey and chase it with a pint of water. I intended not to get dehydrated. Other than the birds and the surf, the only sound I heard was the thump of newspapers landing on driveways every morning. On Monday, I opened four papers, to figure out what day it was. I ran for an hour on the beach with the dog and swam for thirty minutes in the surf while the dog watched. Walking back to the cabin for a shower I said to her, Sorry for being a terrible master. She picked up a piece of driftwood and whipped her head back and forth.

  We had lunch sitting on the deck at Cafe Max-a-Burger. I ordered four hamburgers, a basket of onion rings, and a lemonade. The dog ate her two burgers so fast that I gave her one of mine. When I paid the bill the cashier said, That’s one lucky dog.

  I said, Thanks for saying so, but you have it backwards. That dog is by far my best quality.

  I HEADED BACK to Houston. My original interest in the death penalty was entirely academic, not political or ideological, and at the time Derrick got executed, I was working on a project examining the comparative competency of lawyers appointed to represent death-row inmates in Texas, Florida, Virginia, and Kentucky. I was scheduled to meet with an assistant who was helping me collect data. Traffic on the Gulf Freeway was going to make me late. Driving recklessly, I sideswiped an elderly woman near the NASA exit. I jumped out of my truck and was apologizing before my feet hit the pavement. She screwed up her face like she’d just swallowed sour milk. She said she was going to call the police. I told her I wasn’t drunk, I just smelled like it. She smiled and said, I believe you, young man.

  The law school has blind grading. Students identify themselves on their final exam with a four-digit number. Every year I hire as research assistants the three numbers who write the best answers. When I asked Katya to work for me, I didn’t even know her name.

  An unwritten rule forbids teachers from dating students. I think violations of that rule can be forgiven if you ultimately marry them. A week after Derrick’s execution, I finally got up the nerve to ask Katya out.

  We ate dinner at Ninfa’s on the east side. It was back in the days when the east side was iffy at night. We sat in the back. She said, You have sad eyes.

  I think you’re most alive when you’re sad.

  That’s bullshit.

  My favorite moment in the old Mary Tyler Moore Show is when Mary interviews for the job in the WJM newsroom. Lou Grant says to her, You’ve got spunk. She beams with pride and says, Well, yes. He says, I hate spunk.

  I told her about Derrick. She asked whether I would represent anyone else. I told her I thought I would.

  I said, It seems like important work. I guess I don’t think people should have to die alone, no matter what bad thing they did. She asked whether I thought it would make a difference. I said, Probably not.

  She said, I think there’s a word for trying to get in the way of something that’s preordained.

  Preordained is a little strong.

  I thought, Besides, whether something is inevitable isn’t the same as whether it’s right, but I was feeling too old to say something so naive on a first date.

  She smiled, which I interpreted as agreement. The server brought our food. I had ordered for both of us: tacos al carbon and ratones. She said, What are these?

  I said, Rats.

  Really.

  Seriously. That’s what they’re called.

  They were large jalapeño peppers, split open, stuffed with shrimp and Mexican cheese, dipped in batter, and deep-fried. She took a bite, and her face broke out in a sweat. She said, These are delicious.

  Here, I said, and I slid her my mug of beer.

  She said, I think that if you’re going to keep doing this, and it isn’t going to matter, then you need a better coping strategy than a case of bourbon.

  I said, That’s probably true.

  MOST LAWYERS I work with would never marry a prosecutor. Some of them are making a big mistake. People use proxies to make judgments in life, but the problem with proxies is that most of them are often wrong. A few years ago Katya and I were eating breakfast at the Bellagio. James Carville was sitting by himself at the counter. Katya said, That is one marriage I don’t understand.

  I understand it. Party affiliation is not their proxy. They used something else.

  I myself use books and dogs, and they have never led me astray. When Katya graduated from law school, I gave her a first edition of Walker Percy’s The Second Coming. She read the first page and smiled. We were at my old house, sitting in the book-lined living room, listening to Frank Morgan. The dog normally didn’t like women in the house. Katya patted the sofa and the dog, who weighed almost as much as she did, hopped up and lay down next to her. Katya scratched her under the jaw, and the dog purred like a kitten. Katya looked at me and said, She likes to be scratched, right here.

  WHEN JEREMY WINSTON got executed, I had known him for only two months. I met him and Ezekiel Green, another death-row inmate, the same day, the date of Katya’s and my tenth anniversary. Winston’s lawyer had called me and said he wasn’t going to do any more work on the case because he didn’t have time. To his credit, at least he felt guilty about the fact that he was abandoning his client. You meet many crappy or lazy lawyers, but not very many who admit to others that they’re crappy or lazy. He wondered whether my office would throw the Hail Mary pass. We’re a nonprofit legal-aid corporation that does nothing but represent death-row inmates. I told him I’d talk to Winston the next time I was at the prison.

  Winston was so fat he had to sit sideways in the cage where inmates visit with their lawyers. His arms were green, one solid tattoo from wrist to shoulder. In between each knuckle on each hand were tiny crosses. I introduced myself. He saw me staring at his hands. He said, Are you a religious man?

  I’m afraid not.

  He said, Not a problem. I didn’t mean nothing by the question. Just asking.

  I told Winston there was nothing left to do in his case. We could file a challenge to the method the state intended to use to execute him, but it was not likely to succeed.

  He said, Yeah, I heard they’re gonna kil
l me with some drug that they ain’t allowed to use to kill animals, is that right?

  One of the drugs that is part of the lethal injection combination has in fact been banned by veterinarians. Lawyers representing death-row inmates in some states had raised successful challenges to the lethal-injection cocktail protocol. So far, the legal maneuvering had not worked in Texas. But the lawyers in my office and I had a new idea, and we thought it might work in Winston’s case. I was not going to tell him that.

  I said, That is true, but it doesn’t matter. Most of the judges don’t really believe that you’re going to suffer when you’re executed, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t care, and even if they cared, they couldn’t do anything about it. He nodded. I said, We can file a suit for you, but you will not win. If you want me to file it, though, I will. I just want you to know what’s going to happen. I’ll file it and we will lose.

  I paused to let him ask a question. He didn’t, so I continued, Not only will you not win, but besides that, you probably won’t know for sure that you have lost until twenty minutes before the execution. That’s when the Supreme Court clerk will call me. They like to wait as long as they can so that we don’t have any time to file anything else. They’ll call me and then I’ll call you. Are you following me? He nodded. I said, What I’m telling you is that I think you are going to lose, and that after I call to tell you that we have lost, you’re not going to have much time to prepare. Knowing all that, do you still want me to file it?

  I knew as I was talking that I sounded almost cruel. That’s not what I was aiming for. I was trying to sound completely without hope. I needed him to be hopeless. I didn’t want him to be thinking he was going to win up until the time I called him. I didn’t want there to be even the faintest glimmer of hope. I don’t mind admitting that I know exactly whose interests I had at heart. I’ve called people who still had hope. It’s easier to tell someone who is prepared to die that he is about to die. Winston said, That will be tough on Marie.

  Who’s Marie?

  My wife. We got married last year. You didn’t know that? I told him I didn’t. She’s sweet, from Louisiana. I nodded. Winston drummed his fingers against the glass that separated us. The Randy Newman song “Marie” started playing in my head: You looked like a princess the night we met. I listened, lost, while Winston thought. Finally he said, Yeah, go on ahead. You’re the first dude that’s been straight with me. Everybody’s always sugarcoating everything. I’m tired, man, tired of being lied to. Do what you can do.

  I told him I would and asked if he had any questions. He said, Yeah I do. Do you have any good news for me? He smiled.

  I said, I’m seeing a guy named Ezekiel Green when I finish talking to you. Do you know him?

  Winston said, Bald-headed skinny dude with a tattoo on his face?

  I said, I don’t know. I’ve never seen him.

  He said, I think that’s the guy. Something ain’t right with him. They gassed him once and he didn’t cough or choke or nothing. Just laughed. Talks to himself a lot. Dude showers with his boots on.

  I said, Thanks. I’ll send you what we file. I probably won’t see you again. Take care, though, and I’ll talk to you. He touched his hand to the glass between us. I touched it back.

  MURDER IS PERHAPS the ugliest crime, which is why it is so shocking that most murderers are so ordinary in appearance. Average height, average weight, average everything. Even after all these years, some part of me expects people who commit monstrous deeds to look like monsters. I meet them, and they look like me.

  I stare at their eyes or their hands and try to picture them doing the terrible deed. At the time, this was how I imagined it happened: She was sleeping on the sofa when she felt the gun barrel pressed against her temple. She would have thought it was one of the kids horsing around, except for the hiss of shhhh, followed by, Open your eyes, bitch. She did. Did she think she was dreaming? The gun looked like the one she took to the target range, and she wondered for a moment whether it was. That was the last thought she had. The killer fired one shot, killing her instantly.

  He chose the small-caliber gun because it did not make a lot of noise. It would not disturb the neighbors, but it did get the attention of one of the children, who had been playing in another room. The killer looked up and saw him there. There weren’t supposed to be any children. The boy looked to be around twelve, old enough to remember what he’d seen. The boy ran back into the bedroom. The killer walked toward the boy’s retreat, blood dripping from the gun. The boy was on the floor, under the bed, cradling his little sister. The killer pressed the gun against the boy’s chest, and fired one time. The little girl screamed. He pointed the gun at her heart and pulled the trigger again, and she was quiet.

  On the day I met with Winston, I did not have time to meet with my client Henry Quaker, who had been sentenced to death for committing the triple murder. But his case was why I was at the prison. Ezekiel Green had written me a letter, saying he had important information that would prove Quaker was innocent. There are some letters I don’t ignore.

  GREEN WAS WAITING for me in the booth. He had an elaborate E tattooed on his right cheek and a G on his left. I introduced myself and addressed him as Green. He said, That’s not my name no more. I changed it. I’m Shaka Ali. He paused and looked back over his shoulder, checking to make sure the guard was not standing behind him. He asked, Did you get my letter?

  I told him that’s why I was there.

  He said, I know all about you. I read your book.

  You don’t hear much about people like Green from people like me. Most abolitionists like to focus on innocence. I see their point. They think as soon as we use DNA to prove with certainty that an innocent man has been executed—and that day will surely come—even the sheriffs and prosecutors down here in Texas will choose life.

  But the book of mine Green said he read argued that even the guilty should be spared. I used to support the death penalty. I changed my mind when I learned how lawless the system is. If you have reservations about supporting a racist, classist, unprincipled regime, a regime where white skin is valued far more highly than dark, where prosecutors hide evidence and policemen routinely lie, where judges decide what justice requires by consulting the most recent Gallup poll, where rich people sometimes get away with murder and never end up on death row, then the death-penalty system we have here in America will embarrass you to no end.

  Sometimes I think I became a lawyer because I believe rules matter, but I suppose I could have the cause and effect reversed. Either way, I said in that book that the abolitionists’ single-minded focus on innocence makes them seem as indifferent to principle as the vigilantes are. I might have gone too far. One abolitionist group invited me to give a talk at their annual conference, then disinvited me after the head of their board realized who I was.

  I don’t know whether Green had really read my book, but if he had, I bet he would have liked it. It’s about people like him: murderers who did exactly what the prosecutors said they did.

  He said, You’re an activist just like me. Did you know my old man helped organize factory workers?

  I raised my eyebrows, trying to look impatient, which I was. I said, No, I didn’t know that. I looked at my watch.

  He said, I’m going to organize the guys in here. We can’t stay locked up all day long, man. They treat us like animals. It’s harassment. Captain wrote me up the other day for saying fuck. I got a right to free speech, man. I can say what I want. I been talkin’ to the ACLU people about suing. They sued about the conditions in Mississippi and Oklahoma. Did you know that?

  I did know that, but Green did not wait for me to answer. He kept on: They should let us work, listen to the radio, something, you know what I’m sayin’? His right eyelid pulsed like a cricket was trying to get out. He rubbed his hand across his shaved head. He smiled. His two front teeth were gold. He said, When I do this to my hair the guards know not to mess with me. No ’fro for them to grab ahold o
f. I’m ready to rumble, man. You know what I’m saying? I been keeping it like this for almost a year. They gas me when they take me to the shower, but it don’t bother me none. I can hold my breath for twenty minutes. I wait till it’s all gone.

  I looked at my watch again. He said, You gotta be somewhere?

  I told him that I had to get back to my office to get something filed. He asked, Who for? I shook my head and didn’t answer. He said, Don’t matter. It’s good you came to see me. We need to be dialoguing. We can learn from each other. You got the book smarts. I know what’s going down in here. I tell you, and we can take it on. You can come see me on a regular basis, all right?

  He said, Can you get me something to eat?

  Death row has several vending machines, filled with junk food and soda. People visiting inmates can buy them food by putting change into the machines, pushing the buttons, and letting the guard remove the items and pass them to the inmate. Visitors cannot bring paper money into the prison. The prison has a lot of rules. I told Green I didn’t have any change.

  Green had murdered two people. He said God had told him to do it. His lawyer asked the jury to rule that Green was insane. The jury said he wasn’t, and the jury was right. Green knew the difference between right and wrong. He was not insane. He was just crazy.

  I said, Can we talk about the letter? What do you know that can help me?

  He said, Hold on, bro. You got to do something for me first. You got to earn my trust. Then he was off and talking again. He was talking about filing a civil-rights suit against the prison so he could get different medication and satellite radio. He said the only stations they could get were Christian talk shows. He said they were discriminating against the Muslims. He said they punished people arbitrarily. He said the guards let some inmates use cell phones in exchange for sex or bribes. A lot of what he was saying was probably true, but what he wanted was somewhat outside my expertise and way outside my interest. I looked at his face and pretended to listen. All I heard was blah blah blah blah blah. I heard him say, You hear what I’m sayin’, bro?, and I felt myself nod. I was staring at the tattoos on his face, trying to figure out how to change the E into an S, seeing if I could find a way to make the G into an A. He must have asked me a question I didn’t answer. He stood up and banged the phone against the window. He screamed, Are you listening to me? I stared at him. He banged the phone again and said, I don’t even have to be talking to you, motherfucker, do I?