The Autobiography of an Execution

Why hadn’t I remembered Grand? Why hadn’t I done something to stall? I could have kept banging on the window. I could have struggled with the guard if he tried to pull me away. I could have barged into the press witness area and shouted to them what was going on. I could have tried to barricade myself in the holding cell. Maybe the guards would have cooperated. Nobody knows. I did not even try to stop them from escorting an innocent man to his death. I was a German watching the brownshirts take my neighbor. I could have rushed into the execution chamber. I could have caused a commotion. I could have tried. I did none of that. I stood there. I was idle. I was a man making phone calls, a wordsmith, a debater, an analyst.

I could have, I could have, I could have. The three words that enable all evil.

Quaker needed action. I gave him tears.

I CALLED THE OFFICE. Kassie put me on the speaker and I told them all what had happened. I could hear their silence. My brother Steven keeps telling me I need to hire a grief counselor. He should know. He also works with people who are staving off the flood with teaspoons. One committed suicide last year; she hanged herself in the basement, right next to the washer and dryer. I talked to them until I was sure they were as okay as one can be, and told them I’d see them tomorrow.

Katya was in bed watching TV. I said, I can tell you about it in the morning. Don’t wait up for me.

I want to. Are you okay?

Not yet.

I returned phone calls from reporters at the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the Austin American Statesman, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times. I like all the reporters, but that’s not the reason I called them back. I called them so I did not have to be alone with my thoughts.

MAYBE HE DID do it. It’s not impossible.

JENNIFER HECHT WROTE a book called Doubt. There’s a thirteen-question quiz near the beginning (e.g., Do you believe that some thinking being consciously made the universe?; Do you believe that the world is not completely knowable by science?). According to Hecht’s scoring scale, I am a hard-core atheist… of a certain variety: a rationalist materialist. I took offense at that. That’s not me at all. I’m a deeply spiritual person.

I was tempted to go back over the quiz and change a few of my answers from yes to not sure so that my grade would accord with reality. But I couldn’t bring myself to lie.

Doesn’t that prove that I was right and she is wrong?

Maybe belief isn’t a choice after all. Maybe truth is.

I GOT HOME at a little after two. Winona was waiting for me in the kitchen and followed me up the stairs. Lincoln was sleeping on our bed. Katya was reading. She said, He asked if he could sleep in here so we could all be together.

I sat down next to her. I rested my head on her shoulder and stifled a sob and told her all of it. Lincoln woke up. He said, Hi, Dada. What time is it?

I said, It’s late, amigo. Go back to sleep.

Okay. Good night.

Katya and I held hands and watched him. I ran my fingers through her hair. Neither of us said anything. There wasn’t anything to say.

When I got out of the shower, Katya had fallen asleep with the book on her chest. Winona’s legs were twitching, her head on Lincoln’s hip. I poured brandy into a snifter and sat in the rocking chair at the foot of the bed. I picked up a book of Anne Carson poems. Anger is a bitter lock, she says. But you can turn it.

I turned off the lamp and closed the book. I sat there rocking, watching them sleep, hearing them breathe, my pillars.

AFTERWORD

Early the next morning, two hours before dawn, I got dressed in the dark and walked quietly downstairs. I swallowed four aspirins with a quart of water and left a note for Katya on the kitchen counter. I clipped a flashing reflector to my backpack, got on my bike, and headed back to work. We had another client set for execution the following week, and we had a lot to do.

At my office I couldn’t find the coffee. Usually by the time I arrive somebody’s already made it. It bothered me that I wasn’t sure who. I rode the elevator back downstairs and crossed the street to the coffee shop. There were workers inside, but the doors were still locked. I sat on a bench outside and waited. I watched two trains pass, a northbound crossing Buffalo Bayou toward the University of Houston, and one heading south to the medical center. Both were packed full of commuters. I could see their blank faces under the fluorescent glare. It was too light to see any stars, but there was Venus, sitting right beside the pockmarked crescent moon, winking at me from low in the western sky.

Henry Quaker had been dead almost six hours.

I bought a large americano with an extra shot and a navel orange. Back in front of my computer, I sipped the coffee as I read through yesterday’s e-mail, mostly condolences and a bit of spam. A couple were from people telling me he got what he deserved. I wrote them back and said, Thanks for your thoughtful note.

The weekend before the presidential election, my wife, brother, and I walked door-to-door in rural western Missouri canvassing for Obama. We bought sandwiches at a luncheonette where a skinny white guy squinted at our Obama buttons and whispered, I’m voting for him. Later we rang the bell at a dilapidated A-frame house set back far from a rutted dirt road. Three mangy dogs were chained out front to massive pines. A young pregnant woman holding a baby on her hip said she would never vote for someone who wouldn’t even put his hand on the Bible. Katya wanted to explain to her that she was confused, that Obama is a Christian. I whispered, Let’s go back to the car. People who form firm opinions with so little knowledge only pretend to be open-minded. They select their facts like food from a buffet.

In Executed on a Technicality, the book of mine Ezekiel Green said he read, my objective was to educate people about how the death penalty works. One reviewer said the book was about my cases, but not at all about me. She was exactly right. Maybe it was a mistake to write it that way, but it wasn’t accidental. I wanted to write about facts. My beliefs were irrelevant.

But it is your beliefs, not just facts, that determine who you are. Of the hundred or more death-row inmates I’ve represented, there are seven, including Quaker, I believe to be innocent. They get sentenced to death because they have incompetent or underpaid trial lawyers, and because human beings make mistakes. They get executed because my colleagues and I can’t find a way to stop it. Quaker won’t be the last. I tell young lawyers who want to be death-penalty lawyers that if it’s going to be disabling to watch your clients die, you need to find something else to do. Your clients are going to die. And it’s not a comfort to know that most of them are guilty. The inmate set to die the week after the Quaker execution had murdered a woman and raped her, in that order. But if you believe it’s wrong to kill, you believe it’s wrong to kill. When I first met him, he said to me, All praise be to Allah for sending me here. I was on the wrong path, and until I got here I didn’t know it. He believed he would not be executed. He thought it mattered that he had reformed. His older brother was a marine. He told me if he got paroled he wanted to go to Iraq and fight for his country.

Quaker and Winston and Green and all the rest are not their real names, but their cases are real. The courts and judges behaved in the manner I have described. I think some judges should be removed from the bench, but I don’t think Judge Truesdale did anything legally unethical, or I would have said so. I haven’t held much back. She