The Autobiography of an Execution

Katya had heard this toast before. I had heard her response before. She said, It sure took you long enough to decide.

When you don’t get married until late in life, the list of qualities you expect your wife to have can grow to be specific and long.

Katya is a competitive ballroom dancer. I bump into our piano walking from the kitchen to the library. She could have been a concert flutist, but her parents were practical Germans who saw no prospects in earning a living as a musician. My great-grandparents died in the Holocaust. The first time I met Katya’s mom and dad I wondered where their parents had been.

I said, You were pretty much the exact opposite of the person my list described. It took me a little while to realize that maybe the list was wrong.

She said, Maybe?

I smiled. I said, A little while to realize that the list was definitely wrong.

She said, Maybe you should stop keeping lists.

THE NEXT MORNING I woke up before dawn and went for a run with the dog. I came home and brewed a pot of coffee for myself and a cup of tea for Katya. I made breakfast for Lincoln while Katya fixed his lunch and helped him get dressed. I showered and shaved and put on a suit. I usually wear blue jeans and a T-shirt to the office, so Lincoln asked me why I was dressed funny. I told him I had to go to a meeting. Katya said, Hey Linco, it’s time to go to school. I kissed them both good-bye then drove to the courthouse.

I walked into the courtroom for the 175th Harris County District Court and chatted with Loretta, one of the clerks. I hadn’t seen her since August, when my client Leroy Winter had been executed. Winter had been serving a prison sentence for sexual assault of a minor when he killed a guard. His defense was that the guard had been raping him. It might have been true, but it’s still not a good idea to kill a guard. Loretta said she was sorry about Winter. She was lying. Her friends are cops. She was just being polite. I appreciated it. I said, Thanks, Loretta. She told me that my wife must have picked out my shirt and tie, because they matched. I smiled and told her that she knows me pretty well. I asked her to please call the prosecutor to let her know that I was there.

A few minutes later, the prosecutor came into the court. While we waited for the judge to arrive, we talked about our upcoming vacations. My wife and I are going white-water kayaking, I told her. Shirley told me that she and her husband were going to the Pacific Northwest. She asked how long I’ve been kayaking, and I asked her whether she’d been to Seattle before. Most of my colleagues don’t like her, but Shirley and I get along just fine. Because I used to support the death penalty, it’s not so hard for me to have sympathy for the misguided souls who still do.

I saw two former students of mine, now assistant district attorneys. They asked how things were going at the law school where I teach, and we chatted about their careers. The judge walked in, and a bailiff shouted for us all to rise. Defense lawyers and prosecutors milled around, trying to work out deals with each other, or just engaging in courthouse gossip. Criminal courtrooms, when there isn’t a trial going on, are a lot like a Middle Eastern bazaar.

A man charged with drug possession stood before the judge, in between the prosecutor and his own lawyer, whom he had met less than five minutes earlier, and pleaded guilty. He had been through this ritual before. He was as calm as you would be if you were standing in line to pay a parking ticket. The judge sentenced him to time already served. The prosecutor and I asked the judge if we could approach the bench, and she told us we could. The prosecutor said that she and I had compared calendars, and we wanted to see if she planned to be in town on February 4. The judge glanced down at her calendar and said that she did. Shirley handed the judge an order. Without looking down, the judge signed it.

The order the judge signed is called a death warrant. Shirley and I had picked the day that my client would die. We planned the execution around our vacations. The warrant commanded the director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to place Henry Quaker, on February 4, “in a room arranged for the purpose of execution” and then to inject him with “a substance or substances in lethal quantity sufficient to cause [his] death” and to continue with the injection “until the said HENRY QUAKER is dead.”

I paced in the hall while Shirley made me a copy of the order. I have been reading these boilerplate warrants for close to twenty years, but they still take my breath away. I called Jerome, who had left the office and was on the way to the prison to see Henry. Jerome would deliver the news in person. I don’t like for my clients to learn from a letter or even by phone that a date has been chosen for their deaths. I realize that it’s absurd. What difference does it make how you’re told when you’re going to die? None, probably. But we all have our little idiosyncrasies.

I got in my truck to drive to my office at the law school. You don’t see many homeless people in Houston. They’re there, of course, but unlike New York or San Francisco, where you have to hurdle them on the sidewalks, you can pretend like they aren’t here, because they aren’t in my neighborhood. But I see them when I’m at the courthouse. So I keep a stack of twenty or thirty one-dollar bills in my truck. The experts say that they’re just going to buy booze. For all I know the experts are right, but I’ve never figured out why that means I shouldn’t hand out the money. If I’d been alive five hundred years ago, and been a Catholic, of course, I’d have been one of the sinners buying indulgences.

There’s one homeless guy, Stan, who lives with his three dogs and a grocery cart under the freeway where I turn left. How can you turn a blind eye to a man who shares the food he scavenges from Dumpsters with his dogs? He has a squeegee in his cart. I usually give him a dollar not to clean my windshield and Milk-Bones for the dogs. The first time I gave him money he asked me my name. I told him my friends call me Doc. He said, Cool, then I’ll call you Doc. Some days I give him cans of tuna, or crackers and cheese. He says, This is nice, but I’d prefer some beer. Last Christmas I gave him a six-pack of Shiner. He said, Whoa. The good stuff. Thanks, Doc.

I saw Stan on the day the judge signed Quaker’s death warrant. He said, Hey Doc, you’ve looked better. I nodded and gave him the whole stack of ones.

HENRY QUAKER’S STORY was treacly sweet. He and Dorris had been sweethearts at Yates High School. He carried her books to school, literally, and held her hand in the halls. They got married a week after they graduated, in 1983. Their son Daniel was born seven months later. Henry felt like he had to do something dramatic. He had a son on the way. He intended to support his wife and child, but he had been only a mediocre student. Although he loved to read, he had no skills and no prospects. So he enlisted in the army. It would be a living, and he figured he would get the job skills he needed to take care of his family. Dorris went to pharmacy school while they lived on the base, learning how to mix IVs. Henry learned heavy-machine maintenance and read a lot of books. They were a charming cliche. Charisse was born four years later. Henry served his time, became a reservist, and started welding in Houston. The pay was twice what he made as a soldier. He said he was deliriously happy. He would drink a beer after work with his buddies, but he was home in time to bathe the kids and put them to bed. On Saturday nights, he and Dorris paid a neighborhood kid to babysit, and they would go out to dinner and to the movies.

Then, in 1989, Henry was working at a chemical plant in Pasadena. Leaking gas ignited an explosion that measured over 3.0 on the Richter scale. You could feel the ground shake for miles. Henry escaped with barely a scratch, but his two best friends burned to death in a massive fire that took half a day to contain. Henry heard them screaming, first for help, then in agony. Their bodies were literally consumed by the flames.

A week later he was back on the job. Between the day he returned and the day his family was killed, Henry did not miss even a single day of work. But he stopped reading books and stopped going out for a beer after his shift. His coworkers described him as sullen and withdrawn. They said he did his work like he was hypnotized. No one could remember the last time Henry laughed or even smiled.

When police arrived at the Quaker house following the 911 call, Sandra Blue told them that Dorris and Henry had been separated for a few months. She said she didn’t know him very well. He was quiet. When Sandra would see him in the mornings before he moved out, he was always polite, waved, said good morning, asked her how she was doing. He still spent a lot of time with the kids, shooting baskets, playing catch, going for ice cream. Even after they split, Henry came over to the house twice a week to pick up the kids. He adored them. Sandra had never seen or heard him yell at either of them, and she’d never seen or heard Henry and Dorris fighting.

She said there was no chance that Dorris was seeing someone else. Henry was the love of her life.

Police found Henry at a construction site in the medical center. He was sitting astraddle a beam eleven