Executed on a Technicality

By Professor David Dow

Executed on a Technicality
Lethal Injustice on America's Death Row

The story of the death row inmates who changed one Texas lawyer’s mind about capital punishment

When David Dow took his first capital case, he supported the death penalty. He changed his position as the men on death row became real people to him, as he came to witness the profound injustices they endured: from coerced confessions to disconcertingly incompetent lawyers; from racist juries and backward judges to a highly arbitrary death penalty system.

Dow’s eye-opening book is captivating because he allows the men, and their cases, to speak for themselves. For instance, one inmate’s lawyer literally slept through his trial; another inmate was executed because the jury never heard from two eyewitnesses who swore he was no the murderer; and yet another inmate was allowed to represent himself at trial despite the fact that his mental imbalance, which included attempts to issue a subpoena to Jesus Christ, was evident.

It is these concrete accounts of the people Dow has known and represented that prove the death penalty is consistently unjust, and it’s precisely this fundamental—and lethal—injustice, Dow argues, that should compel us to abandon the system altogether.

“Executed on a Technicality is living and working proof that with capital punishment, only the random is systematic.”
—Christopher Hitchens

Among the stories David Dow tells about the men on death row:

• Johnny Joe Martinez, whose court-appointed lawyer wrote an appeal that was a mere seventeen lines long. He was executed despite the fact that Dow convinced the court that he had strong grounds for an appeal. Martinez had, technically, exhausted his right of appeal when his incompetent appeal lawyer spent all of seventeen lines of ink on him. Martinez was executed on a technicality.

• One man was represented at trial by a court-appointed lawyer whose license to practice law had been suspended. This fact alone should have been enough to warrant a new trial, but it was not. The man was executed.

• Roger Coleman, who was denied an appeal because, although his lawyers mailed the appeal notice on time, it was received literally one day too late. Coleman was executed because his lawyer failed to use registered mail.

• Another man was executed because of his court-appointed lawyer’s incompetence. The lawyer arrived at the courtroom drunk and snorted cocaine in the bathroom during breaks in the testimony.

Every one of these men died on America’s death row.

David R. Dow is professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center and an internationally recognized figure in the fight against the death penalty. He is the founder and director of the Texas Innocence Network and has represented more than thirty death row inmates. Regularly quoted in publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post, Dow is coeditor of Machinery of Death: The Reality of America's Death Penalty Regime. He lives in Houston, Texas.

This book (ISBN: 0807044202) is available through Beacon Press and Amazon.