A Saint on Death Row

by Thomas Cahill

  By this point Sheila was on the verge of hysteria, weeping into the phone to Dominique: “I just want you to know that here I am in my sixties, if anyone's life should be taken it should be mine, because I've had a life. I'm a mother and a grandmother and a wife. All the things you haven't had a chance to do I've had a chance to do.” To which Dominique replied, “Sheila, you stop talking like that. You know you're just being silly. You stop that. Where I'm going I'm going to take care of everybody, and you're going to keep up the struggle. You have to stay here and keep up the struggle.”

  “I'll do the best I can,” said Sheila, dripping tears.

  Andy got on the phone with Dominique and they joked together as they always had, though by this point Andy was probably more of a wreck inside than Sheila. Then the news came through of the Supreme Court's refusal. Sheila took the phone once more to tell Dominique. Then she said, “I will be with you tonight and I will be with you every minute.”

  “And I thought,” said Sheila recently, as if these things had happened only yesterday, “I've just got to get in there and be as close to him as I can and never take my eyes off him. Never. And that's what I did.”

  Facing the execution room are two other rooms, one for reporters and for supporters of the condemned man, explicitly invited by him, the other set aside by law for the family of the victim. Both rooms are shielded from the execution room only by panes of glass, so that the viewers may have unobstructed views of the progress of the execution. On this night the second room was empty. No member of the dissenting Lastrapes family had been invited to attend the execution.

  The witnesses Dominique had invited were Sheila, Andy, Dave Atwood, and two women who had had lengthy correspondences with him—Barbara Bacci, a Roman woman who collaborated with Sant'Egidio, and Lorna Kelly, a Sant'Egidio member from New York. Each of their names was called out by a prison official, and they were told to proceed to the room from which they would view the execution. Dominique did not invite his mother because he was afraid she would make a scene; he did not invite Jessica because he believed it would be impossible for her to bear. But the first person called as a witness that evening was Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Dominique knew the archbishop could not be there, but forcing the prison officials to call out his name and acknowledge him was a final demonstration by Dominique of his sense of his own dignity and self-worth.

  When the witnesses file into the room, they see the condemned already strapped down on a cross-shaped gurney, his arms outstretched, the intravenous tubes by which the chemicals will travel already implanted in his veins. “When we came in,” said Sheila, “he looked at me—I think the whole time. I never took my eyes off him and he never took his eyes off me.”

  An official placed a microphone near Dominique's mouth. Sheila thought his face looked swollen and wondered if he had been already given some sort of medication. His last words, a bit rambling and primitive, suggest that she was right. His initial comment about the number of people present even suggests he may have seen people who weren't there. Certainly, he knew there were thousands praying for him at that moment at an all-night vigil in the Basilica of Santa Maria.

  “Yes,” he began. “Man, there is a lot of people there. There was a lot of people that got me to this point, and I can't thank them all. But thank you for your love and support. They have allowed me to do a lot more than I could have done on my own. Sheila, I wish I would have met you seven years ago; it would have been a lot easier. But I have overcome a lot. I am not angry but I am disappointed that I was denied justice. But I am happy that I was afforded you all as family and friends. You all have been there for me; it's a miracle. I love you. And I have to tell Jessica I am sorry. I never knew it would come to this. Lorna, you know you have to keep my struggle going. I know you just lost your baby, but you have to keep running. Dave, keep the struggle going. Andy, I love you, man. Tell Andre and them that I didn't get a chance to reach my full potential, but you can help them reach theirs. You needed me, but I just did not know how to be there for them. There is so much I have to say, but I just can't say it all. I love you all. Please just keep the struggle going. If you turn your back on me, you turn your back on them. I love you all and I'll miss you all. Thanks for allowing me to touch so many hearts. I never knew I could do it, but you made it possible. I am just sorry. And I am not as strong as I thought I was going to be. But I guess it only hurts for a little while. You all are my family. Please keep my memory alive.”

  Though the Houston Police Department may keep flawed records and the entire justice establishment of Texas may be astonishingly barbaric in its operations, the records kept of Huntsville executions are exceedingly exact:

  OFFENDER: Green Dominique #999068

  EXECUTION DATE: October 26, 2004

  TAKEN FROM HOLDING CELL: 7:37 TIME

  STRAPPED TO GURNEY: 7:39 TIME

  SOLUTION FLOWING: 7:40 RIGHT ARM

  7:41 LEFT ARM

  LAST STATEMENT: 7:47 TIME

  LETHAL DOSE BEGAN: 7:50 TIME

  LETHAL DOSE COMPLETED: 7:54 TIME

  PRONOUNCED DEAD: 7:59 TIME

  So seven minutes before he began speaking his last words, a tranquilizing drug was already being pumped into him, followed by a paralyzing drug, followed by heart-stopping poison.

  Outside the prison at just about 8 P.M., the many protesters gathered there witnessed their own epiphany. The night sky was rent by a dramatic crack of lightning, though the sky was clear and the moon full. Jessica, sure of what the lightning meant, collapsed, falling into the arms of the Lastrapes brothers.

  Andre Lastrapes showed his anger to reporters: “I felt it was dirty, and the state will have their chance to face a higher authority—that is, God. The hell with Texas and the justice system. They were full of shit, and I am speaking from my heart. I really mean that. I mean, Andrew Lastrapes was my daddy in the first place, and I forgave Dominique. I know God has a place for Dominique in heaven. The person I met doesn't deserve to die. He became close to me, and I pray that he goes to heaven.”

  Andy Lofthouse, a witness to the execution, found he could not face the actual moment and turned his back to Dominique. Sheila, exhausted by her tears, was pretty much cried out, but Andy, determined not to give Texas the satisfaction of tears, was lacerated by invisible wounds and had to get himself out of there. He drove off as soon as he could, not realizing he had Jessica's car keys—which left her stranded. She and the Lastrapes brothers rode back to Houston that night with Sheila and her husband, Patrick Racey, who had stood in the parking lot with the other protesters when they beheld with awe the great crack of lightning in the sky.

  I had asked Sheila's assistant, Kathryn, who had my detailed itinerary, to phone me at any hour of the day or night with any news. She reached me a little after 2 A.M. continental European time in the German city of Trier to tell me Dominique was dead. Good-hearted Kathryn, who had come to know Dominique well over the course of many phone conversations and to love him, was immensely sad but strangely peaceful, believing as she did—with impressive firmness— that Dominique had “escaped” to God. “He got away, as the Irish say.”

  My hotel faced the extensive ruins of the Porta Nigra, an elaborate gate built by the empire-building Romans about A.D. 180 and intended to call attention to the importance of Trier, “Roma Secunda” as the Romans called it, the first city to be founded in Roman-occupied Germany. After I had said good-bye to Kathryn, I looked out across the well-lit night to the huge stone blocks, some weighing as much as six metric tons, assembled more than eighteen centuries before. Most of the stones are still in place, cut and laid there without mortar by slaves.

  The Romans were intensely proud of their accomplishments, and they built the longest-lasting empire the world has ever known. They were also insanely cruel, crucifying anyone who got in their way, delighting in the many grisly deaths and the constant flow of human blood that filled their arenas. Though they knew they were great, they didn't know they were cruel. Th
at was something they kept carefully hidden from themselves.

  ∗ In addition to the Death Row prisoners’ methods of communicating and sharing that I declined to describe in the Prologue, there is a further possibility occasionally open to them. Twice weekly each inmate who is deemed to be cooperative and deferential is permitted his hour of exercise “outside”—that is, in a small dayroom or recreation yard composed of cement walls, a cement floor, and a ceiling made of bars. The spaces between the bars of this ceiling, however, are open to the outside, which means that the prisoner can “feel the sun and on occasion feel the breeze if one happens to come through that particular day,” as Ivan Cantu has described it to me. Running the length of the room is a divider made of bars and mesh. One prisoner exercises on one side of this divider, a second prisoner on the other side. This arrangement allows some communication between two prisoners, but arranging to meet a particular prisoner in this way requires considerable prior planning and the cooperation of a guard. Normally, a prisoner is allowed to “go outside” only with another prisoner housed in the same section. But arranging to exercise with a particular prisoner is sometimes possible if one can bribe a guard by forfeiting something else, such as a shower—a principal daily pleasure. Though each Death Row prisoner has the right to a daily shower, this can be taken only in the presence of a guard, and the guards are particularly averse to spending their time in this way.

  ∗ Sheila Murphy has taken particular note of these circumstances as they affect the children of Death Row inmates: “No place for children to play, no books, no coloring books. They just have to sit and wait while their mother talks on the phone to their father. They just look on with eyes so sad—such inhumanity to innocent children under color of law.”

  ∗ Kenneth Foster was on Death Row when he wrote his poem. He had been sentenced under Texas's infamous “law of parties” for innocently driving a car from which a man disembarked and killed another man. Thanks to the heroic efforts of the appellate lawyer Keith Hampton, Sheila Murphy, and Andrew Lofthouse, his sentence has recently been commuted to life in prison.

  6

  “Did he do it?” is the question I inevitably hear from anyone to whom I tell Dominique's story. My answer is that I don't think so, but I am not equipped to provide a definitive answer.

  Dominique usually insisted that he was not present when Andrew Lastrapes was shot. Is this possible? Yes. There is nothing in the case's meager evidence to prove that Dominique was present. The only thing that points to him as present (and as the shooter) is the testimony of three fellow robbers, who were as far from being disinterested observers as one could find and who had every reason to collaborate in pointing the finger at Dominique, the youngest and least protected of their quartet. Dominique's father, admittedly not an indifferent witness— though not as patently incredible as the three robbers— signed an affidavit that Dominique was at home with him at the time of the shooting.

  But Dominique also told Andy Lofthouse that “‘nobody who ever admitted to doing anything ever got out of here.’ And he said that on repeated occasions. He said ‘I've been here a long time and I've never seen anybody who ever admitted to anything ever get out of here.’” This leads me to speculate that it is also possible that Dominique was present but was not the shooter, but that he also decided as a legal strategy not to admit this.

  Dominique's impatient insistence on locating the tape of that night's events from the convenience store in front of which Andrew Lastrapes was shot certainly points us in the direction of one of the two scenarios above, since Dominique was certain that such a tape would exonerate him by showing another (whom he was unwilling to name) to have been the shooter. One could, I suppose, theorize that this was merely a ploy by Dominique, since he must have known that such a tape would long ago have been rendered useless, either by having been destroyed or by its contents having been taped over.

  But Dominique's agitation on the subject of taped evidence goes back far beyond the appearance of Sheila Murphy on the scene. I am in possession of a pitiable letter written by Dominique in August 1994, barely a year after his conviction, complaining—to the first court-appointed attorney assigned to represent him in his appeals—that the tape must be found and pointing out that this is his third request. Given the faulty memory of his original lawyer, Melamed, and the refusal of Melamed's colleague, Diana Olvera, to be interviewed, there is no way of proving that Dominique asked them to locate such a tape, but the letter of 1994 surely points in that direction.

  My own hunch is that one of the above scenarios, more likely the second, comes closest to what happened on that night. But I must admit that it is not outside the realm of possibility that Dominique was the shooter. The difficulty of properly accounting for real lives in cases like these is steeped in far more ambiguities, loose ends, dead ends, and unknowables than one would ever encounter on, say, American television's Law and Order. And when the evidence has been manipulated, suppressed, destroyed, forgotten, the obstacles to ascertaining the truth are very nearly insurmountable. It would be easier today to prove that the recently discovered dark matter of the universe is made of baba ghanoush than to prove the innocence of Dominique Green.

  But why do we fixate on his innocence? On the “did he do it?” aspect of the case? What I see in the eyes of those who ask this question is that, if I cannot say unequivocally that Dominique was innocent, they are freed from any responsibility toward him. “Oh, well, who knows whether he did it or not, so let's talk about something else.”

  But the first question an inquiring American should ask is not “Did he do it?” but “Did he receive a fair trial?” And the second question is like it: “Were his subsequent encounters with the law fair?” That is what we would wish, even what we would demand, for ourselves. To both these questions the answer must be a resounding no. His trial was monstrously unfair. And his subsequent encounters with the law were tragic farces, cat-and-mouse games played out in a legal arena run by people who had no intention of giving him justice.

  Just prior to Dominique's execution, Andy Lofthouse, a brilliant law student whose deep involvement in this case probably cost him the editorship of the law review at Chicago's John Marshall Law School, was desperately leaving no stone unturned, hoping he might uncover some new route to a stay for Dominique. With nearly quixotic enterprise, he resolved to try once more to speak with Diana Olvera, who had acted as assistant counsel in Dominique's trial but had turned aside all of his and Sheila's requests to be interviewed. (“We tried to contact [her] probably ten times but she would never talk to us.”) He visited her office and was horrified to discover that she was now sharing an office with an attorney who had recently been hired to represent Michael Neal, one of those who originally fingered Dominique as Lastrapes's murderer. Michael Neal was already serving a thirty-year sentence. Why, Andy wondered, did he suddenly require a lawyer just as Dominique's case was being reviewed for the last time? Why was one of Dominique's original lawyers, who would never speak about her involvement in Dominique's case, now sharing an office with Neal's lawyer? And why was Olvera, despite the fact that she would not speak to Dominique's current lawyers, willing to sign an affidavit rebutting all of Dominique's charges of ineffective counsel, when it had been so obvious that the principal lawyer, Melamed, had been ineffective? Was there any way that all of this could be just coincidence?

  The pitiable letter I mentioned above is dreary additional evidence that, very early in the game, the door to justice had been firmly shut on Dominique. The letter is worth quoting in full to demonstrate the powerless vacuum in which Dominique found himself Recall in reading it that at the time of writing Dominique was just twenty, a very young man whose only experiences were ghetto experiences, most of them negative. He was just beginning to develop an awareness of his true existential situation—of the inescapable trap in which he was now confined. Whereas he seems during his trial to have believed mistakenly that he was playing a kind of game that would soon end eit
her in his release or in a relatively brief prison term, in this letter he has begun to account his conviction as a deadly serious matter and is attempting to summon the critical intelligence necessary to defeat the system in which he is trapped. But he is, as yet, rather far from the eloquence he would later develop. I reprint the letter here with its typos, misspellings, and other verbal peculiarities:

  Michael P. Fosher

  August 31st, 1994

  The Lyric Center

  440 Louisiana #2100

  Houston, Texas 77002

  Re: Information, Records, Documents of the trial of, Dominique Green, that he wishes to obtain and review that is presently in your possession which is the main primary objective of his concern.

  Dear Michael Fosher:

  Months and months have past since I last chose to write you asking for information regarding my case. And also sending material to you that I had hoped to help you. But somehow you failed to reply to my requests or even give me a responce. So with the utmost amount of patience, I have chosen to write to you again seeking the materials that I have requested, and am now requesting from you.

  As you know, Mr. Fosher, I have sent you my two indictments. One is for aggravated robbery, and the other is for the crime I am charged with committing and convicted for, capital murder. When I had sent them to you some time ago, I also sent you alot of information I gathered from researching cases which I sincerely felt would affect or have an affect on the surface of my two indictments.