Angel of Death Row

Angel of Death Row, by Andrea D. Lyon

Full disclosure:  I know Andrea, I've worked with Andrea, I've represented some of the same people, I know and have worked with people she writes about in this book.  But I'm going to review this book all the same.

Andrea joined the Cook County (IL) Public Defender's Office at a time when there were very few women trial lawyers, much less criminal defense lawyers.  She took a lot of guff from prosecutors, judges and colleagues, but she never let it stop her.  By the time she left that office, she was the head of the Homicide Task Force, than which there are, in no small part thanks to Andrea, no better lawyers.  She went on to found the Capital Resource Center, representing Illinois' death row inmates in post-conviction proceedings (the Center is now the Post-Conviction Unit of the Office of the State Appellate Defender), and then moved on to clinical work at the University of Michigan and the DePaul University School of Law, where she heads the Center for Justice in Capital Cases.

This is the story of how she came to be "The Angel of Death Row", as she was dubbed by the Chicago Tribune.  She talks of her life, her family, and her clients in an easy, conversational style.  It's not a book that's heavy on the law; that's not what it's about.  It's about people.  The people she works with, the people she lives with, the people she represents.  The last are the most important.  It's so easy to see criminal defendants as "the other"; Andrea helps us (as she has helped juries) see the man or woman, and how they got to be sitting in the defendant's seat.   Some of the stories are horrific, some are sad, some are incomprehensible.  But they are all stories of human beings whose lives went terribly wrong.  Andrea knows that the "why" is as important as the "what" in these stories, and she is indefatigable in conveying that to judges and juries.

Andrea's passion for justice and her anger at injustice and the system that tolerates it are obvious on every page of this book. 

The Autobiography of an Execution

The Autobiography of an Execution, by David R. Dow

David Dow works in the belly of the beast. He's the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service, which represents death row inmates, mostly in federal habeas corpus proceedings (or what's left of them), and provides assistance to capital trial lawyers. The TDS' mission is to "establish a fair and just criminal justice system in Texas". Yeah, well, good luck with that one. In Texas, they'd as soon send you to Death Row as look at you.

This isn't, however, a diatribe against capital punishment. It's about how this work affects someone who does it, how you balance your commitment to someone whose life is, quite literally, in your hands with your commitment to your family. He misses the Hallowe'en visit to a haunted house he promised his son. His family goes on vacation without him. He tries to juggle overwhelming workloads and not enough time and resources, and how that means that his office can't do anything to help a man who believes that Jesus has arranged that he will walk out of Death Row, a mentally ill man who was allowed to represent himself at trial and on appeal.

The "hook" here is the story of Henry Quaker, a man convicted of killing his wife and children, whom Dow is representing. Then he receives a letter from another inmate, telling him that Quaker is innocent, that this man had hired another to kill a woman who had been stealing from him and that he'd killed the wrong person. What happened? Hell, this is Texas. What do you think happened?

There's one thing that bothers me about this book. Dow writes about the death penalty system that "the abolitionists' single-minded focus on innocence makes them seem as indifferent to principle as the vigilantes are." And there is something to that. But it seems to me that by centering this memoir around the execution of a probably innocent man, Dow is doing the same thing. It's as if he felt that writing about representing the guilty would somehow diminish his memoir, and I don't believe it would.

Dow tells the story of a childhood friend of his wife's, a famous artist, who, inebriated, reveals herself to be "racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, narcissistic, and altogether unlikable." Dow says that he realized that his "clients were better people than this piece of garbage, and they even killed somebody." But, you know, I take a different lesson. Katya tells him, "She's been my friend since she was eight years old, which is way before she was a terrible person. What am I supposed to do? Abandon her?" They remain friends for the same reason we ask juries not to kill our clients: we are more than the worst thing we've ever done.

(The names of people in this book have mostly been changed, some circumstances altered, in order to respect the confidences of clients. In an appendix, Meredith Duncan, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, discusses the duty of confidentiality that lawyers have to their clients. I appreciated this very much, because it's something most people don't understand, particularly when it comes to people like the Cook County public defenders whose client confided in to them that he was responsible for a murder for which another man had been convicted. Counsel kept the secret for years, until the client, who had given them permission to reveal the confidence after his death, died. The lawyers were vilified, but they were right.)