David R. Dow

When a universally admired Austin billionaire, dedicated humanitarian and patron of the arts, is found bludgeoned in her home, her husband Rafael - fifteen years her junior, the son of poor Mexican immigrants, who works as a cook - is the obvious and only suspect. He is tried, convicted, and sentenced to death; sent to death row where monsters like him belong. The only problem: he's completely innocent. Six years pass, when overlooked DNA evidence saves him from execution at the eleventh hour. He vows to use his regained freedom to take revenge on the people and the system that stole years of his life.

A Novel

Confessions of an Innocent Man

Near the beginning of The Autobiography of an Execution, David Dow lays his cards on the table. "People think that because I am against the death penalty and don't think people should be executed, that I forgive those people for what they did. Well, it isn't my place to forgive people, and if it were, I probably wouldn't. I'm a judgmental and not very forgiving guy. Just ask my wife." It this spellbinding true crime narrative, Dow takes us inside of prisons, inside the complicated minds of judges, inside execution-administration chambers, into the lives of death row inmates (some shown to be innocent, others not) and even into his own home--where the toll of working on these gnarled and difficult cases is perhaps inevitably paid. He sheds insight onto unexpected phenomena-- how even religious lawyer and justices can evince deep rooted support for putting criminals to death-- and makes palpable the suspense that clings to every word and action when human lives hang in the balance.

The Autobiography of an Execution

"Every life is different, but every death is the same. We live with others. We die alone." In his riveting, artfully written memoir The Autobiography of an Execution, David Dow enraptured readers with a searing and frank exploration of his work defending inmates on death row. But when Dow's father-in-law receives his own death sentence in the form of terminal cancer, and his gentle dog Winona suffers acute liver failure, the author is forced to reconcile with death in a far more personal way, both as a son and as a father. Told through the disparate lenses of the legal battles he's spent a career fighting, and the intimate confrontations with death each family faces at home, THINGS I'VE LEARNED FROM DYING offers a poignant and lyrical account of how illness and loss can ravage a family. Full of grace and intelligence, Dow offers readers hope without cliché and reaffirms our basic human needs for acceptance and love by giving voice to the anguish we all face--as parents, as children, as partners, as friends--when our loved ones die tragically, and far too soon.

A Book About Life

Things I've Learned from Dying

When David Dow was first asked to represent death row inmates, he supported the death penalty. Capital punishment was an abstraction to him, and he imagined that death row was filled with characters like Charles Manson and Hannibal Lecter. Dow gradually realized that his perception of the death penalty and those on death row was completely incorrect.Dow began witnessing the profound injustices the inmates consistently endured: from confessions coerced by the police to bizarrely incompetent lawyers; from corrupt prosecutors and backward judges to racist juries. None of his clients was a serial killer; some had been unarmed and perhaps unwitting accomplices; most were repentant; one turned himself in; several were obviously innocent. Not one of them fit the media stereotype of the hardened, heartless murderer, incapable of rehabilitation, undeserving of even a modicum of justice. And yet these are the men Dow came to know as he fought, often unsuccessfully, for their lives. In the end, he is forced to concur with Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart's famous pronouncement that being sentenced to death in America is like being struck by lightning; capital punishment isn't reserved for the most heinous criminals but is meted out arbitrarily.The cases in this eye-opening book are those of the men on death row who changed Dow's mind about capital punishment forever. You'll meet Johnny Joe Martinez, for instance, who was executed despite the fact that Dow convinced the court that he had strong grounds for an appeal. Martinez had exhausted his right of appeal when his lawyer wrote a mere seventeen-line-long appeal; he was executed on a technicality. Roger Coleman was denied an appeal because, although his lawyers mailed the appeal notice on time, it was received literally one day too late; he was executed because his lawyers failed to use registered mail. Another inmate was executed despite his court-appointed lawyer's shocking and demonstrable incompetence: the lawyer arrived at the courtroom drunk and snorted cocaine in the bathroom during breaks in the testimony. All of these men were executed on technicalities.These concrete accounts of the people Dow has known and represented prove that the death penalty is consistently unjust, and it's precisely this fundamental-and lethal-injustice, Dow convincingly argues, that should compel us to abandon the system altogether.

Lethal Injustice on America's Death Row

Executed on a Technicality

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, and 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. 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.

David R. Dow

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