The Autobiography of an Execution

David R. Dow’s 2010 book The Autobiography of an Execution presents an enthralling true crime narrative in which the author takes the reader into the world of prisons, the complex minds of judges, execution-administration chambers, and the experiences of death row inmates. In doing so, Dow sheds light on an underexplored but important facet of society, providing insight into unexpected phenomena, such as the way even religious justices and lawyers can express deeply rooted support for the death penalty. In The Autobiography of an Execution, Dow makes explicit the high stakes surrounding each word and action when someone’s fate of life or death is being decided.

Dow, who has represented more than one hundred death row inmates over twenty years, begins by highlighting some of the current trends surrounding the death penalty. Statistics from the Death Penalty Information Center reveal that support for the death penalty is declining and that 88 percent of presidents from the country’s top academic criminological societies do not believe it is an effective deterrent to murder. At the time the book was published, the number of death sentences was at its lowest since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. The prominent American Law Institute developed the framework for the modern capital punishment system, but it recently abandoned the project due to “intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.”

The author then goes into some of the issues with the death penalty, stating that in addition to the lengthy appeals processes, high costs, and racial biases that afflict the system, there is the growing public apprehension that sometimes we are executing the wrong people. At the time the book was published, the Innocence Project had helped exonerate seventeen people on death row through DNA evidence. Texas, a state in which only 7.8 percent of Americans live, accounts for 38 percent of state-sanctioned killing. Furthermore, the Criminal Justice Project of the NAACP reported that in the cases singled out for the death penalty, 78 percent of the victims were white.



Dow is convinced that the American “machinery of death” is faulty, and he provides a litany of reasons, giving the impression that the system is more of a lottery than anything else. Police officers lie and coerce false testimony. Court-appointed lawyers miss deadlines, sleep through trials, and fail to present exculpatory evidence. Juries buy into every word said by “expert” witnesses, who make judgments about defendants they have never met. Jurors avoid responsibility and hide behind other jurors. Judges avoid responsibility and hide behind jury verdicts. Appeals courts hide behind trial courts. The Supreme Court is able to hide from a case if it refuses to take it. Federal judges are appointed due to their friendships with senators, and they ignore facets of deeply flawed trials.

The author contends that certain federal appellate court judges are dishonorable and hostile toward the rule of law; that they seek the means to uphold death sentences even when there are egregious constitutional violations. He also notes that Supreme Court justices find themselves so inundated with cases that they cannot be sticklers for their principles, even if they are so inclined.

Dow claims to know death-penalty lawyers who were seeing a movie at the theater when their clients were executed. One attorney, he knows, found out on a Thursday that his client has been executed the previous Monday. The man had had no idea; he had been in Aruba scuba diving. Dow admits that death-row attorneys can either see themselves as the final person between the client and lethal injection, or they can see their clients as people who put themselves on the path that led them there. One perspective, he says, is healthier than the other.



At the center of the book is a death-row client Dow has been unable to save. Dow and his client have essentially run out of time, and the majority of Dow’s efforts are now carried out in the hope to buy time as he and his coworkers at the nonprofit Texas Defender Service continue to file appeals. Of the one hundred-plus death-row inmates Dow has represented, he has believed seven of them to be innocent, including the person at the center of this book.

Dow alternates scenes of how things operate on the legal side and his visits to prison with talk of his home life with Katya, his wife, and their son, Lincoln. He admits that he sometimes misses family events in order to witness another execution. He watches the executions of clients who request him to.

Through the course of the book, Dow ultimately reveals that the machinery of death cannot be halted, slowed, or reasoned with using facts, logic, or truth. He also presents himself as someone who, despite this, cannot stop fighting for it.