A Killing in Texas

Plus: Check out Book Beast, for more news on hot titles and authors and excerpts from the latest books.

Pat Sullivan / AP Photo Thomas Cahill’s moving new book about Death Row in Texas exposes the horror of executions—and the power of forgiveness.

If you're at all like me you've always assumed that the criminal justice system generally works pretty well in these United States, even knowing how slowly its wheels turn and that serious mistakes are made. Darkening the picture, of course, is the racial element, the unequal treatment of black defendants. And then, there's the death penalty, which puts us into the dubious judicial company of China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Afghanistan, and other countries where you wouldn't want to stake your life on the independence of a humane judiciary, and that is disturbing. Still, in contrast to those countries, we have real defense lawyers here, independent judges, an attachment to the presumption of innocence, and a certain correction mechanism to catch mistakes, sometimes.

Read Thomas Cahill on ending the death penalty.

Well, actually it would be a bit naive to give a ringing endorsement of the way things work in the United States. Even so, prepare for your level of disturbance to be pushed up a quantum step or two by Tom Cahill’s new book, A Saint on Death Row, which mounts a powerful challenge to any notion that all is more or less OK with the administration of criminal justice in the US. Known for books like How the Irish Saved Civilization, The Gift of the Jews, and other charmingly erudite excursions into cultural history, Cahill has produced a very contemporary piece of reportage and observation in his new book. At the center of it is the “saint” of the title, one Dominique Green, who, once you’ve gotten to know him in Cahill’s pages, is not likely to slip very quickly from your memory.

The first thing to know about Dominique is that he was put to death by lethal injection at 7:59 p.m. on October 26, 2004, having been convicted 12 years earlier, when he was 18 years old, of a murder he probably didn’t commit. Cahill met Dominique, as he refers to him throughout the book, a few years before the execution and became deeply involved in his case, not out of some anti-death-penalty activism but because of the striking effect that Dominique had on him. And what gives his book its power to break the frozen sea within us, is the character of Dominique himself, a person who started badly but acquired genuine moral grandeur during 12 years on Death Row, somebody that any reasonable person would prefer to be able to remain alive.

Not that Dominique’s qualities of compassion, the sweetness of his personality, his eloquence as a poet and writer, or the beneficent influence he had on other Death Row inmates, should matter on the larger political question that Cahill poses about the administration of justice in Texas. After all, even the vicious and unredeemable are entitled to the protections the judicial system is supposed to provide. Still, that Dominique Green rose morally above those who killed him wrecks any sense of the abstract that one might have had about Death Row inmates in general. I say this aware of the misjudgments some writers besides Cahill have made in portraying a criminal in saintly, or even just admirable terms—Norman Mailer’s championship of Jack Abbott, who had literary talent but, after getting out on parole, killed a man, comes to mind.

A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green. By Thomas Cahill. 160 pages. Nan A. Talese. $18.95. But it’s impossible to read Cahill’s quiet, straightforward, entirely unforced portrait of Dominique without being moved by it, even knowing that, without doubt, he did some foolish and criminal things when he was a troubled teenager. He was almost certainly among a group of three young men who robbed a truck driver at gunpoint outside a convenience store in Texas in 1993. During the robbery, the truck driver was killed and surely Dominique bears a heavy responsibility for that. Still there’s no proof that he actually pulled the trigger, and yet only he was charged with a capital crime by Texas’s police and prosecutors. The reason for this highly unpreferential treatment would seem to be that Dominique was the most vulnerable among the three suspects, the easiest to nail.