A Saint on Death Row

January 26, 2009
“His face has the dignity of a Benin bronze.... His countenance is suffused with an aura... goodness.” This is Cahill’s opening description of Dominique Green, whose life and death the bestselling author (How the Irish Saved Civilization
) recounts in a distinctly hagiographic tone. Green was a young African-American executed for murder in Texas in 2004, who Cahill and many others believe was innocent and convicted in a sham trial. Cahill’s “saint” Dominique suffered (among other travails, he was abused by a schizophrenic mother), sinned (he turned to drug dealing, but only, he said, to support his younger brothers) and redeemed himself in prison by educating himself and aiding his Death Row comrades, whose quoted testimony to Dominique’s qualities is more convincing than Cahill’s own praises. But Cahill makes Green more than saintly, a Christ-like figure (“like the peaceful Jesus of the gospels, Dominique was on the verge of... transfiguration”). Given the spiritual and literary license Cahill takes, one must read this less as a reasoned argument than an impassioned, very personal plea against racism, poverty and the death penalty.

March 15, 2009
Noted historian Thomas Cahill ("How the Irish Saved Civilization") movingly recounts 11 months spent with Dominique Green, a Texas death row inmate whom he met through retired Chicago judge Sheila Murphy. In descriptive, poetic words, Cahill tells of Green's chaotic and troubled life, which led him to admit participation in an armed robbery that had resulted in murder. Through the lay Catholic Community of Sant'Egidio, Green transformed his life in prison, according to Cahill, and became an earthly saint. Despite the efforts of Judge Murphy, Desmond Tutu and others, Green was executed by the state of Texas in 2004. Cahill includes poems and letters by Green as well as Cahill's specific criticism of Green's sentence. Unlike Helen Prejean's "Dead Man Walking", Cahill's book is not an all-out attack on the death penalty so much as a meditation on a life reborn through faith. Recommended for general readers.Harry Charles, Attorney at Law, St. Louis

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