Executed on a Technicality

May 2, 2005
This volume joins a growing list of recent books arguing against the death penalty, particularly by people who once supported it. Dow, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center and founder of the Texas Innocence Network, used to be "somewhere between agnostic and mildly in favor of capital punishment." Then, in 1988, he took on the case of Carl Johnson-and began to change his mind. Johnson's lawyer literally slept through crucial parts of the trial, and the judge, in Dow's opinion, gave an incorrect answer to a question from the jury that might have compelled them to sentence Johnson to death. The arguments Dow presents are pragmatic, based not on abstract theories but on facts: only a handful of murderers are executed, he says, and they are "almost never the worst of the worst"-not the Hannibal Lecters, not the Charles Mansons. Rather, they are poor members of minority groups who have been represented by incompetent lawyers, manipulated into forced confessions, or have, in some cases, even been innocent. All of these points will be familiar to opponents of capital punishment, but readers who are on the fence may learn much from Dow's impassioned but well-reasoned case.