A Saint on Death Row: The Story of Dominique Green
"Dominique is where he is for two reasons only: because he is poor and because he is black."
So far this is one of the most striking lines in the book I began reading yesterday, Thomas Cahill's account of an innocent man sentenced to death in the nightmare of hell known as Texas' Death Row. This book is absolutely extraordinary, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the death penalty. Recently in one of my other posts I was having a discussion with an avid supporter of the death penalty, someone who thinks instead of curtailing our use of it we should actually seek more executions. When confronted with the massive injustice in the United States' application of the death penalty, where the disparity in sentencing between poor minorities versus middle class whites is overwhelming, his solution was instead to just kill more whites, as if that would even it out. And he fails to address the hundreds or thousands of innocent men and women sitting on death row right now, or who have already been executed, nor does he address the horrific circumstances in which society has completely failed these persons and drove them to a life of crime. My challenge to all of you who support the death penalty (and to Christians, I understand that in theory one can be a Christian and support execution as a form of justice), given the horrifying injustice of its current application, and given that there is no progress being made towards addressing it, can we not at least support a moratorium on all executions until such injustices are addressed? Or are we really so filled with blood lust that we are willing to let innocent men be killed just to satisfy our need for the perception of justice?
Dominique's case is particularly harrowing. He was raised by an alcoholic/drug addict mother and father, a mother who was also mentally ill, she herself having been raised in some sort of Satanic cult, where she was raped by all the men in her family and eventually bore a child by one. In her late teens she somewhat got herself together, repressing all the pain, and married and had her first son, Dominique. She would eventually have two more sons. She had her children baptized in the Catholic Church, and sent them to Catholic school, where Dominique was raped by a priest. The mother never informed anyone, neither authorities nor the church, but simply removed Dominique from the school and kept it quiet. But this rape of Dominique seemed to trigger all of her own repressed memories, so that she began sinking into alcoholism and drug abuse, and began prostituting herself, openly in front of the children and the husband, who himself was so messed up on drugs as not to care. One time Dominique forgot to pass on a message to his mother from a john, and to punish him she held his hand over an open flame on the stove, something she would do one more time years later. One time, taking the blame for some trouble of his younger brother, his mother grabbed her gun and shot at Dominique. Somehow, though, this five year old brother sensed what was going down and managed to empty the gun of its bullets before she could shoot. Eventually his mother was placed in a mental institution, where she would be in and out for years.
Dominique took on the role of protector of the younger two, and whenever the mother was angry about something, no matter whose fault it was Dominique took the blame. He knew he was strong enough to handle his mother's abuse, and that they were not. At around the age of 15 he ran away from home, and though living on the streets of Houston or at friends' houses, he began taking care of his brothers full time. His parents taught him to sell drugs when he was eight years old, and it was the only thing he knew, and so he did. He sold drugs to keep his brothers alive. At one point he got involved with a group of burglars, and one of the victims of robbery remembers him so vividly, because throughout the process of the robbery Dominique continuously apologized to the man, told him how sorry he was, that he had to feed his family, and after robbing him, Dominique actually said thank you.
During one of the robberies one of his cohorts shot and killed a man, a truck driver. All of the evidence exonerated Dominique. The gun that was found had one set of prints on it, not belonging to Dominique. Eyewitness testimony placed Dominique in a position where it would be impossible to shoot the man. But his court appointed defense attorney was working hand-in-glove with the prosecutor, and none of the evidence was ever brought to the jury - the jury of all whites (so much for jury of your peers). Of the four men involved in the burglary gang, three were black and one was white. The white man was never even charged with a crime, had an expert come in and prepare a statement for him that was supposed to be his words, but after his testimony in court it was clear he played no part in that statement at all, just merely offered his signature, thus condemning Dominique. His attorneys never called a single character witness, even though there were several who truly knew Dominique, knew he was incapable of murder - including the victim's wife! His own attorney never called the victim's wife, who was willing to testify in Dominique's favor. They did decide to call one witness, however, to testify to Dominique's character - his mother, the woman who hated Dominique with all her being, who burned him and twice attempted to murder him, who was a diagnosed schizophrenic with a drug and alcohol addiction, this is the woman his own attorneys called to testify to his character. It was perhaps her testimony that sealed his fate, as she said that of course he was capable of murder, he was a little devil, and that when they sentence him he should be given the harshest sentence possible.
At his sentencing hearing, his attorneys again betrayed him, and called a psychologist to the stand who testified that Blacks and Latinos are more prone to violent crime and that execution is the preferred sentence because it is almost a guarantee that even if he weren't guilty, he would certainly commit some crime like this in the future, just by virtue of his being Black. This was his own witness testifying in this manner.
Needless to say, Dominique was sentenced to death - which in Texas doesn't require anything near the kind of fabricated case brought against Dominique (just ask Cathy Henderson, the woman on death row convicted without a shred of evidence against her). For several years he was full of rage and hate while in prison, in solitary confinement for 23 out of 24 hours a day. Eventually he got to healing, and he read Bishop Desmond Tutu's book No Future Without Forgiveness, which details the Bishop's work in South Africa on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where members of the Apartheid were encouraged to come forward and openly testify to the wrongs they had done and the sins they had committed against Black Africans, and Black Africans were then called forward to forgive them. This book profoundly changed Dominique, and he set out to forgive every single person who had ever wronged him, and inasmuch as possible, to seek forgiveness from anyone he had ever wronged. Ultimately, under extraordinary circumstances given the lack of contact with other prisoners (the author says he cannot reveal the means, but that prisoners find creative ways to contact one another), Dominique took this on as a ministry of his own, and led many more prisoners to seek out this same kind of forgiveness, for and from others. Here, on Texas' infamous Death Row, where innocent and guilty alike go to die a lonely death, a saint was born.
I have not yet finished the book, but I do know that eventually Dominique loses his appeals, and is executed (it's not really a spoiler, it's mentioned on the back cover). The book is reviewed and praised by Jonathan Kozol, +Desmond Tutu, and Sister Helen Prejean. I encourage everyone to get this book, to read it, and to please take a stand against the injustice of the death penalty, and of our prison system in general.