A Saint on Death Row (11 page)

So Dominique had a final meeting with his mother, but one that also involved Sheila: “He motioned for me to come over and he said, ‘Sheila, would you sit with my mom and me for just a few minutes? It's really important to me because she and I have had very poor parenting and she doesn't know how.
Would you help her learn to pattern as a parent should, teach her how to do it?’ And I said, ‘Well, how would I do that?’ And he said, ‘Well, just talk to me like you always do. We'll just talk, and you listen, Mom. So you can do it with my brothers.’ And so we talked like we always did, you know, we joked and all.”

Then Sheila told Stephanie that Jessica was waiting her turn. “You were once young,” said Sheila, “and so was I, and we can remember how we loved seeing the person we loved when we were young, and Jessica is here and Dominique hasn't had much time with her these last ten years, so why don't we give our place to Jessica?” Miraculously, Stephanie agreed. The two older women moved off and allowed Jessica to speak privately with Dominique.

Jessica saw that the discreet beauty she had recognized long ago in her first meeting with Dominique had blossomed exponentially. His was now a presence that overcame any other energy in the room. She promised him that she would always, always remember him, and he said that for him that would be enough.

Later, when only the law team remained, Dominique began to call Sheila “Mom.” It wasn't a slip of the tongue, as Sheila realized: the first time he did it, he winked at her. Andy also had a last conversation with his friend, who had refused to order a last meal. Like his model Desmond Tutu, he was fasting. What, Andy asked, would you eat if you decided to have a last meal? “Jessica,” came the smiling reply. It seemed as if, on this last day, Dominique had worked his way free of the spiritual
crumbling he had written about to Archbishop Tutu. He was back in his usual groove, calling the shots and playfully pushing these final encounters to heightened significance.

But now it was almost time for Dominique to be taken from the Livingston prison to the Huntsville Death House. Dominique spent his last few minutes in his cell dividing up his meager possessions for his friends. Andy got all his legal notes. In the weeks ahead, as Andy read through the notes, he came to the firm conclusion that Dominique had trained himself like a law student in every legal subtlety and strategy and had succeeded in being the best lawyer of them all. To the Lastrapes brothers, Dominique gave his inscribed copy of
An African Prayer Book
and his rosary. He also directed that the payment from
National Catholic Reporter
for his essay on his rosary, the only legitimate earnings he had ever made, be given to the Lastrapes family. Everyone received an appropriate gift.

Two guards arrived to take Dominique, but deferred their mission for a few minutes at Sheila's urging, so that everyone, especially Jessica, could say a last good-bye. Sheila could see the pain in the eyes of the guards and recalled the archbishop's speculation about what this business did to the spirits of those whose work is death. Then, as the guards escorted Dominique along a glass-enclosed corridor, Sheila and Andre Lastrapes were able to accompany him for some distance on the other side of the glass. Soon enough, the two parties—Dominique and his guards, Sheila and the other friends of Dominique— were on their way in separate vehicles through the pretty Texas countryside to Huntsville.

Huntsville, a cheerful, outwardly gracious community, has to be one of the strangest human settlements on the surface of the earth, a town organized around its Death House. So many in the town work for the Huntsville prison or for one of the six other prisons in the area; and so many who do not work for the prisons work to supply the wants of those who do. The hillside above the town contains the graves of those who have been executed, many thousands of gray tombstones erected over many acres of ground, each stone engraved with the number of a prisoner, seldom with his name, the single letter “X” for executed, and the date of execution. As one approaches the town, one notes a huge signboard high above the local McDonald's franchise, welcoming visitors to “the home of Old Sparky”—that is, the electric chair that was used for decades and which is now enshrined as the central exhibit of the Texas Prison Museum of Huntsville.

As there is an unvarying procedure for carrying out executions, there is an unvarying procedure for those who have come to stand in solidarity with the condemned. The family and friends of the man (or woman) to be executed must wait in a hospice run by the Southern Baptists. They are given no choice in this matter, for the mixture of government and religion in Texas is pervasive—and not just religion as a category, nor even Christianity as a category, but a peculiar version of extreme Calvinism, full of self-justification, retribution, and even cruelty. The hospice is decorated throughout with gory scenes of Jesus's passion and death, painted by those about to be executed, often with accompanying notes from the condemned
confessing that they are paying their just dues for their sins. This is the ambience that the family and friends of the condemned must endure while they wait to speak one last time with the condemned by telephone.

While Sheila and the others waited, they were assailed by a particularly antipathetic chaplain, a Catholic, who rattled on about what an awful sin murder is and that murder by abortion is the worst of all. Dominique had refused a chaplain, saying that they were all compromised. If they didn't go along with the system, they wouldn't have been named chaplains here.

Sheila, her cell phone clutched in her hand, was still hoping for a last-minute miracle because that very morning U.S. District Judge Nancy Atlas had issued a stay of execution on the grounds that ballistics evidence used to convict Dominique may have been inaccurate. Some 280 boxes of improperly stored and cataloged evidence, involving some eight thousand cases, covering more than two decades, and kept by the Houston Police Department crime lab, had recently been discovered and could contain information relevant to the case. Harold Hurtt, the Houston police chief, had called for a moratorium on executions in cases like Dominique's, where the lab was involved. A second petition, using the same argument, was before the Supreme Court. The chaplain, claiming that it would be a felony to bring a cell phone into the prison itself, tried to wrestle Sheila's from her. She refused to let go of it, shouting at him that he was interfering with her legal rights and those of Dominique. She won the tussle.

But the call that finally came through advised her that the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals had done what it normally does: it had overturned the stay of execution in response to the objection of Texas's attorney general. There was still the U.S. Supreme Court to be heard from. Meanwhile, the chaplain— “a total ass,” as Sheila labeled him—was keeping up his steady babble, apparently believing that the silence everybody desperately wished for would be inappropriate.

The phone conversations with Dominique, when they occurred at last, were so brief as to be all but undetectable. But Sheila was to have some final communications with Dominique after she entered the Walls Unit itself, the section of the prison where executions are carried out, where she was shocked to see that in an interior courtyard a garden had been planted. “He's like a flower opening,” she recalled the archbishop's words. Then, once again she was talking to Dominique with a glass barrier between them: “There is Dominique standing up by himself in the cell, and other people, the guards, were close by. We talked very quietly, and I told him that we hadn't heard from the Supreme Court yet and that every moment that went by was good for us. And he said, ‘I'm going to be O.K.’ He was reassuring me. He was unbelievable. And it was all about making sure to thank everybody. Thank you for being my family, for Patrick coming to see me. I had such a good time with him that day. And thank Andy. And thank Tom. And thank Sant'Egidio: where would I ever have been without them? I would never have met you. And to think Archbishop Tutu came here. Nobody thinks we're anything
but he came from South Africa. And on and on. He said, ‘You've done so much in such a short time. If I had had you from the beginning, I'd never be here. So know that. If you'd been my lawyer at the trial, they would have listened to you.’ Then they came and got me and I had to go back and then I said I gotta talk to him one more time, I have to talk to Dominique one more time, there is something I have to tell him. So they let me.”

By this point Sheila was on the verge of hysteria, weeping into the phone to Dominique: “I just want you to know that here I am in my sixties, if anyone's life should be taken it should be mine, because I've had a life. I'm a mother and a grandmother and a wife. All the things you haven't had a chance to do I've had a chance to do.” To which Dominique replied, “Sheila, you stop talking like that. You know you're just being silly. You stop that. Where I'm going I'm going to take care of everybody, and you're going to keep up the struggle. You have to stay here and keep up the struggle.”

“I'll do the best I can,” said Sheila, dripping tears.

Andy got on the phone with Dominique and they joked together as they always had, though by this point Andy was probably more of a wreck inside than Sheila. Then the news came through of the Supreme Court's refusal. Sheila took the phone once more to tell Dominique. Then she said, “I will be with you tonight and I will be with you every minute.”

“And I thought,” said Sheila recently, as if these things had happened only yesterday, “I've just got to get in there and be as
close to him as I can and never take my eyes off him. Never. And that's what I did.”

Facing the execution room are two other rooms, one for reporters and for supporters of the condemned man, explicitly invited by him, the other set aside by law for the family of the victim. Both rooms are shielded from the execution room only by panes of glass, so that the viewers may have unobstructed views of the progress of the execution. On this night the second room was empty. No member of the dissenting Lastrapes family had been invited to attend the execution.

The witnesses Dominique had invited were Sheila, Andy, Dave Atwood, and two women who had had lengthy correspondences with him—Barbara Bacci, a Roman woman who collaborated with Sant'Egidio, and Lorna Kelly, a Sant'Egidio member from New York. Each of their names was called out by a prison official, and they were told to proceed to the room from which they would view the execution. Dominique did not invite his mother because he was afraid she would make a scene; he did not invite Jessica because he believed it would be impossible for her to bear. But the first person called as a witness that evening was Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Dominique knew the archbishop could not be there, but forcing the prison officials to call out his name and acknowledge him was a final demonstration by Dominique of his sense of his own dignity and self-worth.

When the witnesses file into the room, they see the condemned already strapped down on a cross-shaped gurney, his
arms outstretched, the intravenous tubes by which the chemicals will travel already implanted in his veins. “When we came in,” said Sheila, “he looked at me—I think the whole time. I never took my eyes off him and he never took his eyes off me.”

An official placed a microphone near Dominique's mouth. Sheila thought his face looked swollen and wondered if he had been already given some sort of medication. His last words, a bit rambling and primitive, suggest that she was right. His initial comment about the number of people present even suggests he may have seen people who weren't there. Certainly, he knew there were thousands praying for him at that moment at an all-night vigil in the Basilica of Santa Maria.

“Yes,” he began. “Man, there is a lot of people there. There was a lot of people that got me to this point, and I can't thank them all. But thank you for your love and support. They have allowed me to do a lot more than I could have done on my own. Sheila, I wish I would have met you seven years ago; it would have been a lot easier. But I have overcome a lot. I am not angry but I am disappointed that I was denied justice. But I am happy that I was afforded you all as family and friends. You all have been there for me; it's a miracle. I love you. And I have to tell Jessica I am sorry. I never knew it would come to this. Lorna, you know you have to keep my struggle going. I know you just lost your baby, but you have to keep running. Dave, keep the struggle going. Andy, I love you, man. Tell Andre and them that I didn't get a chance to reach my full potential, but you can help them reach theirs. You needed me, but I just did not know how to be there for them. There is so much
I have to say, but I just can't say it all. I love you all. Please just keep the struggle going. If you turn your back on me, you turn your back on them. I love you all and I'll miss you all. Thanks for allowing me to touch so many hearts. I never knew I could do it, but you made it possible. I am just sorry. And I am not as strong as I thought I was going to be. But I guess it only hurts for a little while. You all are my family. Please keep my memory alive.”

Though the Houston Police Department may keep flawed records and the entire justice establishment of Texas may be astonishingly barbaric in its operations, the records kept of Huntsville executions are exceedingly exact: