A Saint on Death Row (12 page)

So seven minutes before he began speaking his last words, a tranquilizing drug was already being pumped into him, followed by a paralyzing drug, followed by heart-stopping poison.

Outside the prison at just about 8 P.M., the many protesters
gathered there witnessed their own epiphany. The night sky was rent by a dramatic crack of lightning, though the sky was clear and the moon full. Jessica, sure of what the lightning meant, collapsed, falling into the arms of the Lastrapes brothers.

Andre Lastrapes showed his anger to reporters: “I felt it was dirty, and the state will have their chance to face a higher authority—that is, God. The hell with Texas and the justice system. They were full of shit, and I am speaking from my heart. I really mean that. I mean, Andrew Lastrapes was my daddy in the first place, and I forgave Dominique. I know God has a place for Dominique in heaven. The person I met doesn't deserve to die. He became close to me, and I pray that he goes to heaven.”

Andy Lofthouse, a witness to the execution, found he could not face the actual moment and turned his back to Dominique. Sheila, exhausted by her tears, was pretty much cried out, but Andy, determined not to give Texas the satisfaction of tears, was lacerated by invisible wounds and had to get himself out of there. He drove off as soon as he could, not realizing he had Jessica's car keys—which left her stranded. She and the Lastrapes brothers rode back to Houston that night with Sheila and her husband, Patrick Racey, who had stood in the parking lot with the other protesters when they beheld with awe the great crack of lightning in the sky.

I had asked Sheila's assistant, Kathryn, who had my detailed itinerary, to phone me at any hour of the day or night with any news. She reached me a little after 2 A.M. continental European time in the German city of Trier to tell me
Dominique was dead. Good-hearted Kathryn, who had come to know Dominique well over the course of many phone conversations and to love him, was immensely sad but strangely peaceful, believing as she did—with impressive firmness— that Dominique had “escaped” to God. “He got away, as the Irish say.”

My hotel faced the extensive ruins of the Porta Nigra, an elaborate gate built by the empire-building Romans about A.D. 180 and intended to call attention to the importance of Trier, “Roma Secunda” as the Romans called it, the first city to be founded in Roman-occupied Germany. After I had said good-bye to Kathryn, I looked out across the well-lit night to the huge stone blocks, some weighing as much as six metric tons, assembled more than eighteen centuries before. Most of the stones are still in place, cut and laid there without mortar by slaves.

The Romans were intensely proud of their accomplishments, and they built the longest-lasting empire the world has ever known. They were also insanely cruel, crucifying anyone who got in their way, delighting in the many grisly deaths and the constant flow of human blood that filled their arenas. Though they knew they were great, they didn't know they were cruel. That was something they kept carefully hidden from themselves.

“Did he do it?” is the question I inevitably hear from anyone to whom I tell Dominique's story. My answer is that I don't think so, but I am not equipped to provide a definitive answer.

Dominique usually insisted that he was not present when Andrew Lastrapes was shot. Is this possible? Yes. There is nothing in the case's meager evidence to prove that Dominique was present. The only thing that points to him as present (and as the shooter) is the testimony of three fellow robbers, who were as far from being disinterested observers as one could find and who had every reason to collaborate in pointing the finger at Dominique, the youngest and least protected of their quartet. Dominique's father, admittedly not an indifferent witness— though not as patently incredible as the three robbers— signed an affidavit that Dominique was at home with him at the time of the shooting.

But Dominique also told Andy Lofthouse that “‘nobody who ever admitted to doing anything ever got out of here.’ And he said that on repeated occasions. He said ‘I've been here a long time and I've never seen anybody who ever admitted to anything ever get out of here.’” This leads me to speculate that it is also possible that Dominique was present but was not the shooter, but that he also decided as a legal strategy not to admit this.

Dominique's impatient insistence on locating the tape of that night's events from the convenience store in front of which Andrew Lastrapes was shot certainly points us in the direction of one of the two scenarios above, since Dominique was certain that such a tape would exonerate him by showing another (whom he was unwilling to name) to have been the shooter. One could, I suppose, theorize that this was merely a ploy by Dominique, since he must have known that such a tape would long ago have been rendered useless, either by having been destroyed or by its contents having been taped over.

But Dominique's agitation on the subject of taped evidence goes back far beyond the appearance of Sheila Murphy on the scene. I am in possession of a pitiable letter written by Dominique in August 1994, barely a year after his conviction, complaining—to the first court-appointed attorney assigned to represent him in his appeals—that the tape
must
be found and pointing out that this is his
third
request. Given the faulty memory of his original lawyer, Melamed, and the refusal of Melamed's colleague, Diana Olvera, to be interviewed, there is
no way of proving that Dominique asked them to locate such a tape, but the letter of 1994 surely points in that direction.

My own hunch is that one of the above scenarios, more likely the second, comes closest to what happened on that night. But I must admit that it is not outside the realm of possibility that Dominique was the shooter. The difficulty of properly accounting for real lives in cases like these is steeped in far more ambiguities, loose ends, dead ends, and unknowables than one would ever encounter on, say, American television's
Law and Order.
And when the evidence has been manipulated, suppressed, destroyed, forgotten, the obstacles to ascertaining the truth are very nearly insurmountable. It would be easier today to prove that the recently discovered dark matter of the universe is made of baba ghanoush than to prove the innocence of Dominique Green.

But why do we fixate on his innocence? On the “did he do it?” aspect of the case? What I see in the eyes of those who ask this question is that, if I cannot say unequivocally that Dominique was innocent, they are freed from any responsibility toward him. “Oh, well, who knows whether he did it or not, so let's talk about something else.”

But the first question an inquiring American should ask is not “Did he do it?” but “Did he receive a fair trial?” And the second question is like it: “Were his subsequent encounters with the law fair?” That is what we would wish, even what we would demand, for ourselves. To both these questions the answer must be a resounding no. His trial was monstrously unfair. And his subsequent encounters with the law were tragic
farces, cat-and-mouse games played out in a legal arena run by people who had no intention of giving him justice.

Just prior to Dominique's execution, Andy Lofthouse, a brilliant law student whose deep involvement in this case probably cost him the editorship of the law review at Chicago's John Marshall Law School, was desperately leaving no stone unturned, hoping he might uncover some new route to a stay for Dominique. With nearly quixotic enterprise, he resolved to try once more to speak with Diana Olvera, who had acted as assistant counsel in Dominique's trial but had turned aside all of his and Sheila's requests to be interviewed. (“We tried to contact [her] probably ten times but she would never talk to us.”) He visited her office and was horrified to discover that she was now sharing an office with an attorney who had recently been hired to represent Michael Neal, one of those who originally fingered Dominique as Lastrapes's murderer. Michael Neal was already serving a thirty-year sentence. Why, Andy wondered, did he suddenly require a lawyer just as Dominique's case was being reviewed for the last time? Why was one of Dominique's original lawyers, who would never speak about her involvement in Dominique's case, now sharing an office with Neal's lawyer? And why was Olvera, despite the fact that she would not speak to Dominique's current lawyers, willing to sign an affidavit rebutting all of Dominique's charges of ineffective counsel, when it had been so obvious that the principal lawyer, Melamed, had been ineffective? Was there any way that all of this could be just coincidence?

The pitiable letter I mentioned above is dreary additional
evidence that, very early in the game, the door to justice had been firmly shut on Dominique. The letter is worth quoting in full to demonstrate the powerless vacuum in which Dominique found himself Recall in reading it that at the time of writing Dominique was just twenty, a very young man whose only experiences were ghetto experiences, most of them negative. He was just beginning to develop an awareness of his true existential situation—of the inescapable trap in which he was now confined. Whereas he seems during his trial to have believed mistakenly that he was playing a kind of game that would soon end either in his release or in a relatively brief prison term, in this letter he has begun to account his conviction as a deadly serious matter and is attempting to summon the critical intelligence necessary to defeat the system in which he is trapped. But he is, as yet, rather far from the eloquence he would later develop. I reprint the letter here with its typos, misspellings, and other verbal peculiarities: