A Saint on Death Row (3 page)

Some, such as his brothers, however, continued to receive the considerate gentleness that had previously distinguished Dominique in all his dealings. Another recipient of Dominique's positive attention was Jessica Tanksley, a captivatingly beautiful neighborhood girl, two years his junior, whom he would soon begin to court with extraordinary deference and ceremony. She would be duly impressed. But Dominique also impressed his juvenile probation officer, Sylvia Gonzales, who remembers him as “always well behaved” and extremely likable. “There are certain kids that you never forget,” Sylvia would remark many years later. “They just get to you—to your heart.”

At sixteen, Dominique's rather realistic assessment of his own strategy was that eventually his drug distribution business
would land him in prison. He hoped only to remain free as long as his brothers needed him. Then, he reasoned, after he finished serving his time, they would be old enough to take care of him when he returned to rebuild his life. As his bad luck would have it, however, he was to remain free only till he was eighteen.

On October 18, 1992, Dominique Green was arrested by the Houston police. It was his fourth arrest. He had been driving a stolen red car the previous afternoon when the police gave chase along a fifty-mile stretch of Highway 288. The car ended in a ditch in Brazoria County, just outside the city. Dominique, lightning quick, set off on foot through field and forest and succeeded in eluding capture till the next day, when the police sent out dogs to track him down. Arrested immediately were two others, Michael Neal and Mark Porter, both black, who were found in the backseat of the car in possession of a large handgun and a BB gun. The handgun was sent off for ballistics testing.

The police, aware of a recent series of armed robberies carried out at a shopping mall and elsewhere by young black men,
believed they had caught the perpetrators. In lineups, one or another of the arrested men was then identified by witnesses; and though no one identified Dominique, the three prisoners were charged with participating in robberies. Michael Neal, however, represented by counsel arranged by his mother, was able to put up a bond for his release.

The ballistics test came back, establishing that the handgun, a Tech 9, was the weapon that killed a man named Andrew Lastrapes Jr. outside a Houston convenience store in the early morning of October 14. Eventually the police, questioning the suspects separately, determined that Mark Porter could not have been part of the group that morning, but that two other youths were: Paul Lyman, black, and Patrick Haddix, white. Neal did not provide a statement at that time.

At this point, for anyone researching the history of these events, the record becomes exceedingly muddled and incomplete. How the police made the determinations they did and why the various suspects were charged and brought to trial could defeat the deductive skills of the most prescient investigator. This is only partly because seventeen years have passed since these events. It is also because the State of Texas keeps shockingly incomplete records of such matters and because many of those in authority are unwilling or unable to shed any light on the matters in which they were participants. Sandy Melamed, for instance, who was appointed Dominique's lawyer, told Sheila Murphy, a retired Chicago judge who would eventually become involved in Dominique's appeals, that he drank a couple of Scotches every night and that, well, his recall
just wasn't very good. He was far more forthcoming than most.

Much of what I can report comes not from those in authority but from the accused perpetrators and from the family of the victim. Andrew Lastrapes, according to his wife, Bernatte, was a “truly good man,” a big black truck driver who always kept a few dollars in his pocket for beggars. But he was also a man who kept a knife on his person and knew how to use it—and he would never have surrendered his wallet without a fight. After his body was turned over to his family, Bernatte discovered that his back pants pocket where he kept his wallet had been torn and that there were puncture wounds in one of his hands, both suggestive of a struggle. The obvious scenario is that Andrew resisted the robbery with his knife and was shot in a scuffle. He lay in the parking lot for hours, alive and bleeding. It is hard to resist the speculation that he might be alive today if the police had seen fit to call an ambulance in a timely manner. But it is also hard to ignore the possibility that the shooting of Lastrapes was an unintended consequence of the scuffle. Such mitigating possibilities were never shared with the jury.

Though Melamed was appointed to defend the indigent Dominique on robbery charges, Dominique was soon charged— on January 5, 1993
^∗
—with capital murder by a Harris County
grand jury, despite the fact that his prints were not found on the murder weapon. (Someone else's were, someone never identified.) But the police, after many hours of intense grilling, finally wrested a signed “confession” from Dominique by making empty threats to arrest Stephanie. Dominique, not wanting his mother arrested and his family even more wrecked than it already was, told a story of his involvement that he believed would be subsequently discredited by witnesses and fingerprints. “Bart,” he claimed, had been the killer. Bart did not exist—or, to put it more precisely, no one with that legal name was found.

Texas treasures a legal wrinkle within its “law of parties” according to which any participant in a crime that results in murder may be charged with the murder, even if he or she had nothing to do with committing the murder. The statute reads in part: “All traditional distinctions between accomplices and principals are abolished by this section, and each party to an offense may be charged and convicted without alleging that he acted as a principal or accomplice.” Under this statute one might expect that four young men—all seen by the police as participants in the robbery that resulted in the death of Andrew Lastrapes—would be put on trial for capital murder. But this was not the case. Only Dominique, the youngest and least protected, was so tried.

Michael Neal was protected by his lawyer; and both Neal and Paul Lyman were able to plea-bargain their way to more limited sentences. Patrick Haddix, the sole white participant, was never booked or charged with anything, merely characterized
as a “citizen informant.” To read in succession the sworn statements that Dominique, Lyman, Porter, and Haddix gave to police is to be struck as if by a blow. The statements of the three black boys are typed in the usual police manner: all in capital letters, all full of typos and grammatical and spelling errors. Haddix's statement is typed with extraordinary refinement in upper- and lower-case letters, and its language is startlingly literary, even elegant. The writer of this prose punctuates and paragraphs perfectly, knows how to write dialogue, even employs the semicolon correctly. The statement, which reads like fiction, is full of novelistic detail and runs to five dense pages, whereas the others’ statements have the clunky, halting sound of teenage accounts and range between one and three poorly typed pages. To compare Haddix's supremely polished statement with the unfocused, inarticulate, fear-ridden, stop-and-go courtroom performance he gave subsequently is to know that this statement, recorded many hours after the statements of the others, was not written or dictated by Haddix but provided by an expert, hired to engineer an intended outcome.

At the time the ballistics report came in, both Neal and Lyman had been released and only Dominique, unable to post bail, remained in custody. The most likely scenario is that Haddix, first to point the finger at the others (while never denying that he had acted as lookout and had shared in the proceeds of the robbery) and having much better family connections, was able to wiggle free of the legal vise that ensnared the others. But only Dominique, the least experienced, the
least able to mount a defense, was left exposed to the death penalty that the police and the legal system were determined to impose on
someone.

Complicating this picture is the nature of the only testimony against Dominique, which was supplied by the other three. According to them, Dominique and Neal got out of the car and walked toward Lastrapes, who was getting out of his truck in front of the convenience store, while Lyman and Haddix pulled the car around to the back. So only Neal, not the other two, could know what happened when Lastrapes was confronted and which of the two—Dominique or Neal— shot Lastrapes. But also: since when are co-conspirators who are doing a deal for a lesser sentence (and, in the case of Haddix, no sentence at all) found credible in a court of law? In the entire history of law and in every country that takes law seriously, the testimony of co-conspirators who exculpate themselves while implicating another is viewed with suspicion.

The United States Supreme Court has termed such testimony “inherently unreliable.” Even Texas has an “accomplice witness rule” that requires corroboration of such testimony before it is admitted. But, as an exceedingly experienced Texas attorney confided to me, “the corroboration tends to be anything that matches the prosecutor's theory of the case. Almost anything serves, eviscerating the purpose of the rule.”

Dominique's trial was over almost before it began. Melamed, originally appointed by Judge George Goodwin of the 174th District Court to defend Dominique against robbery charges, now petitioned the judge in the new capital murder case—
Doug Shaver of the 262nd District Court—asking that he be allowed to continue to represent the defendant. Melamed had only one previous brush with a capital murder case: he had been second-chair defense attorney in a famous Harris County case known as “the sleeping lawyer case,” which had been argued before the same Judge Shaver who was to preside over Dominique's case.

In the earlier case, the principal defense attorney, one John Benn, then in his seventies, had been seen by those present to sleep throughout the trial, his eyes shut, his mouth repeatedly falling open, his head lolling back on his shoulders. When asked about his behavior, Benn defended himself impatiently. “It's boring,” he whined. What makes the case famous, however, is not that the lawyer slept (which was hardly a first for Texas) but that Judge Shaver remarked dismissively to the
Los Angeles Ti
‘
mes
, “The Constitution says everyone's entitled to the lawyer of their choice, and Mr. Benn was their choice. The Constitution doesn't say the lawyer has to be awake.”

Shaver, who had been Melamed's mentor, readily agreed to the lawyer's request that he continue to represent Dominique. There was a second lawyer on Dominique's “team,” Diana Olvera, who has never since allowed herself to be interviewed about this case. But keep her in mind; she will appear in our story once more.

The jury, composed of whites and one Asian American but of no blacks or Latinos, had no trouble convicting Dominique. Bernatte Luckett Lastrapes, who attended the trial with her father, a pillar of Houston's black community, and her eldest
son, was shocked at the cursory nature of the proceedings and the lack of substantive engagement and effective participation by the defendant's lawyers. Bernatte began to wonder if this was really a trial at all or rather some kind of bizarrely predictable ritual with a predetermined outcome. She noted that Dominique's mother, who attended, slept through almost the entire proceeding. Poor Dominique, thought the murdered man's widow. He has no one.

At the least, Dominique's attorneys must be judged exceedingly bumbling and naïve. Knowing little about Stephanie, Olvera appears to have supposed that a mother would help sway the jury to sympathy. She asked Stephanie if she thought her son capable of such a crime. Yes, proclaimed Stephanie with considerable assurance, he's just like me. For her day of testimony at her eldest son's murder trial, Stephanie managed to call forth one of her more evil personae. But her testimony weighed heavily on the jury in deciding to convict Dominique of murder. After all, even his mother was against him. Later, when asked what Dominique's punishment should be, she urged the court to inflict on her son whatever punishment the law allowed. Though this second outburst was instrumental in ensuring that Dominique would be given the death penalty, the jury was told nothing of Stephanie's schizophrenia or of her repeated hospitalizations in mental institutions.

Melamed and Olvera did call another character witness, Sylvia Gonzales, Dominique's juvenile probation officer, who was sympathetic to Dominique and recognized the extremely negative role Stephanie had played in his young life. Sylvia testified
briefly to Stephanie's oppressive behavior toward her son as well as to Dominique's character, “easygoing and receptive,” “truthful and cooperative.” But Sylvia was not prepared to testify by Dominique's lawyers, who met her but once—in the hallway just prior to her testimony—and they made little of her testimony.

Far more important was another character witness, a supposedly scientific one. For the sentencing phase of the trial, Melamed called a psychologist, Dr. Walter Quijano, to testify to Dominique's psychological disposition. Quijano, who was born in the Philippines and whose father was of Spanish (not Hispanic) ancestry, has in other cases urged the death penalty for explicitly racial reasons, believing, as he does, that the race of a defendant—if the defendant is black or Latino—is a “statistical predictor of future violence.” In Dominique's case, Quijano, keeping quiet about his racial prejudices, limited himself to telling the jury that Dominique had never developed a normal conscience and could therefore be a future danger to society if he were allowed to live—this from a witness supposedly testifying on behalf of the defendant. Though Quijano had interviewed Dominique briefly, his assessment came not from anything he had learned directly in his interview. Rather, his assessment of Dominique's lack of conscience was a syllogistic deduction: those who grow up in circumstances like Dominique's—that is, without a caring parent—lack a normal conscience; therefore, Dominique lacks a normal conscience.