American Caste
By Rob Owen, Meredith Rountree, and Raoul Schonemann, Fri., Oct. 20, 2000
Off the Record
Based entirely on information compiled by the Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice, Texas Death Row is about as interesting and enlightening as one would expect from a book that was written, for all practical purposes, by the Texas prison system.
The book claims to present the "factual record" preserved by the Texas prison system about each man and woman who has been executed by Texas in the modern era. (In fact, since the book went to press in mid-June of this year, Texas has executed 10 more people -- more than 18 other death penalty states have executed in the 25 years since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.) Designed to look like the prison's dossier on executions, Texas Death Row devotes a single page to each of the 222 inmates executed between December 1982 and June 2000. Each case has been distilled to the following data:
The only thing needed to complete the full America's Most Wanted effect is the word EXECUTED stamped over the prisoner's mug shot.
While the book's "just the facts" approach tells us a good deal about the reductive and dehumanizing attitude of the prison system toward the people it kills, no one should think that it approaches the true or complete factual record of the Texas death penalty. Nowhere does Texas Death Row reflect, for example, that Carl Kelly had mental retardation; Kelly could not name the vice-president, make change for a dollar, or tell you whether the sun rises in the east or west. The dossier on Robert Black Jr. conspicuously ignores the fact that he was an Eagle Scout and a decorated Marine Air Corps veteran who saw repeated combat in Vietnam, or that the service's own doctors diagnosed him as disabled by post-traumatic stress disorder. The bland recitation of the details of Lawrence Buxton's case leaves out that he was raised in a family so poor that Buxton and his siblings ate their meals off the plastic lids of five-gallon pesticide buckets, or that Buxton's sharecropper father lashed him with strips cut from an old tire, bristling with rusty wire. Texas Death Row doesn't tell the reader that Eddie Johnson loved to play chess, that Dorsie Johnson was a passionate Chicago Bulls fan, or that Danny Barber stitched needlepoint samplers and signed his letters "Danny Boy."
One might object that it is impossible to craft a genuinely comprehensive account of the death penalty in Texas, because such a story would have to expand infinitely, to include not just every fact about the men and women the state has executed, but every fact about the people whose lives these men and women took. At the other extreme, however, bureaucratic documents like Texas Death Row only obscure the real moral and political choices involved in deciding who lives and who dies at the hands of the state.
Rob Owen, Meredith Rountree, and Raoul Schonemann are Austin criminal defense lawyers who concentrate on defending persons on death row.
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