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Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
David R. Dow, ima see if he can help my brother
David R. Dow, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, defends death row inmates in Houston, Texas. And most of the time, Dow will tell you, he loses. In the early days of his career, after a client's execution, Dow would disappear for a few days with a case of Jack Daniels. These days, he's learned to cope (sort of). The brutal nature of the job is at the heart of his chilling new memoir, The Autobiography of An Execution, due out February 3rd. (Click here for an exclusive look at the book's first 20 pages.) Dow speaks:
You talk a lot in the book about small victories—taking solace in keeping a client alive for a few extra days. But do you keep track of the larger victories?
I don't keep track of them in the sense of having a scorecard. If I did it would be too depressing. Because that list, while not insignificant, is dramatically shorter than the list of people I've had executed. And so the only way of making the wins column even approach the losses is to expand the definition of win.
How do you weather a client's execution? You're no longer downing Jack Daniels, right?
I went through three different stages of coping. The first is that I would really go to Galveston and drink for a couple of days. You can maybe do that in a state that doesn't have a lot of executions. But Texas has a lot, and I didn't really want to drink myself to death. So I started going kayaking. I've always found water very soothing and peaceful, and so I'd put my boat up on my truck and I'd drive wherever there was a river. And then I got married in 1996. My wife, although she was a lawyer, she'd never done this kind of work, but she's obviously been around it now for a long time. This sounds weird, but she gets more irate now than I do.
That helps?
Being around somebody who's more irate—soothing is the wrong word, cause it isn't really soothing, but you kind of feel like the load is being spread over additional pillars, so each one of those pillars is bearing less weight.
The book almost takes the morality question out of the death penalty. It's not a matter of whether you feel that killing people is right or wrong. In short, you say the system is so flawed, we simply should not be executing people. You're convinced that, over the years, at least six or seven of your clients that were executed were innocent.
I think that's a fair read of it. I now believe killing is wrong, but that was not what actually first made me feel like society had to abandon the death penalty. What made me first feel like society had to abandon the death penalty was the intimate knowledge that I gained as a lawyer in these cases. It was all about the broken system.
To that end: The war stories in this book are insane. You were in court once when a district attorney read a transcript—aloud, in the courtroom—using what amounts to a "black voice."
Yeah, that actually happened. It was stunning. That was a case where we were litigating an Atkins claim—states can't execute people who are mentally retarded. The basic measure for mental retardation is an IQ of 70, plus or minus five. If you have a guy and he's consistently tested with a full-scale IQ score in the range of 75 or lower, then you have a plausible mental retardation claim. This guy had tested consistently between the high sixties and the mid seventies. The second big part of it that you also have to show evidence of what are called adaptive deficits, these are non-IQ measures of mental retardation.
Like, you can't live alone, or you can't hold a job.
Exactly. That was gonna be the harder part of this case. Anyway, from prison this guy was calling his brother, and the county jail records all these conversations for security reasons. These guys sounded like a couple black guys talking in a Spike Lee movie—every other word was nigger this, nigger that. And the first thing the district attorney does is play a CD that's got about a week's worth of conversations on it, and his ostensible purpose was to show that my client understood the proceedings, and that that somehow proved that he was not mentally retarded. Then, for no apparent reason, he decides he's going to highlight certain parts of these transcripts. The D.A.'s got a copy and he's reading it in blackface. I just thought I'd seen everything, but I was sitting there thinking: This is just unbelievable. My colleagues and me, we were kind of sitting there and our jaws fell open. But to everybody else it just seemed like an ordinary piece of theater.
The little details in the book are fascinating. You mention that inmates are obsessed with germs. This is true?
They come in and they wipe the phone down. From the commissary, they can buy the little handy wipes. Others inmates, who don't have enough money in their commissary or want to save their money for pork rinds, they just use their jumpsuits. They'll spit on the mouthpiece and then dry it off.
Where does that come from?
I honestly don't know. But it's not just some of them, it's virtually all of them.
Do you expect the book will change opinions?
I wrote the book less to change minds about the death penalty than to illuminate the whole price that's paid. The death penalty is not really a voting issue. But I think the death penalty will go away strictly for economic reasons. One of the myths of the death penalty system is that it's so expensive because of the appeals, when in fact most of the costs of the death penalty are front-loaded. Seventy-five or 80 percent of the costs come at the beginning of a case, and the reason is the trial is really two trials. The first is, Did the guy do it? And the second is, Should we execute him? And that second one is really expensive because the defense is entitled to go and investigate everything about this person, in order to persuade the jury that he's got some redeeming qualities that should save him from death, and that means you get to go in and interview every single person that the person has ever known, and submit him to all kinds of psychological and neuropsychological examinations. It's a conservative statement to say that—from arrest through execution—a death penalty case costs two to three times as much as a non-death penalty case. In a state like Texas, where you've had 400-something executions over the last 20 years—that's a lot of money that could have been spent in some other way. That fixes a lot of schools. It fixes a lot of potholes. It gives people health insurance, I think that our society makes most decisions not on the basis of ideology but on the basis of cost and this is why we'll end up abandoning the death penalty.
There's an almost surreal moment in the book where you realize that your law office is in the same building where your grandfather's legal practice had been. Did that make you feel that your career was somehow pre-ordained?
I don't tend to tilt in that direction—
To religion, you mean?
Yes. But I must say that despite the fact that I don't tilt in that direction, that was one of those moments where I felt like, Good grief, maybe I actually belong in this building.
— Mickey Rapkin
Read More http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2010/01/the-great-defender.html#ixzz0n0GF4OiZ
Read More http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2010/01/the-great-defender.html#ixzz0n0GFDKJb
Trae to file suit against 97.9 The Box
Trae to file suit against 97.9 The Box
Johnny Hanson: Chronicle
Houston rapper Trae Tha Truth will file a lawsuit against Radio One, which owns radio station 97.9 FM (KBXX The Box), citing "a consistent pattern of business disparagement, conspiracy and tortious interference."
Trae, whose real name is Frazier Thompson III, is planning to sue for general damages to his reputation, character, standing in the community, mental suffering, loss of professional opportunities, performance revenue and record royalties. He will hold a press conference Wednesday to announce the filing of the lawsuit.
The action stems from the station's alleged "ban" of Trae's music after the rapper was involved in an on-air altercation with Madd Hatta Morning Show DJ Nnete. Trae then mentioned Nnete's weight in a mixtape.
The suit, which will be filed by Houston attorney Warren Fitzgerald Jr., alleges that Trae was the subject of a radio ban after Nnete falsely accused Trae during an on-air interview of causing the violence which occurred at public festival which he sponsored. Ironically, Trae has arguably been the most active Houston rap artist when it comes to serving the local community. In 2008, Trae was honored by Houston Mayor Bill White and Council Member Peter Brown with his own "Trae Day" in honor of his outstanding community service
http://blogs.chron.com/peep/ for rest of the story
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Google Map envelopes
The Google Map Envelop is a clever idea thought up by 2 student in the Industrial Design program at Syracuse University. Just a concept for now but Google should add this feature asap, perfect envelop for that card above!
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