NYTimes: Toll of Mexican Crime Wave, Written in Faces on the Wall
By DAMIEN CAVE
March 21, 2012

ECATEPEC, Mexico — When residents of this poor industrial city look to the hills, they now see the faces of crime victims staring back at them. Enormous photographic portraits cover concrete homes as part of a community art project that captures what has become a Mexican obsession: visualizing victimhood or, more broadly, turning cold, mind-numbing data back into real people.

“We speak too often in terms of numbers,” said Marco Hernández Murrieta, president of the Murrieta Foundation, which organized the photo project here in a suburb of Mexico City. “We’re putting a face on the statistics.”

Other groups have recently given voices to victims, in videos with famous actors like Diego Luna playing Mexicans who have lost loved ones to drug violence or human rights abuses. Twitter accounts like @Tienennombre also name the dead, often adding ages and other personal details.

These efforts speak to more than just frustration with Mexico’s mounting insecurity. Experts and activists say they are also a shout of outrage against the impunity and lack of transparency that keep Mexicans in the dark, often unable to separate the guilty from the innocent.

And yet, while earlier examples of victim-focused advocacy in Latin America have been aimed mainly at governments, many of Mexico’s so-called victim visualizers say they are less interested in politics and marches than in changing their neighbors’ mind-sets. Their campaigns are mostly attempts to create a public conscience, to keep people from committing or accepting violence by making them feel the suffering that ripples out from crime — largely through efforts that can be shared easily by word of mouth or social media.

“These movements are significantly different from the good old ‘marchas,’ ” said Andrés Monroy-Hernández, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “The stereotype of the marchas was that they were movements made up of working-class folk, led by charismatic union or political leaders. These new social media movements seem to be structurally different: they are networked, and attract a different demographic — middle-class youth who probably identify more strongly with Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring.”

The Ecatepec project was actually inspired by a star of both the street and the Web: the French photographer known as JR, who posts huge portraits on buildings and in public spaces. A few years ago, he displayed poster-size photos of young people from the housing projects around Paris. Later, in the Middle East, he hung portraits of Palestinians and Israelis side by side, on both sides of the walls that divided them. (Last year, JR won an annual $100,000 prize from TED, the tech-savvy conference juggernaut concerned with “ideas worth spreading.”)

The process in Mexico was more communal. The Murrieta Foundation gave photography classes to young people from rough neighborhoods and recruited crime victims as their subjects.

“Victim” was defined broadly. Along with those who had witnessed murders firsthand, lost relatives or been the victims of violent crime, the category included drug addicts, the girlfriends of criminals and an old man who feared that he would never see his imprisoned son before he died. The subjects’ stories were put together in a compilation of testimonials, their names withheld for security reasons.

Cerro Gordo, the neighborhood chosen for its sightlines, at first wanted nothing to do with the project. “Everyone thought it was political,” said Antonio Olvera, 24, a resident who helped hang the posters. “But really, it’s just art.”

Mr. Hernández of the foundation described it more as artistic crime prevention. Standing near a photo of a young woman with full lips and intense eyes here in this dusty neighborhood, he said he hoped the images would cause people thinking of committing a crime to reconsider, while also provoking Mexicans to challenge friends or relatives involved in gangs or drug trafficking.

A similar effort at public awakening can be found with 31K Portraits for Peace, which is posting 2,000 posters of Mexicans eager for peace in the country’s most violent cities, and in the work of El Grito Más Fuerte, an activist collective drawn from Mexico’s film, theater and communication industries.

The five-minute video that El Grito Más Fuerte produced and posted online this year, “In the Shoes of the Other,” received widespread coverage in the Mexican news media and attention on social networks like Facebook because it included celebrities’ telling the story of Javier Sicilia, a poet whose son was murdered last year, and several others with scarring, emotional stories.

The organizers described the video as an attempt to “accompany victims in their pain, their demand for justice and their right to live in peace.” Though the group also said it hoped the video would reverse the government’s attempt “to conceal the state of emergency we live in,” its political demands have stayed general, with calls for less impunity and more security.

“There are no concrete steps to take,” said Gael García Bernal, a star of “Amores Perros” and a new Will Ferrell movie, “Casa de Mi Padre,” at a news conference for El Grito Más Fuerte. Rather, he added, the collective aimed for the symbolic and practical “sharing of conversations.”

But for Mexico, a complicated democracy that has historically chosen stability over reform, are talking and sharing enough?

Homero Aridjis, a Mexican poet and longtime environmental activist, said he was encouraged by the passion surrounding those with “credenciales de sangre” (credentials of blood). “But what we need in Mexico is judicial transparency,” he said. “The only hope is to reform the judiciary.”

Without institutional change, Mr. Aridjis added, the popularization of the victim could lead to more trouble, not less, as people felt encouraged to act as vigilantes. “You have to be careful so that victims don’t become inquisitors.”

John M. Ackerman, a professor at the Institute for Legal Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, also questioned how much could be achieved through a protest movement largely devoid of specific demands. “It’s more of a social catharsis,” he said.

In Ecatepec, too, the limits are apparent. Residents say the portraits have stirred up conversation and civic pride. But many people had hoped that the attention the photos have attracted would lead the government to provide much-needed services, like better roads and policing.

Three months after the first image went up, that has not happened. Crime in the neighborhood has also not declined. Residents say there is still a shooting once a week on average.

Mr. Hernández nonetheless maintains that tiny acts of civic re-engineering are the only way to go. “We have to be like ants,” he said, “working hard on small things that are very focused.”

Like hope itself, however, the photos have proved hard to hold onto. Of the 35 that were originally hung up, only about 10 have survived. The rest have been destroyed by storms or stolen by neighbors who used the vinyl they are printed on as roofs for their homes. Basic needs like shelter, it seems, still trump conversation.

NYTimes: Stone-Washed Blue Jeans (Minus the Washed)

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

SAN FRANCISCO   —  From the cotton field in rural India to the local rag bin, a typical pair of blue jeans consumes 919 gallons of water during its life cycle, Levi Strauss & Company says, or enough to fill about 15 spa-size bathtubs. That includes the water that goes into irrigating the cotton crop, stitching the jeans together and washing them scores of times at home.

The company wants to reduce that number any way it can, and not just to project environmental responsibility. It fears that water shortages caused by climate change may jeopardize the company’s very existence in the coming decades by making cotton too expensive or scarce.

So to protect its bottom line, Levi Strauss has helped underwrite and champion a nonprofit program that teaches farmers in India, Pakistan, Brazil and West and Central Africa the latest irrigation and rainwater-capture techniques.  It has introduced a brand featuring stone-washed denim smoothed with rocks but no water. It is sewing tags into all of its jeans urging customers to wash less and use only cold water.

To customers seeking further advice, Levi Strauss suggests washing jeans rarely, if at all — the theory being that putting them in the freezer will kill germs that cause them to smell.

Conservation worries are not limited to the clothing giants: food and beverage conglomerates, tobacco companies and metal and mining companies are all starting to reckon with their heavy dependence on water. Pepsico, for example, has embraced a method of sanitizing plastic bottles with purified air instead of water at a plant in Georgia. For its Frito-Lay brands, it has identified drought-resistant potato strains that it provides to farmers along with a soil-monitoring method so that crops are watered only when necessary.

The Carbon Disclosure Project, a group that monitors corporations’ greenhouse gas emissions, recently added water security to its priorities. Of the 150 companies that responded last year to a questionnaire that it sent to the world’s largest corporations, nearly 40 percent reported that water problems had already resulted in “detrimental impacts” to their businesses.

The threat of water shortages was brought home to Levi Strauss last year when floods in Pakistan and parched fields in China destroyed cotton crops and sent prices soaring. Roughly two pounds of cotton go into every pair of jeans that the company manufactures. Although scientists are wary of linking specific extreme weather events to climate change, recent increases in floods and droughts are in line with patterns that experts have long projected would result from global warming. The general rule of thumb is that wet regions will get wetter and dry regions will become even more arid.

Upmanu Lall, director of the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, said that the local implications of those changes were still being sorted out but that “agriculture, which does best with a relatively consistent supply of water, will be impacted the most.”  

That is particularly the case for cotton, the world’s biggest nonfood crop. Many big cotton-producing countries like India, which has tens of thousands of small cotton farmers, lack the reservoirs to store water, heightening the risk of shortages.

Companies doing business overseas are also contending with rising water costs or water that is not clean enough. Then there is the threat of bad publicity if a corporation is perceived to be squandering precious local water.

“The total volume of water used by a single beverage business, for example, may not be much,” Dr. Lall said. “But they are often the most visible users in a locality, depleting groundwater much more quickly than, say, a small farmer.”

It is not lost on American and European manufacturers that cotton already competes with grain for what arable land exists in some regions, a tension that will only grow as the world seeks to feed its growing population in coming decades.

Making ‘Better Cotton’

Because cotton is mostly grown by a diffuse network of very small farmers in more than 70 countries, encouraging water-efficient practices is a formidable challenge. Cotton cultivation accounts for more than 3 percent of the world’s agricultural water use and 6 percent of all pesticide purchases. Outmoded practices like field flooding contribute to overconsumption.

In 2005, nongovernmental and cotton industry organizations and some giant retailers, including Ikea, the Gap and Adidas, founded the international nonprofit Better Cotton Initiative to promote water conservation and reduce pesticide use and child-labor practices in the industry.

Levi Strauss joined in 2009. Partners include groups like Cotton Inc., an American industry association that has provided technical know-how. A three-year independent study of Indian farms found those adopting the new techniques reduced water and pesticide use by an average of 32 percent, the initiative says. The profit was 20 percent higher than that of a control group using traditional methods.

Kailash Himmitrao Mahalle grows cotton in Shelu, India, about 90 miles east of Mumbai. On one side of his 15-acre farm, which was used to compare methods, the cotton plants are about a foot taller and bear more flowers than the ones on the other side. The lusher field has a drip irrigation system — a tangle of plastic veins that direct water to each plant’s root system — that was installed with advice from the Better Cotton Initiative.

Mr. Mahalle said the drip system spreads water and fertilizer more evenly than traditional pumping, and because it puts water only where it is needed, it also results in fewer weeds.

Power failures, commonplace in India, are less worrisome now because drip irrigation does not require electricity over an extended period of time, as traditional irrigating methods do. “This takes three hours; that takes three days,” Mr. Mahalle said, and his water use is down by about 70 percent.

The resulting crop from the new methods of farming is now referred to by Levi Strauss and the initiative as “better cotton.” Levi Strauss’s top management says that about 5 percent of the cotton used in the two million pairs of jeans the company shipped to stores this fall was grown with the sustainable method. The company wants that number to rise to 20 percent by 2015.

Ikea, the furniture chain, hopes to be using “better cotton” exclusively by 2015. The footwear maker Adidas has said it will do the same by 2018.

To reach its 20 percent goal, Levi Strauss says it must radically change how it does business, engaging more directly with contractors as well as farmers. There was a time when American corporations preferred not to know what was going on in foreign factories — to afford them maximum deniability in the event that poor labor or environmental practices were discovered.

Levi Strauss, which reported $4.4 billion in net revenue last year, would not reveal how much it is spending on water sustainability efforts, beyond saying that the company and its foundation have given a combined $600,000 to the Better Cotton Initiative since 2009.

Selling an Idea

On a recent morning at Levi Strauss headquarters here in San Francisco, company executives were trying to figure out how best to capitalize on their water conservation efforts. After being briefed on the cotton initiative by the sustainability team, the new chief marketing officer, Rebecca Van Dyck nodded her approval, then asked, “But do our customers know?”

Internal company research tells them that Levi Strauss consumers like to see themselves as changing the world, Ms. Van Dyck said.

The company does not disclose sales figures for individual products, but it says that Levi Strauss jeans that were marketed this year as less water-intensive sold faster than regular Levi’s that were similarly priced.

The company will start to publicize its commitment to better cotton in videos on its Web site and at sustainability conferences.

Customers shopping at the Levi’s store in Times Square one recent afternoon said they had never heard of the company’s Water‹Less brand or other conservation efforts.

There was more awareness on online jeans forums.  Edmund X White, a Brooklyn photographer, even chronicled his efforts to avoid washing his jeans. Two months into his experiment, on his honeymoon in Jamaica, he wrote, he dived into the ocean with a pair on. Afterward, Mr. White boasted, 11 months passed without a wash.

As long as you don’t get dirt on them, don’t do a lot of strenuous activity in them and — sorry if this is a bit vulgar — be sure to always wear underwear, you can really go a very long time between washing,” he wrote.

All the coverage around Troy Davis and his impending execution this evening is so sad. It reminds me of this interview on Fresh Air I listened to last year, and it still haunts me. 

NPR.org: 20 Years Of Defending Death Row Inmates

February 8, 2010 

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, David Dow, has represented more than 100 death row inmates, mostly in Texas, over the last 20 years. Most of his clients were guilty, and he knew it. Some of them were guilty of monstrous crimes, and he's won only a few cases.

We're going to talk about why, in spite of all that, he continues to represent men on death row and what impact this work has on his life and on his family.

Dow has written a new memoir called "The Autobiography of an Execution." He's a distinguished professor at the University of Houston Law Center and the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service, a nonprofit, legal-aid corporation that represents death row inmates.

David Dow, welcome to FRESH AIR. Your book is a memoir, and one of the things that you write about is the difficulty of making the transition back and forth between working on death row and coming home and trying to be in the world inhabited by your young son and having your son say things to you like: Hi, dad, did you have a good day on death row? Tell us a little bit about what those problems are going back and forth between death row and your son.

Professor DAVID DOW (Author, "The Autobiography of an Execution"; Litigation Director, Texas Defender Service): Yes, it's a very difficult transition. I think that it's still a difficult transition for me, even though I've been doing it now for nine years, which is how old our son is.

I spend a lot of time at death row, which is located in Livingston, Texas, and the visits range from okay to terrible. I don't think that I've ever really had a visit on death row that I would call good. Maybe there's been one or two where I'm reporting to an inmate that we've won and that I don't think that there's any chance that that victory is going to be taken away from us. I suppose you could call that a good visit, except that it's still a case where there has been a murder in the background, and I've spent all day at death row.

And then I come home, and I see my son, and he's been at school. He's now in third grade. But in the stories that I'm telling in the book, a lot of the times he was in kindergarten or first grade, and it's just a very difficult transition. He wants to talk to me about that he did well on the spelling test or that he got all of the state capitals right, and then he says, you know, how was your day? And it's just a difficult conversation to have.

I think that I've gotten better at those transitions and conversations over the years. But I would say that for a while, they were difficult for me.

GROSS: What do you tell him about your work?

Prof. DOW: Well, from the time that he was old enough to ask me what I do, I would tell him honestly. Now, we obviously haven't told him about the details of what the people I represent have done. He knows that I represent people who have done bad things. He knows that I represent people who have killed somebody, and he knows that I represent people that the state wants to punish by executing them.

As I say, he doesn't know the details of the murders. He doesn't know details of how executions are carried out. But from the time that he's been old enough to ask what I do and why I do it, I've told him honestly. I haven't really felt that there was any way that I could think of to hide that from him in a way that wasn't misleading or dishonest.

GROSS: You write that when you come home, you shower, and then you wash your clothing in a separate load from the rest of the family's. Are you trying to wash out, like, the grime and dirt from the prison, or is it something more existential you're trying to wash out?

Prof. DOW: Well, I'm sure that a psychologist would say that there's something existential that I'm trying to wash out. I just really feel that I don't want death row hanging over me when I'm in my house.

The prison itself obviously is not filthy. It's not a prison environment like you might think if you've seen "Midnight Express" or something like that. It's a fairly sterile environment, and they have linoleum floors, and there isn't trash on the floor and that sort of thing. But there's just an aura about the place that at least I personally, I find that it clings to me. And I don't want it to cling to me.

And so, I've just had a habit for the last 15 years of feeling so dirty when I get home from the prison that I just feel like I want to wash it off of me. And to this day, the first thing that I do when I get home from spending a day at death row is walk up to the shower and get in the shower and carry my clothes and put them in the washing machine. And my our son is, he's an environmentalist. And so, he tells me that I'm not being earth-friendly when I throw the clothes in a washing machine. Oh, by the way, so I no longer turn on the machine.

Now I just throw them in the machine, and we don't actually turn on the machine until we have a fuller load. So as a result of pressure from him, I've backed off from my previous policy of washing the clothes right away. But I still, to this day, feel like I need to wash the prison off of me.

GROSS: One more thing about your son before we get deeper into your work representing people on death row. You write that your son started getting night terrors at the age of two, and you say: I knew they weren't my fault and that they were. What was happening in your life when those night terrors started?

Prof. DOW: It was 2004 and 2005 that I remember becoming aware of the link between my life and his night terrors. It was a very bad year for me professionally, and I remember coming home one day from the prison, and it had been a particularly difficult day for me. I had had a visit where I had told a client of mine, who was going to be executed the next week, that he was almost certainly going to be executed, that there was really nothing left for us to do, and it was a client who I cared about.

I don't care about all of my clients deeply, but I did about this one. And it was difficult for me. And I remember walking into the kitchen at the end of that day, and my wife and son were sitting at the kitchen table. Lincoln was eating his dinner, and Katya and he were reading a book together, and I walked over, and I kissed them, and Lincoln said: Dada, you seem really glum.

And I thought to myself, I don't really want the first thing that my says to me to be dada, you seem glum. And so, I decided at that moment that I wasn't going to be glum in front of him. And two weeks after that, it was another bad day for me at the office. And I came home, and I finished listening to the song on the CD that I was listening to in the car before I came inside, and the song finished, then I steeled myself. I plastered a smile onto my face. I put a little lightness into my step, and I walked into the house faking it.

And of course, Katya, my wife, could tell that I was faking it, but I thought this was a pretty good act, and Lincoln, he wasn't going to be able to tell. And I walked over, and I kissed them both again, and Lincoln said: Dada, you seem glum.

And then that evening, after we put him to sleep, I was talking to Katya and telling her that I was trying my hardest to not communicate what I was feeling professionally to Lincoln when I came home. And literally, in the middle of that conversation, he started wailing upstairs.

And so, I became I just became deeply aware of the way that I was bringing a certain sadness or heaviness or weightfulness, if there's such a word, into the house, and that I was burdening him, or at least I felt like I was burdening him with that. And I wanted to do something to try to take that weight away.

GROSS: My guest is David Dow. He's been representing death row clients in Texas for about 20 years. He's written a memoir called "The Autobiography of an Execution." Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is David Dow, and he's written a new book called "The Autobiography of an Execution." It's a memoir about his work as a death row lawyer, defending death row clients, and the book has just been published.

You write that murder is perhaps the ugliest crime, and that's why it's so shocking to you that murderers, most murderers are so ordinary in appearance. Did you start this work expecting to meet monsters and end up meeting people instead?

Prof. DOW: That's exactly what happened. I think that the first time that I went to death row, I expected it to be full of Hannibal-Lector-like characters, people who gave you the creeps just to be sitting in front of them. And, in fact, exactly the opposite happened.

When I first started representing death row inmates, most of the people who I was representing were probably a few years older than I was. And now, of course, I've been doing it 20 years, and most of them are younger than I am. But I had a client, for example, who was executed last November, November of 2009, and I remember the first time I went to see him, being struck by how completely ordinary he looked.

The first thing I thought when I was talking to him was that I simply could not picture this kid he was 30 years old, but he still looked like a kid to me I simply could not picture this kid doing what he had done. And I think that one of the really striking things about meeting people on death row and talking to people on death row is that, almost without exception, they don't look like what you expect them to look like.

There are a few, obviously, who have ticks and mannerisms, and you can tell that they're not normal in the sense that they have some apparent mental illness, but almost all of them aren't like that. Almost all of them look like people who you might have sat next to at the bar, where you were watching the ball game the night before.

GROSS: The people who you defend aren't monsters, but some of them have committed, most of them have committed crimes that are monstrous. Can you give us an example of somebody who you defended who you were pretty sure was, in fact, guilty and who committed an especially monstrous crime?

Prof. DOW: Yes. I had another client who was executed in March of last year. His name was Willie Pondexter. And Pondexter had grown up in this vast, sprawling, broken family. One of the things that the lawyers in my office do is we try to construct family trees of all of our clients, and it's not just for curiosity that we do that, but one of the things that we're looking for when we do that are signs of mental illness because mental illness tends to run in families. And the only way you can know whether mental illness is running in a family is to construct a family tree. And so, we routinely construct family trees.

The family tree that we tried to construct for Pondexter looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. I mean, it had so many triangles and squares and circles veering off into all kinds of different directions that it was impossible to follow.

And that was the environment where he grew up. He grew up in an environment where he had no father. His brother, the only full brother that he had that he was close to committed suicide when Pondexter was 10 years old. His mother was placed in mental hospitals four, five or six different times, and he ended up finding a family, which was a gang.

And as a result of that membership in a gang, he participated in a crime that included the murder of an elderly woman by the name of Martha Lennox. They killed her and then stole her car, and there isn't any doubt that Pondexter participated in that crime. I'm not sure that he would have initiated it, but he participated in it voluntarily. And Martha Lennox was shot and killed inside her house in a suburb of Dallas.

By the time Pondexter was executed, more than 10 years after this crime had been committed, he was simply not remotely the same person he had been at the time the crime occurred. He had completely grown up. He had matured. There were guards on death row who approached me and told me that they didn't think that he should be executed. Several of them signed affidavits that we submitted to the Board of Pardons and Paroles on his behalf to try to have his death sentence converted into a life sentence.

He is somebody who, at the time that he was executed, I would have had no hesitation, none, asking him to babysit for our son. He was simply not dangerous anymore. He had been rehabilitated. As a society, we've mostly given up on rehabilitation, but Pondexter had been rehabilitated.

GROSS: Is this an example of one of the reasons why you do death row work, because there are people who are going to be killed for a crime in their past, and they've since been transformed in some way?

Prof. DOW: Yes, I think that that's certainly one of the factors that pulls me to the work. Were executing people who did something unspeakably terrible at some point in their lives, and yet by the time we execute them, many of these people I'm tempted to say most would not ever commit such a crime again.

I had another client who was executed just this past November who was executed because he and three others went out looking for a house to burglarize. And they broke into a house because they thought it was empty. They picked it because they thought it was vacant.

And sure enough, it was vacant. There were four of them. Two stayed in the car, and two broke in. And while the two were inside - one of them was my client, whose name was Christian Oliver and while Christian was inside the house, the owner of the house, a man by the name of Joe Collins, he returned home.

And Joe Collins happened to be a gun collector and a marksman as well. And so, he picked up one of his own guns and started to chase the two boys through the house. They had broken into his house after all, and he was unhappy to come home and see these two kids burglarizing his house.

And the two kids - Christian and the other one - ran to the back of the house to try to escape through the back. And unfortunately for them, the back door was locked. It was padlocked shut from the outside. And so, the two took refuge in a bedroom in the rear of the house, and Mr.�Collins cornered them there and started shooting into the room. And then my client, Christian Oliver, shot back and killed Mr.�Collins.

Christian Oliver had been involved in other burglaries before this crime. He's never been involved in a violent crime. He'd never even shot at anybody, much less killed somebody. And so, here you have this I call him a kid. By the time he was executed, he wasn't a kid anymore, but he was only 19 at the time this happened.

You have this young man, and he participated in a crime that should never have happened. He should never have participated in it. But the crime itself spun out of control in a way that he certainly didn't plan and probably nobody could have predicted. And by the time he was executed, 11, 12 years after this happened, I feel confident in saying that there was no way that was ever going to happen again.

GROSS: So when you are defending somebody who's already been convicted of murder, they're on death row, and you're trying to appeal their case, on what grounds can you appeal? You think they are guilty most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time. So the question isnt whether or not they did the crime usually. So what is the case about then?

Prof. DOW: In death penalty jurisprudence, there's this very peculiar concept, and the concept is being innocent of the sentence. So the person isn't innocent of the crime. There's not an argument that the person didn't commit the crime. The argument is that the person is innocent of the sentence.

And what that means is that the person should have been sentenced to life in prison rather than death. So most of the time, what I'm doing as an appellate lawyer in these cases is trying to construct the argument to persuade a court that my client, even though he did something horrible, even though he committed a murder, should have been sentenced to life in prison rather than death.

And then there are a variety of argumentative strategies that we use to try to persuade the court that the person should have a life sentence rather than a death sentence.

GROSS: And which court are you appealing to?

Prof. DOW: Well, I personally, and my office generally, work in both the state courts, as well as the federal courts so that the first layer of appeals in death penalty cases go through the state courts. And then after you exhaust all of your opportunities in the state courts, you have an opportunity to go into federal court.

GROSS: And sometimes you've appealed directly to the Supreme Court.

Prof. DOW: Almost invariably, we try to take the case all the way up to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, unlike the other courts, has to give you permission to appeal to it. So we are allowed to file an appeal in the lowest federal court, the federal district court, and then if we lose there, we're permitted to appeal that loss to the intermediate court of appeals.

If we lose there, we almost always ask the Supreme Court to review the case, but the Supreme Court rarely does. They only hear these appeals in a handful of cases.

GROSS: David Dow will be back in the second half of the show. His new memoir is called "The Autobiography of an Execution." He's a distinguished professor at the University of Houston Law Center and the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Im Terry Gross back with appellate lawyer David Dow author of the new memoir "The Autobiography of an Execution." Over the past 20 years, he's represented more than 100 death row inmates, mostly in Texas and he continues to do the work although he knows most of his clients are guilty. His goal with guilty clients is to prevent them from being executed and change their sentence to life in prison. He opposes the death penalty. Dow is a distinguished professor at the University of Houston Law Center and the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service.

Weve talked about cases where you were convinced that your client was guilty of murder but that they shouldnt be executed. There is one example in your book of a case you took on where you came to believe that your client actually did not do the murder - did not commit the murder - murders that he was accused of. Can you tell us briefly what the charges were against the person who you give the name of Quaker in the book? Youve changed the names in the book.

Prof. DOW: I have changed the names. The story that I tell about Henry Quaker is a story involving one of my clients who was convicted of killing his wife and his two children. And over the course of my work on that case, I came to be convinced that he didnt actually commit the crime. Of all the cases that I've worked on over the years - more than a hundred cases - there've been only seven or eight where I reach the conclusion that my client didnt commit the crime that he was sent to death row for.

One of the erroneous beliefs that people have about death row inmates is that they all claim to be innocent. In my experience, very few of them claim to be innocent. And what that means, if youre a death penalty lawyer, is that when somebody claims to be innocent, you pay attention to that claim and you pay attention to it because it isn't all that common for people to claim to be innocent.

In the Henry Quaker case, Henry Quaker told me he was innocent and I didnt believe him at first. I didnt disbelieve him. I simply didnt form an opinion; I tried not to form an opinion. But the more deeply we looked at the case the more I became convinced that all of the evidence that had been used to support Quaker's conviction had problems with it and at the end of the day, none of it in my judgment really established his guilt. And that, coupled with the shear fact that I believed him when he told me he didnt do it combined to convince me that he was innocent.

GROSS: But you lost the case anyways.

Prof. DOW: We did lose the case, anyways. Of the six, or seven, or eight cases that I've mentioned where I said I think that I've been representing somebody who's innocent, the truth is that I've lost most of those cases. I think that that's one of the reasons that it's harder to represent somebody who you believe to be innocent than somebody who you believe to be guilty. Because as a death penalty lawyer youre going to lose most of the cases - almost all of the cases, and if youre going to lose almost all of the cases, this sounds odd to say, but it's less devastating to lose a case where youre representing somebody who actually committed the crime that he's being executed for committing.

GROSS: So, for Quaker, whose innocence you believed in, did you witness his execution?

Prof. DOW: Yeah, I did witness Quaker's execution. They're...

GROSS: Why was it important for you to be there?

Prof. DOW: There's a lawyer in my office who was asked to witness an execution at the end of last year and she asked me whether she should. And I'm going to tell you what I told her. What I told her was that it is something you will never get over, that you have nightmares about it for weeks, months, maybe years. And so, what you have to decide when youre making the decision about whether youre going to witness your client's execution, is whether the suffering that youre going to have for watching it is greater or lesser than how much your client needs you to be there.

I watch executions only if my clients ask me to. And if they ask me to, I watch because if they ask me to I feel that it is more important to them that I be there than it is to me that I not be there. In addition, one of the things that I talk about when I'm talking about the Quaker case is that in almost all of our cases we're actually litigating the case up until the very end. I had a conversation with one of my clients last week and I was telling him that he could put me on the witness list to witness his execution if he wanted to, but that I thought it was really more important that I be in my office working on the case if we were still working up until the end.

So I think that one reason that many death row inmates dont put their lawyers on the list of people to witness their execution is that their lawyers tell them they'd really like to be working on the case up until the very end. That's certainly true in my case. I tell my clients that Ill be there if they want me to, but that I'd rather be at my office so that I can try to keep working on the case if there's anything left to do.

GROSS: Did you ever get one of those last minutes stays of execution?

Prof. DOW: Oh sure. We get last minute stays of execution; I'm tempted to say a lot. It's not a lot compared to the number of executions, but in 2009, for example, we had six or seven last minute stays of execution. So it happens about every other month or so for us.

GROSS: That's a lot. So when you are witnessing an execution, do you try to make eye contact with your client when they're strapped to the chair?

Prof. DOW: The people who are being executed can't see...

GROSS: It's really a gurney, isn't it? It's not a chair anymore.

Prof. DOW: It's...

GROSS: In Texas its a gurney and it's - what's it called? Like an IV. What's the word for it?

Prof. DOW: Right. It's lethal injection.

GROSS: Lethal injection. Yeah. Yeah. So you can't make eye contact because they're in a prone position.

Prof. DOW: Well, you could - you would be able to make eye contact if they could see you because you are standing at a level that is above them, so that youre essentially looking down at the person who's strapped to the gurney. And what typically happens is that there are three different rooms that witnesses are in. There's one room that is reserved for members of the press; there's a second room that is reserved for members of the - family members of the murder victim, and then there's a third room that is reserved for people who have been asked to witness the execution by the person whos being executed.

And they're those three different rooms and one of those rooms is essentially at the feet of the person's who's being executed and if the person who's being executed turns his head to the left - and I say his head because most people who are executed are in fact men - if he turns his head to the left he would be looking into the room where the family members of the murder victim are. And then if he turns his head to the right he would be looking into the room where his own witnesses are. But all of those windows are one-way glass so that the witnesses can see into the execution chamber but you can't see into any of the other rooms where witnesses are.

And so, by the same token, the person who's being executed can turn his head and look towards the family members of the murder victim. He can look toward his own witnesses but he doesnt actually see them because he's looking at a piece of one-way glass. So, I guess in answer to your question, it's possible for the witnesses to make eye contact with the execution victim but it's a sort of one-way eye contact. Youre looking at the person whos being executed but he's not seeing you.

GROSS: Its hard to single out not being able to make eye contact as the thing that's unfair about execution, but it does seem like okay, so youre executing the person, shouldnt they at least be allowed to make eye contact with family or friends? Is there like a reason why it's one-way glass and they're not allowed to see you?

Prof. DOW: The reason that it's one-way glass is simply because if it weren't the witnesses would be able to see into the other witness rooms and I...

GROSS: Oh, I see so - Mm-hmm.

Prof. DOW: Yeah. And so I think the idea is that they dont want, for example, the relatives of the person who's being executed to be able to look into the room and observe the family members of the murder victim and vice-versa. They dont want the family members of the murder victim to be able to look into the room where the relatives of the person who's being executed are located. So I think that's just the practical reason that they do it. But the truth is that it goes beyond not being able to make eye contact.

When people arrive on death row they lose their opportunity to have contact visits with anyone. In some cases the lawyers can have contact visits with their clients but they're not permitted, any longer, to have contact visits with their family members. So when somebody gets executed, he has to tell his family goodbye by talking to them on a telephone. I was talking earlier, about my client Christian Oliver who was executed last November.

His execution was witnessed by four members of his family - his mom, his dad, his brother and his sister - and he had to tell them goodbye by essentially talking to them on a microphone. He wasnt permitted to hug them; he wasnt permitted to kiss them. I think that that aspect of the way that we carry out executions in the U.S., and in Texas, in particular, is an aspect of these executions that has been particularly bothersome to me.

GROSS: My guest is David Dow, an appellate lawyer who represents death row inmates. His new memoir is called "The Autobiography of an Execution."

We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: If youre just joining us, my guest is David Dow and he's the author of a new memoir about his work as a defense attorney for death row clients and the book is called "The Autobiography of an Execution." He's been representing death row clients under appeals in Texas for about 20 years.

Now youve spent your 20 years working on death row in Texas, which is famous, for among other things, for having a lot of executions. So what's unique about working with death row clients in Texas?

Prof. DOW: I have a few cases that I work on in other states and one of the facts that always strikes me when I go to those other states is how different death penalty lawyers are in other states. Even other states that have substantial death row populations, like Florida. Death penalty lawyers in other states are not constantly representing clients who are on the verge of execution. In other states it's a busy year in the execution chamber if you have five or six executions. In Texas, we might have five or six executions in a month or two.

What makes being a death penalty lawyer in Texas different from being a death penalty lawyer anywhere else, is just the shear volume of executions that we confront. And that volume of executions has an impact on the lawyers who do the work. There's never really a period of time where you have a breather where you can relax from the constant pressure of having clients who are just days or weeks away from being executed. I think that that's the singular factor about Texas that makes it different from other places from the standpoint of a death penalty lawyer.

GROSS: You know, I found it really interesting in your book that you often warn your death row clients that if they appeal they're probably not going to win. And if they lose they might be executed very shortly after they lose and they're not going to have time to prepare for their death. Why do you tell your clients that?

Prof. DOW: I was talking earlier about how, in most cases, we are litigating up until the very end; we're trying to find something else that we can file, something else that we can do. But at the same time, even if we find something, I know we're going to lose. And so I think that it's incumbent on me as a lawyer to tell the clients that we're going to lose. And I do that for two reasons: one of them is altruistic and one of them isn't. The altruistic reason is that I believe in being honest with my clients. I dont want to tell them that I think that we're going to win if I dont think that we're going to win. I dont want to mislead them. I dont want them to put off doing things that people who know the date that they're going to die might want to do. I dont want them not to write goodbye letters to people they want to write letters to. I dont want them not to say goodbye to their loved ones. I dont want them not to make plans for disposing of their body if that's important to them. So, one of the reasons that I'm honest is just so that my clients can tie up the loose ends the way many people would want to. The second reason is that I'm the one who has to call them after our final appeals have been turned down by the Supreme Court and that typically happens at 5:30 in the afternoon or 20 to 6:00 and the execution is scheduled for 6 o'clock.

GROSS: Wow.

Prof. DOW: And I pick up a telephone and I call the prison where they're going to be executed at that time. My clients are still in a holding cell, which is immediately adjacent to the execution chamber and I identify myself to the warden's assistant who answers the phone, although I think she knows my voice by now, and then she patches my call through to the telephone that's right next to the holding cell. And a guard picks it up and I identify myself to the guard. I think he knows my voice as well by now, and then I talk to my client. And I tell him that we lost.

Sometimes the conversations are very very short; sometimes they're a little bit longer. One of the reasons that I'm so clear when I tell them that this is the way the cases are probably going to develop, is that I have in fact had the experience of calling someone who was not prepared to die. And I called him and told him that we had lost and he started crying the crying turned into something that was close to hysteria and he was begging me to do something else, to file something else, to think of something else to try to do for him. And those are horrible conversations to have. They're terrible for the inmate, of course, but it was also, frankly, terrible for me and I dont want to have anymore conversations like that.

GROSS: Now, you write in your book that the people you meet on death row, they're not monsters; they're people and often they're transformed people 'cause the crime that they committed - the monstrous crime they may have committed - was years ago and they often change between the time of the crime and the time of the execution. Yet, at the same time, you write in your book: I believe in evil. When you use the word evil and say that you believe in it, what do you mean?

Prof. DOW: I do believe in evil. I believe that there are some people who are just bad and they're never going to be made good. And I think I say in the book, I hope I say in the book, that I dont know how they got to be that way. I dont know whether they were born that way or whether they were broken at such a young age that that's how they came to be that way, but from the point of view of society it doesnt really matter. It doesnt really matter why a person is inveterately bad. And I think that there are people like that. I dont think that we need to be executing them. But I do believe that they're people in prison who can not possibly be made good - who can not possibly be rehabilitated.

GROSS: And what's your role as a defense attorney when youre representing somebody who you not only believe is guilty but who you believe is evil?

Prof. DOW: My role as a defense lawyer is to try to persuade the court - the judges - that my client should've been sentenced to life rather than death. And I will say this, that even in those some number of cases where I've been representing somebody who I really believe is or was an evil person, even in those cases, there were appalling constitutional violations. And one of the things that I noticed about those cases is that the fact that my client seems to be evil, seems to make it easier for the judges to ignore the fact that there were constitutional violations. They just dont care about it. They say, here we have a bad person; this is a bad person. There's no way this person is ever going to be fixed or better or rehabilitated. Let's just be done with him. And I represent those people because I dont accept that analysis. I dont think that that's the United States legal system is supposed to work. Even my bad evil clients are human beings who are entitled to have their rights protected.

GROSS: David Dow, thanks so much for talking with us.

Prof. DOW: It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

GROSS: David Dow's new memoir is called "The Autobiography of an Execution." He's a distinguished professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center and the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service. You can read an excerpt of his memoir on our Web site freshair.npr.org.

Coming up, jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews a new CD of music inspired by Eric Dolphy. It's by the British band Empirical.

This is FRESH AIR.