New York Times bestselling author Thomas Cahill tells the story of the difficult life and unjust death of Dominique Green.

On October 26, 2004, 30-year-old Dominique Green was executed in Huntsville, Texas. Arrested at the age of 18 after a fatal shooting during a convenience store robbery, Green admitted to taking part in the robbery, but insisted that he did not pull the trigger. Despite obvious errors in the legal procedures and protests from the victim’s family, Green was sentenced to death. During the last twelve years of his life, spent on Death Row, Green inspired his fellow prisoners with his grace and wisdom. Through his inspiring story, Thomas Cahill illuminates the moral imperatives often ignored by our legal system


From the Compact Disc edition.

1

The man known to me as Dominique was born Dominic Jerome Green in Houston, Texas, on May 13, 1974, the first child of Emmitt and Stephanie Faye Smith Green. This was less than four months after my own first child was born. As in all our lives, the most important truths of our histories come to us through the uncertain lenses of remembrance, viewpoint, and self-justification. It is always hard, and often impossible, to sort out what actually happened from the way it is remembered either by the subject himself or by those closest to him. But having listened to several witnesses to Dominique's early life, I set down here the truest account I can frame of his early years.

That Stephanie was a mother from hell seems to be taken for granted by everyone. But the truth of this portrait is open to question at least in some of its particulars. How did Dominique, who looked so much like her, who possessed her intelligence and even her cunning, evolve into the expansive human being he became if all his early experiences were negative? Mothers mold us more surely than do all others. In his earliest years, Dominique's mother was a different woman from the creature she became. Our most damning evidence against her comes from the 1980s, and there are no incidents related of her before 1981 that would force us to name her an abuser of children.

I met Stephanie and spent several hours with her in mid-July of 2007. There can be no doubt that most people would find her evasive, narcissistic, and creepy. The row of gold-capped teeth that glint from the front of her mouth, combined with the quicksilver indirection of her responses, can almost leave the impression that you are speaking with an android, a counterfeit human being.

Stephanie was brought up in a household that she claims was in league with the devil, a family devoted to the worship of Satan. Certainly, her mother was a practitioner of voodoo and believed she could put curses on other human beings and magically control them. Stephanie was forced as a child to have sexual relations with several, perhaps all, the mature males of the household and of her extended family. When she was barely into her teens, she gave birth to a baby girl, the result of one of these encounters. Her mother took the baby and raised it as her own and threw Stephanie out of the house before she was fifteen.

Despite this terrible beginning, Stephanie was able to function as wife and mother at least for a while. From the first, she acted the part of the dominant parent, Emmitt always assuming the more passive role. Defining herself in contrast to her mother's grotesque religious practices, she attended her local Catholic church and had her children baptized there. Stephanie surely admired her first baby: "I remember this little guy about nine months old tottering across the floor on his feet. He's nine months old and he's walking, O.K.? I remember this little guy who used to have a beautiful smile. He was smart as a whip. He could do anything he set his mind to. He'd do it. He was always leading stuff."

In 1976, two years after Dominique's birth, his younger brother Marlon, another handsome child, was born. The two boys became inseparable companions and, soon enough, co-conspirators. Stephanie and Emmitt would have a third child, Hollingsworth, but not till 1985. By then, the cracks in their lives had become too obvious for anyone to miss.

When Dominique was six, two supposed friends of Emmitt broke into the house, intending to rape Stephanie and kill Dominique and Marlon in retribution for a drug deal gone wrong. They did not succeed. But when Dominique was seven, another episode of violence left its invisible...

 

"There are many ways to tell the tragic story of America's death rows. Tom Cahill has chosen to show -- through the extraordinary life of one man -- that God is always working everywhere and can bring the most beautiful soul to maturity in even the most horrifying circumstances. If you read his story, you will never forget Dominique Green, nor will you ever feel the same way about our courts, our prisons, and our criminal justice system. This book is a life-changer."

 

"Dominique Green was a wonderful man whose life demonstrated the power of God to heal and transfigure even the most unlikely people and places. Who could have expected that Texas Death Row would be made into an avenue of divine grace? -- which is exactly what happened through Dominique's instrumentation. Though this is a book that ends in death, it does not end in despair. Read it and discover how even the obscenity of capital punishment can be transformed into an occasion of light and peace."

 

"A tremendously moving book--all the more effective because of the tempered voice with which Cahill narrates an unspeakable injustice. Dominique Green's personal and moral triumph, prior to his execution under the benighted legal processes of Texas, is portrayed with so much sensitivity, and the racial factor that Cahill emphasizes is conveyed so forcefully, that I expect A Saint On Death Row to become a classic in the growing struggle to cleanse this nation finally of the sin of the death penalty."

 

"A deeply moving narrative about a man transformed as he faced an unjust execution."

 

"A Saint on Death Row is not the first book blasting the Texas criminal justice system, and it won't be last. But Cahill's book is one of the most compelling."

 

"Cahill stimulates deep thought about good and evil, and he is an intelligent, engaging historian.... A Saint on Death Row is an affecting book."

 

"A Saint on Death Row tells, on one level, the Kafkaesque particulars of one young black man's transmogrifying journey through the justice system to its ultimate punishment. On another level, the book is the story of how a young black man held in solitary confinement 23 hours a day helped inspire a movement for an international moratorium on state-sanctioned executions, helped inspire a U.N. resolution against the death penalty, hosted a pilgrimage by South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu to death row in Huntsville, Tex., and helped transform the lives of the other men with whom he shared death row.
Most powerful, however, is the story of redemption and forgiveness contained in this slim volume. In stunning testimony of the human heart's capability for forgiveness, Bernatte and Andre Lastrapes, the wife and son of the man Dominique Green was executed for allegedly having killed, spoke out about the injustice of Green's trial and bore witness to both Green's personal apotheosis and the inexorably tragic meaninglessness of his execution.
Cahill, author of the popular 'Hinges of History in the Western World' collection (including How the Irish Saved Civilization and The Gift of the Jews) does not write as a polemicist, an expert on the law, or as courtroom dramatist. With deceptively casual prose, Cahill writes of how he came to be personally involved with Green's case and, more deeply, with Green himself. More like a set of extended reflective journal entries--indeed, Cahill's prologue is him quoting from his own written first impressions upon initially meeting Green--the voice in A Saint on Death Row is without the bathos or plaintiveness of a mere death-penalty partisan. It is the voice of a layman looking on with growing disbelief at the machinery of the state as it moves toward taking the life of a young man....
Thomas Cahill's excellent book allows readers to meet Dominique Green and suggests that no one deserves to die like he did."

 

"[P]repare for your level of disturbance to be pushed up a quantum step or two by Tom Cahill's new book, A Saint on Death Row, which mounts a powerful challenge to any notion that all is more or less OK with the administration of criminal justice in the US. Known for books like How the Irish Saved Civilization, The Gift of the Jews, and other charmingly erudite excursions into cultural history, Cahill has produced a very contemporary piece of reportage and observation in his new book. At the center of it is the 'saint' of the title, one Dominique Green, who, once you've gotten to know him in Cahill's pages, is not likely to slip very quickly from your memory.... [I]t's impossible to read Cahill's quiet, straightforward, entirely unforced portrait of Dominique without being moved by it."

 

"You pick up a book that clocks in at 160 pages and you naturally assume it will be an easy read. But the story of Dominique Green is so tragic, so overwhelming and powerful that I'm not sure Cahill could've padded it even if he'd wanted to.... [T]his is not merely an academic account of miscarried justice. It's a person with a voice lending that voice to someone who has been dehumanized, debased and locked away in a cage to rue the steadily loudening drumbeat of his impending execution.... Cahill's central question lingers like the burn of stomach acid in the back of one's throat: What did we gain--what?--by killing him?"

 

"An impassioned, very personal plea against racism, poverty and the death penalty."

 

A Saint on Death Row by Thomas Cahill
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