Draggingtree Posted July 25, 2015 Share Posted July 25, 2015 Appeal to Reason HOW A PROMINENT DEATH PENALTY LAWYER WAS WRONGED—AND HOW THE SUPREME COURT CAN MAKE THINGS RIGHT. by MIMI SWARTZ JUNE 2015 Maybe you wouldn’t want David Dow to be your BFF, and you probably wouldn’t want him to be your dinner party companion either. He has the burning eyes of a zealot, the sheared head and hollowed cheeks of a penitent, and the focus and drive of a cheetah. He does not suffer fools. Put another way, there’s no “Tons o’ Fun” sign flashing across the 55-year-old’s forehead. The case could be made that Dow’s appearance and his manner are occupational hazards: the founder of the Texas Innocence Network, Dow is the foremost death penalty lawyer in the state. He has consulted on more than one hundred such cases. Two death row inmates, Anthony Graves and Michael Toney, were freed from prison with help from his team at the University of Houston; others were given new trials or spared the death penalty because Dow and his colleagues could show—where the defendants’ previous attorneys had not—that they were too young or too intellectually impaired when their crimes were committed to be executed. But thanks to a ruling by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals last January, Dow could be essentially put out of business for an entire year. The only hope for him and, more important, his desperate (and possibly innocent) clients is the Supreme Court of Texas, which can overrule the Court of Criminal Appeals’. While we await that decision, which could come at any time, ponder this: what happened to Dow illustrates just about everything that is wrong with the CCA http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/appeal-reason?fullpage=1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts