On October 18, 1992, Dominique Green was arrested by the Houston police. It was his fourth arrest. He had been driving a stolen red car the previous afternoon when the police gave chase along a fifty-mile stretch of Highway 288. The car ended in a ditch in Brazoria County, just outside the city. Dominique, lightning quick, set off on foot through field and forest and succeeded in eluding capture till the next day, when the police sent out dogs to track him down. Arrested immediately were two others, Michael Neal and Mark Porter, both black, who were found in the backseat of the car in possession of a large handgun and a BB gun. The handgun was sent off for ballistics testing.
The police, aware of a recent series of armed robberies carried out at a shopping mall and elsewhere by young black men, believed they had caught the perpetrators. In lineups, one or another of the arrested men was then identified by witnesses; and though no one identified Dominique, the three prisoners were charged with participating in robberies. Michael Neal, however, represented by counsel arranged by his mother, was able to put up a bond for his release.
The ballistics test came back, establishing that the handgun, a Tech 9, was the weapon that killed a man named Andrew Lastrapes Jr. outside a Houston convenience store in the early morning of October 14. Eventually the police, questioning the suspects separately, determined that Mark Porter could not have been part of the group that morning, but that two other youths were: Paul Lyman, black, and Patrick Haddix, white. Neal did not provide a statement at that time.
At this point, for anyone researching the history of these events, the record becomes exceedingly muddled and incomplete. How the police made the determinations they did and why the various suspects were charged and brought to trial could defeat the deductive skills of the most prescient investigator. This is only partly because seventeen years have passed since these events. It is also because the State of Texas keeps shockingly incomplete records of such matters and because many of those in authority are unwilling or unable to shed any light on the matters in which they were participants. Sandy Melamed, for instance, who was appointed Dominique's lawyer, told Sheila Murphy, a retired Chicago judge who would eventually become involved in Dominique's appeals, that he drank a couple of Scotches every night and that, well, his recall just wasn't very good. He was far more forthcoming than most.
Much of what I can report comes not from those in authority but from the accused perpetrators and from the family of the victim. Andrew Lastrapes, according to his wife, Bernatte, was a “truly good man,” a big black truck driver who always kept a few dollars in his pocket for beggars. But he was also a man who kept a knife on his person and knew how to use it—and he would never have surrendered his wallet without a fight. After his body was turned over to his family, Bernatte discovered that his back pants pocket where he kept his wallet had been torn and that there were puncture wounds in one of his hands, both suggestive of a struggle. The obvious scenario is that Andrew resisted the robbery with his knife and was shot in a scuffle. He lay in the parking lot for hours, alive and bleeding. It is hard to resist the speculation that he might be alive today if the police had seen fit to call an ambulance in a timely manner. But it is also hard to ignore the possibility that the shooting of Lastrapes was an unintended consequence of the scuffle. Such mitigating possibilities were never shared with the jury.
Though Melamed was appointed to defend the indigent Dominique on robbery charges, Dominique was soon charged— on January 5, 1993∗ —with capital murder by a Harris County grand jury, despite the fact that his prints were not found on the murder weapon. (Someone else's were, someone never identified.) But the police, after many hours of intense grilling, finally wrested a signed “confession” from Dominique by making empty threats to arrest Stephanie. Dominique, not wanting his mother arrested and his family even more wrecked than it already was, told a story of his involvement that he believed would be subsequently discredited by witnesses and fingerprints. “Bart,” he claimed, had been the killer. Bart did not exist—or, to put it more precisely, no one with that legal name was found.
Texas treasures a legal wrinkle within its “law of parties” according to which any participant in a crime that results in murder may be charged with the murder, even if he or she had nothing to do with committing the murder. The statute reads in part: “All traditional distinctions between accomplices and principals are abolished by this section, and each party to an offense may be charged and convicted without alleging that he acted as a principal or accomplice.” Under this statute one might expect that four young men—all seen by the police as participants in the robbery that resulted in the death of Andrew Lastrapes—would be put on trial for capital murder. But this was not the case. Only Dominique, the youngest and least protected, was so tried.
Michael Neal was protected by his lawyer; and both Neal and Paul Lyman were able to plea-bargain their way to more limited sentences. Patrick Haddix, the sole white participant, was never booked or charged with anything, merely characterized as a “citizen informant.” To read in succession the sworn statements that Dominique, Lyman, Porter, and Haddix gave to police is to be struck as if by a blow. The statements of the three black boys are typed in the usual police manner: all in capital letters, all full of typos and grammatical and spelling errors. Haddix's statement is typed with extraordinary refinement in upper- and lower-case letters, and its language is startlingly literary, even elegant. The writer of this prose punctuates and paragraphs perfectly, knows how to write dialogue, even employs the semicolon correctly. The statement, which reads like fiction, is full of novelistic detail and runs to five dense pages, whereas the others’ statements have the clunky, halting sound of teenage accounts and range between one and three poorly typed pages. To compare Haddix's supremely polished statement with the unfocused, inarticulate, fear-ridden, stop-and-go courtroom performance he gave subsequently is to know that this statement, recorded many hours after the statements of the others, was not written or dictated by Haddix but provided by an expert, hired to engineer an intended outcome.
At the time the ballistics report came in, both Neal and Lyman had been released and only Dominique, unable to post bail, remained in custody. The most likely scenario is that Haddix, first to point the finger at the others (while never denying that he had acted as lookout and had shared in the proceeds of the robbery) and having much better family connections, was able to wiggle free of the legal vise that ensnared the others. But only Dominique, the least experienced, the least able to mount a defense, was left exposed to the death penalty that the police and the legal system were determined to impose on someone.
Complicating this picture is the nature of the only testimony against Dominique, which was supplied by the other three. According to them, Dominique and Neal got out of the car and walked toward Lastrapes, who was getting out of his truck in front of the convenience store, while Lyman and Haddix pulled the car around to the back. So only Neal, not the other two, could know what happened when Lastrapes was confronted and which of the two—Dominique or Neal— shot Lastrapes. But also: since when are co-conspirators who are doing a deal for a lesser sentence (and, in the case of Haddix, no sentence at all) found credible in a court of law? In the entire history of law and in every country that takes law seriously, the testimony of co-conspirators who exculpate themselves while implicating another is viewed with suspicion.
The United States Supreme Court has termed such testimony “inherently unreliable.” Even Texas has an “accomplice witness rule” that requires corroboration of such testimony before it is admitted. But, as an exceedingly experienced Texas attorney confided to me, “the corroboration tends to be anything that matches the prosecutor's theory of the case. Almost anything serves, eviscerating the purpose of the rule.”
Dominique's trial was over almost before it began. Melamed, originally appointed by Judge George Goodwin of the 174th District Court to defend Dominique against robbery charges, now petitioned the judge in the new capital murder case— Doug Shaver of the 262nd District Court—asking that he be allowed to continue to represent the defendant. Melamed had only one previous brush with a capital murder case: he had been second-chair defense attorney in a famous Harris County case known as “the sleeping lawyer case,” which had been argued before the same Judge Shaver who was to preside over Dominique's case.
In the earlier case, the principal defense attorney, one John Benn, then in his seventies, had been seen by those present to sleep throughout the trial, his eyes shut, his mouth repeatedly falling open, his head lolling back on his shoulders. When asked about his behavior, Benn defended himself impatiently. “It's boring,” he whined. What makes the case famous, however, is not that the lawyer slept (which was hardly a first for Texas) but that Judge Shaver remarked dismissively to the Los Angeles Ti‘mes, “The Constitution says everyone's entitled to the lawyer of their choice, and Mr. Benn was their choice. The Constitution doesn't say the lawyer has to be awake.”
Shaver, who had been Melamed's mentor, readily agreed to the lawyer's request that he continue to represent Dominique. There was a second lawyer on Dominique's “team,” Diana Olvera, who has never since allowed herself to be interviewed about this case. But keep her in mind; she will appear in our story once more.
The jury, composed of whites and one Asian American but of no blacks or Latinos, had no trouble convicting Dominique. Bernatte Luckett Lastrapes, who attended the trial with her father, a pillar of Houston's black community, and her eldest son, was shocked at the cursory nature of the proceedings and the lack of substantive engagement and effective participation by the defendant's lawyers. Bernatte began to wonder if this was really a trial at all or rather some kind of bizarrely predictable ritual with a predetermined outcome. She noted that Dominique's mother, who attended, slept through almost the entire proceeding. Poor Dominique, thought the murdered man's widow. He has no one.
At the least, Dominique's attorneys must be judged exceedingly bumbling and naïve. Knowing little about Stephanie, Olvera appears to have supposed that a mother would help sway the jury to sympathy. She asked Stephanie if she thought her son capable of such a crime. Yes, proclaimed Stephanie with considerable assurance, he's just like me. For her day of testimony at her eldest son's murder trial, Stephanie managed to call forth one of her more evil personae. But her testimony weighed heavily on the jury in deciding to convict Dominique of murder. After all, even his mother was against him. Later, when asked what Dominique's punishment should be, she urged the court to inflict on her son whatever punishment the law allowed. Though this second outburst was instrumental in ensuring that Dominique would be given the death penalty, the jury was told nothing of Stephanie's schizophrenia or of her repeated hospitalizations in mental institutions.
Melamed and Olvera did call another character witness, Sylvia Gonzales, Dominique's juvenile probation officer, who was sympathetic to Dominique and recognized the extremely negative role Stephanie had played in his young life. Sylvia testified briefly to Stephanie's oppressive behavior toward her son as well as to Dominique's character, “easygoing and receptive,” “truthful and cooperative.” But Sylvia was not prepared to testify by Dominique's lawyers, who met her but once—in the hallway just prior to her testimony—and they made little of her testimony.
Far more important was another character witness, a supposedly scientific one. For the sentencing phase of the trial, Melamed called a psychologist, Dr. Walter Quijano, to testify to Dominique's psychological disposition. Quijano, who was born in the Philippines and whose father was of Spanish (not Hispanic) ancestry, has in other cases urged the death penalty for explicitly racial reasons, believing, as he does, that the race of a defendant—if the defendant is black or Latino—is a “statistical predictor of future violence.” In Dominique's case, Quijano, keeping quiet about his racial prejudices, limited himself to telling the jury that Dominique had never developed a normal conscience and could therefore be a future danger to society if he were allowed to live—this from a witness supposedly testifying on behalf of the defendant. Though Quijano had interviewed Dominique briefly, his assessment came not from anything he had learned directly in his interview. Rather, his assessment of Dominique's lack of conscience was a syllogistic deduction: those who grow up in circumstances like Dominique's—that is, without a caring parent—lack a normal conscience; therefore, Dominique lacks a normal conscience.
But in the end, race was hardly absent from these proceedings, as the most damning evidence in support of Dominique's punishment came from his own words. Before he had been charged with murder, he had written a letter from jail to Mark Porter (who had been found by police in the stolen car that Dominique had been driving) in which he suggested a narrative they could propose of their movements, a narrative that would enable them to elude conviction (“how to get our case dropped or at least dropped down”). The letter is partly written in ghetto-speak, perhaps because eighteen-year-old Dominique thought he was being cool but also perhaps for the sake of rendering it difficult for any authority intercepting the letter to make sense of it. It begins playfully: “What's up damn fool?” The rest of the letter is the “story” (whether accurate, invented, or somewhere in between, I cannot verify) of what Dominique and his friends were doing the night of the murder, mostly looking for girls and getting into arguments with other boys. The letter ends casually with an expression of Dominique's unconcern as to whether Porter and the others will go along with this or not: “I don't care if a nigga with me or not ‘I forever be a trigga happy nigga.’” To me, this looks like a pose of unconcern and bravado, masking anxiety.
The last words, a quotation from a then popular rap song, “Trigga Happy Nigga,” by a Houston group, the Geto Boys, were placed in double quotation marks by Dominique—a plain signal from the detail-oriented author of the letter that he is quoting someone else's words. Read aloud in court by the prosecutor, however, these words signed Dominique's death warrant. The members of the jury, needless to say, were not informed that what they were hearing was a literary quotation, designated as such. By his own words, Dominique had convinced the jury of the murderous danger that society would be “forever” subjected to, if he were allowed to live.
Normally in a court of law, a letter is read aloud after its recipient has testified that he received the letter and identified from whom it came. But the presence of Mark Porter on the witness stand might have pushed the case into unpredictable byways. He almost surely knew things that the prosecutor did not wish the jury to hear, things that might have bearing on Dominique's possible innocence (such as that all the codefendants knew one another, one of many facts kept from the jury). The prosecutors found a simpler course for introducing Dominique's letter: they asked his mother to identify his handwriting, which she did. On July 9, 1993, a Harris County jury found Dominique guilty of capital murder. On July 14, following the punishment hearing, the court sentenced Dominique to death.
Though the forces of law in Harris County are devoted to executing Death Row inmates with as much dispatch as possible, their eagerness is slowed somewhat by the venerable practice of appellate review, enshrined in the Texas state constitution and to which they owe at least formal loyalty. Over the years to come, Dominique would spend as much time as he could learning the intricacies of the law and of the legal processes by which he had been convicted and sentenced. Needless to say, his interest was hardly academic or disinterested. He needed to learn “the game,” as he called it, the rules of which he had barely comprehended before and during his trial. For a long time he figured that there must be a legal key that would fit his case, that could unlock his cell and send him back to freedom.
He was held during these years in Death Row cells in two different prisons, at Huntsville, then from mid-1999 at Livingston (where he was held—as were all Death Row prisoners—in solitary confinement); and occasionally and for relatively short stays he was brought to the Houston jail. He had plenty of time for legal study. He met occasionally with one lawyer or another who was willing, usually for a brief period of time, to take up his case pro bono, that is, without compensation. On September 11, 1996, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) affirmed Dominique's conviction and sentence on his direct appeal. On November 13, it denied Dominique's petition for a rehearing. On April 28, 1997, the United States Supreme Court denied his petition for a writ of certiorari, that is, an order to call up and review the decision of the lower court. That August 29, Dominique filed an application in the state trial court for a writ of habeas corpus, which is an order to produce the prisoner in court for the purpose of investigating the lawfulness of his imprisonment. Its purpose, as used in the appeals process, is to uncover ineffective assistance of trial attorneys, misconduct by prosecutors or police, and previously unavailable evidence of innocence. Nearly three years later—on May 31, 2000—the CCA at last denied Dominique's application.
That these years were hard on Dominique is almost too obvious to say. He began his long imprisonment as little more than a boy, a street kid whose understanding of the world and its ways was severely limited both by his youth and his peculiar experiences. Over and over, he would say to anyone who would listen that he was innocent of the charge they convicted him of. For this reason he had rejected the offer prior to his trial of a thirty-year sentence if he would confess to the murder. But he also stated firmly that he would not become “a snitch.” The impression he left was that he knew the identity of the shooter but would not identify him. He would speak darkly of those who had turned against him to save their own skins, but even this accusation was broached without his naming identifiable actors. Again and again, he reminded his attorneys that witnesses to the robbery spree that preceded the Lastrapes murder had spoken of three boys, not four, and he pressed the attorneys to locate the relevant videotapes made by the stores the robbers had passed through or near, including the videotape from the convenience store in front of which the murder had occurred. These, he claimed repeatedly, would establish his innocence.
He did admit being part of a gang of robbers on October 17, when the victim related to the police that one of the robbers apologized for what they were doing and thanked the victim. “What kind of robber tells a victim I'm sorry and thank you? One who didn't want to see any harm come to them. Someone like old friendly-ass me.”
Through the worst of these years, Dominique kept his sense of humor, though he often lost his temper. As year followed year without the hint of a reprieve, he snapped occasionally, sometimes more than occasionally, at friend and foe alike and certainly at his lawyers. For several years, he signed himself “Stumpa,” his street moniker and the name under which he had performed aggressive, foul-mouthed rap songs (for which he had, just prior to his arrest, been offered a recording contract). For a while he tried to be a Muslim and wrote his name as “Dominique Green-El.” But these glints of black-power rage tended to alternate with his natural optimism, his playfulness, and his capacity for enjoying the world, even the bit of it he could experience from his prison cell.
Through these years, he had a true friend on the outside, Jessica Tanksley, the delicately beautiful girl he had fallen for two years before he lost his freedom—and who is listed in court documents (with her assent) as Dominique's “common-law wife.” Their correspondence is dramatic and humane; and though only Dominique's letters survive in quantity, we can hear Jessica's voice, as Dominique quotes occasionally from her letters. Aint nobody ever told me things like you have. Like ‘you know where home is.’ Or tell me they love me and really mean it like you do. I aint never had anyone love me like you do…. And everytime you write me I continue to feel more needed and wanted. So when I come home to you, I want to be ready for you. And now I got all the time to prepare.”
There are letters so intimate that to quote from them here would be a violation of privacy, but a paragraph from one of the less steamy ones will give you an idea: “Have you ever had a dream where me and you are together and I am kissing you, or you are kissing me? We slowly touch each other and hold each other. As I gently caress your skin that's so delicate and slowly move myself up to your breasts and start to nibble and kiss them and you. Then I feel you rub your fragile hands up my back and onto my face. I feel your hands softly rubbing up against my face. So I go down to embrace your lips and taste your breath and lick your tongue. But I wake up to find my own hand rubbing against my face. A pillow as the face I soon was to embrace. A sheet as the hand rubbing down my back. And a radio is the voice of you I imagined to hear.”
To Jessica Dominique speaks openly of his worst fears: “I have visioned and thought about my own death over and over. And I know that when or if they take me to deathwatch to put me to sleep. Once my eyes close they will never open again. And I will only have three minutes to watch my life pass before my eyes. Watching all those moments I labeled precious, remembering all the things that brought me happiness, and also watching all my mistakes. Three minutes to recap and review my life.
“And not one time have I ever cried. I cried inside because the pain of being here is starting to kill me. But I do know that if I do have to go to deathwatch I wont show the pain then either no matter how bad it hurts.
“Baby, the shit fucks with me everytime I think about it. But I know that no matter what I wont hurt myself by becoming a snitch like these folks want me to be. Because then everything I have done or did would be a complete lie. That's why I cant say nothing and wont ever say nothing.”
But Jessica is growing up in ways almost unimaginable to Dominique. In the summer of 1994 she leaves Houston to attend Xavier University in New Orleans. Her visits to Dominique, which had never been frequent because of the maddening difficulties that the inaccessibility of prisons places in the way of poor Texans, become even fewer. Soon she is writing about her courses and her reading in ways that leave Dominique in the dust. He is jealous and even confesses dislike of her then favorite writer, the long dead W. E. B. Du Bois, because she likes him too much (“—and I don't take second place for no one!”).
In August 1999, however, this extraordinary correspondence comes to an end. Jessica, her bachelor's degree in hand, is heading to Havana to study medicine at the Latin American School of Medicine, having been granted a full scholarship by the Cuban Ministry of Public Health. Dominique, knowing that communication between a Death Row prisoner and a Havana resident will be almost impossible (and would subject Jessica to unwonted attention from the U.S. State Department), releases her from all obligations to him: “I wish you knew how hard this is for me, but for some small reason I think you do. Just like I think you knew I would eventually end up writing this letter.” Just before this, he had written a harsh letter. But, “no matter how much I tried to make it seem like me, that last letter to you was someone I'm not. I know, and you know. I am a pussycat at heart. I ain't no hardcore muthafucka—although I wish I was. Thankfully who I am truly is a secret. A secret that can only exist between me and you. If anyone else knew, my bad boy image could end up being destroyed. Who knows I could cause a scandal and make these niggas here want to impeach me, like I was the president of some gotdamn body.” (Earlier that year, President Bill Clinton had been acquitted of the impeachment charges against him.)
The self-deprecating humor cannot entirely obscure the immense generosity of this act of farewell. With Jessica gone from his life and his imprisonment entering its seventh year, Dominique, refusing to sink into despair, turns more than ever to his fellow prisoners and to the legal thicket of his case.
∗ The abysmally sloppy press release from the Office of Attorney General lists the date as January 5, 1992—before the murder occurred. The legal record contains not a few such errors.