Thomas Cahill

Years later the woman’s bereaved husband got a chance—through a serendipitous turn of events—to share the painful story with one of his lifelong heroes, Bono, over dinner in Washington D.C. According to my friend, Bono listened intently until the guy finished unpacking his still-raw feelings about the experience. After a brief moment of silence, the Irish rock star and humanitarian soberly responded, “Sometimes God uses people like me who are fucked up—and sometimes he uses people who get fucked.”

Bestselling historian Thomas Cahill’s new book, A Saint On Death Row, offers an additional case study of the second scenario Bono mentioned—the seemingly star-crossed lives that nevertheless have a redeeming purpose in this frequently cruel world. The saint in the book’s title is another Houston resident, Dominique Green, sentenced to death at 18 years old for a crime he likely did not commit. Dominique grew up in inner-city Houston, the eldest of three sons being raised—or, more precisely, raising themselves—in the home of an alcoholic mother who was both mentally ill and physically abusive. Once, after young Dominique—who’d just learned his ABCs—received a call from his mother’s pimp and failed to write out a message, she punished him by holding the palm of his tiny right hand over an open flame on their gas stove.

When Dominique was just six years old, two of his father’s supposed friends broke into their house to rape his mother and kill Dominique and his younger brother, Marlon, as retribution for a botched drug deal. Fortunately, they escaped harm. On another occasion, Dominique’s mother tried to shoot him, but failed only because his five-year-old brother had emptied the pistol just moments earlier. As if Dominique’s upbringing couldn’t be any more soul-destroying, a priest at St Mary’s—the Catholic school he attended in Houston—raped him. Later, as a teenager, Dominique would be raped again by male staff at the juvenile detention center where he was admitted after being arrested for possession of a small quantity of marijuana and an illegal weapon.

Cahill reveals the stomach-knotting circumstances of Dominique’s childhood years with great sensitivity, being careful not to exploit his subject, instead building a case for why so many unloved African-American youths grow calloused and vengeful, turning to crime as a means of expunging the hate and resentment calcified inside them. Their problems are, of course, only aggravated by the narrow range of employment options they have for surviving the brutal economic realities of America’s urban ghetto.

At age 18, Dominique was sentenced to death by a Harris County grand jury for the shooting death of Andrew Lastrapes, Jr., a Houston truck driver. That sentence seems impossible, on the face of it. Dominique’s prints didn’t match those on the murder weapon. He passed a polygraph test attesting to his innocence. He only signed a written confession after the police began threatening to arrest his mother if he didn’t comply.

Four young men were thought to have been party to the attempted robbery that resulted in Lastrapes’s shooting. The two blacks implicated, other than Dominique, were either protected by counsel or plea-bargained their way to more limited sentences. Patrick Haddix, the sole white participant, was never booked or charged. In fact, the court record merely cited him as a “citizen informant.” The court-appointed attorney assigned to Dominique had zero experience with capital cases and appeared to work hand-in-glove with the prosecution. In short, poor Dominique never had a chance.

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. It would’ve been too painful for readers, not to mention the author himself, since Cahill grew to be a dear friend of Dominique’s after visiting him on death row in December 2003. So this 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 most famous work, How The Irish Saved Civilization, describes how Irish monks and scribes meticulously preserved the West’s written legacy. It’s hard not to view A Saint On Death Row through a similar lens. Sure, the book is an indictment of the Texas “justice” system, but it’s also the illuminated memory of a man who blossomed like a flower, even while stripped of sunshine. A man who showed that forgiveness is more powerful than revenge. After one of Dominique’s heroes, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, paid him an auspicious visit—an against-the-odds meeting Cahill helped facilitate—Tutu addressed reporters thusly: “[The death penalty] is an obscenity that brutalizes. As a believer, [I find it] the ultimate giving up, because our faith is a faith of ever-new beginnings.”

Dominique Green was executed by lethal injection on Oct. 26, 2004. No man-made cage could keep his soul trapped from its final rest—a place where every tear is wiped away. But 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?