'The Autobiography of an Execution' by David R. Dow

You support the death penalty -- almost two-thirds of the country did, in a 20096 Gallup Poll. You may consider it retributive justice or perhaps a deterrent. You do not find racial disparities or irregularities in its application overly troubling. You believe most attorneys and judges act dispassionately and in accord with the dictates of law and the Constitution.

Still, there is the Texas problem.

Of the 1,194 executions in this country since 1976, Texas alone has carried out 449. A state in which 7.8% of Americans reside accounts for 38% of our state-sanctioned killing, in other words. A report by the Criminal Justice Project of the NAACP pointed out last year that, of the cases singled out for the death penalty, 78% involved white victims. A 2009 survey, cited by the Death Penalty Information Center, showed that 88% of former and current presidents of the country's top academic criminological societies believe that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent to murder. There have been 139 death-row exonerations since 1973 based on evidence of innocence.

Ignore all that, and still the Texas situation begs an accounting.

David R. Dow is an attorney and law professor in Texas who has defended death-row clients since the late 1980s. He will not bore you with such statistics in his book "The Autobiography of an Execution." Instead, he will transfix you with what he has to say and raise a host of other questions.

"I know death-penalty lawyers who are at the movies when their clients get executed," Dow observes early in this memoir. "I know one who found out on Thursday that his client had been executed on Monday. He'd been scuba diving in Aruba. I understand that. It's possible to care without seeming to. It's also possible to care too much. You can think of yourself as the last person between your client and the lethal injection, or you can see your client as the person who put himself on the rail to that inevitability. One is healthier than the other."

At the center of his account is a death-row client whom Dow is unable to save, as telegraphed by the book's title. That he and his client ran out of time would be a more precise way to put it, as most of Dow's efforts only buy time as he and his co-workers at the nonprofit Texas Defender Service file appeals they hope will bring permanent respite from death row. This case, confounding but unexceptional in many respects, does have an aspect that made it particularly harrowing: The attorney became convinced of his client's innocence. (In an afterword, Dow says that of the 100-plus death-row inmates he has represented, seven, including the individual at the center of "The Autobiography of an Execution," appear to him to have been innocent.)