A Saint on Death Row, Page 2

  For a time, Dominique crashed with friends, then spent some weeks in the open with a homeless man, who taught him the ins and outs of sleeping under the highway or in abandoned cars. Finally, Dominique rented a storage shed as a place to live. He was finished trying to abide Stephanie. Though he had left home on a number of occasions in the past, this time he had no intention of returning. He was also finished with school. After the rape at St. Mary's, he had attended a public elementary school, then two different middle schools, followed by three different high schools. Though he was smart and intellectually curious, the goal of education, as it appears to normal children, could have no appeal for him.

  He hoped to avoid additional stints in juvenile detention, where he had been sexually abused by staff, especially on visitors’ days when no one ever showed up to see him. While other children were receiving visits from family members, Dominique was lying on his bed in a pool of his own blood, which leaked from his torn anus. Pedophiles, always drawn to jobs that entail unsupervised work with children, are also keenly aware of which children lack adult protection. (A series of reports in the Dallas Morning News, beginning in February 2007 and picked up by newspapers such as the New York Times, has brought to light that the sexual abuse of minors has long been pervasive in Texas's institutions for juvenile correction.)

  In his late twenties, Dominique would look back on his personal experience of sexual abuse in a poem entitled “What does hate create?”:

  I watch him

  cry out

  stretched out

  turned inside out

  and nobody does anything

  no one utters a peep

  but everyone knows what happened

  and feels the tears that pour down his face

  understands the pain that dyed his sheets with blood

  from hungry erections injecting him with hate.

  Next to this poem, he would one day draw a surrealistic picture of the boy these rapes had made of him, a tense, tearful child out of whose eyes grow thorny stems that end in fantastic flowers—a multivalent image that incarnates the tension between the child's private aspirations and the pain of his reality.

  Just sixteen, Dominique knew his fate was now entirely in his own hands. But he also meant to do whatever he could to protect his brothers, an obligation he took with high seriousness.

  Both Marlon and Hollingsworth remain full of memories of Dominique's protective role in their early lives. Hollings worth, eleven years younger than Dominique, remembers him as “a loving, honest, true friend, a mentor, a leader,” who took him to clothing stores and toy stores and to the amusement park to ride the go-carts and the little trains. He played basketball and football with Hollingsworth and his friends and was always “very gentle.” Marlon recalls being afraid of the dark and Dominique descending from the upper bunk bed to lie next to him till he'd fallen asleep. “He was almost like my second dad. He did a lot of things that a father should do and my mom couldn't do.” Dominique tried to teach Marlon how to withstand Stephanie, how not to give in to her in his mind. “About the time that Mom started getting physical, he was like a human shield almost,” Marlon remembers. “He deflected a lot of stuff that was directed towards us from my mom [and from] a couple of my teachers. He served as a buffer. She told us that she really didn't want us, that she wished she had never had us. After that, it was just him and me against the world.” Emmitt himself admitted in an interview in 2003 that Dominique cared more for his brothers than did he and Stephanie.

  How would Dominique at sixteen continue to protect these brothers, at the mercy of mad Stephanie and inconstant Emmitt? Part of the solution would lie in earning sufficient money. He had already had some experience selling drugs; now it became his livelihood. “I chose the drug trade,” Dominique would write later, “because I didn't have the nerve to be a burglar, the heart to be a jacker, the cunning to be a thief, the will to be a pimp, or the hate to be a hired killer. I was just a kid trying to find a way for me and my siblings.”

  Given the household he came from, he was hardly unfamiliar with drugs. He had sold them from the age of eight, once dealers recognized that cute little Dominique could serve as the perfect pusher. When he was nine, his mother began taking half his drug money from him, as if he were working for her. More than once, he had even sold drugs to each of his parents. He had gotten high on pot at thirteen—to find out what the experience was like—but the idea of taking drugs regularly held no allure for him. It was a business, the only one he knew.

  He had begun somewhat inauspiciously by selling white candle wax, which he refashioned to resemble rocks of crack cocaine, but soon he was embedded in the brisk trade that fed the crack epidemic. “Dominique,” says Marlon, looking back, “wasn't selling drugs so he could go out and buy flashy cars or anything like that. He just wanted the money so we could live.”

  But if there is no honor among thieves, among drug dealers there is only shame and violation. Even Dominique, motivated by love of his brothers, could not escape the coarsening effects of such employment. And with the epic disappointments of his family life and the natural aggression that the advent of puberty can work on even the mildest of boys, the face that Dominique began to show the world was one of brutality and rage, a rage that would not abate for many years. For all that, his rage was eloquent, coherent, and full of grown-up resolve: “I promised myself that I would never sell myself short for anyone ever again. I stopped caring about people because those that I did care about did not care about me.”

  Some, such as his brothers, however, continued to receive the considerate gentleness that had previously distinguished Dominique in all his dealings. Another recipient of Dominique's positive attention was Jessica Tanksley, a captivatingly beautiful neighborhood girl, two years his junior, whom he would soon begin to court with extraordinary deference and ceremony. She would be duly impressed. But Dominique also impressed his juvenile probation officer, Sylvia Gonzales, who remembers him as “always well behaved” and extremely likable. “There are certain kids that you never forget,” Sylvia would remark many years later. “They just get to you—to your heart.”

  At sixteen, Dominique's rather realistic assessment of his own strategy was that eventually his drug distribution business would land him in prison. He hoped only to remain free as long as his brothers needed him. Then, he reasoned, after he finished serving his time, they would be old enough to take care of him when he returned to rebuild his life. As his bad luck would have it, however, he was to remain free only till he was eighteen.

  2

  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.