Killing Time: One Man's Race to Stop an Execution

by David R . Dow (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2011

  $4.03

  Shortlisted for The CWA Gold Dagger for Non Fiction David Dow is a leading death row attorney in Texas, where 99% of appeals are rejected.He knows his clients are guilty, but he defends them because he believes murder is wrong. Henry Quaker is a quiet man, charged with murdering his childhood sweetheart and their two children. All the evidence is against him: he's mentally unstable, his gun is missing, his son's blood was found in his car, and he'd taken out life insurance on his family immediately before their murder. But as Dow painstakingly pieces the case together, he gradually becomes convinced that Quaker - whose execution is just weeks away - is actually innocent. This is the real story of Death Row; of corrupt lawyers, judges who are hostile to the very idea of justice and executioners who rely on inmates for moral support.Killing Time is a modern classic; both a searing and haunting memoir, and a story that will have you holding your breath until the last page.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2010

  $3.40

  How does it feel to defend a serial killer? To tell a young man that he will be executed in twenty minutes' time? To explain to your five-year-old son that you're late because you couldn't help someone? To realise that a death row convict whose life you hold in your hands is actually innocent? David Dow is a leading death row attorney in Texas, a state where 99 per cent of execution appeals are rejected. He defends convicted murderers for the simple reason that he feels putting them to death is wrong. He knows his clients are vicious, violent monsters, but killing a murderer is homicide, and homicide, as David sees it, is morally insupportable. Yet this routine of resignation - to the fate of both his clients and his young family, whom he can feel slipping away from him by the day - is interrupted by the worst thing that could happen to him: the realization that a client is innocent. Not just undeserving of his imminent execution, like all his other clients, but actually innocent. In this gripping and hauntingly honest memoir, David confronts a bleak yet stirring scenario: to lose this fight, as he knows is nearly inevitable, will be to watch an innocent man be murdered. Written with searing immediacy, Killing Time is both a masterpiece of personal narrative, and a morally overwhelming exploration of justice, integrity, and humanity.