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Title details for A Saint on Death Row by Thomas Cahill - Available

A Saint on Death Row

The Story of Dominique Green

by Thomas Cahill
Thomas Cahill
Audiobook
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On October 26, 2004, Dominique Green, thirty, was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas. Arrested at the age of eighteen in the fatal shooting of a man during a robbery outside a Houston convenience store, Green may have taken part in the robbery but always insisted that he did not pull the trigger. The jury, which had no African Americans on it, sentenced him to death. Despite obvious errors in the legal procedures and the protests of the victim’s family, he spent the last twelve years of his life on Death Row.
When Thomas Cahill found himself in Texas in December 2003, he visited Dominique at the request of Judge Sheila Murphy, who was working on the appeal of the case. In Dominique, he encountered a level of goodness, peace, and enlightenment that few human beings ever attain. Cahill joined the fierce fight for Dominique’s life, even enlisting Dominique’s hero, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to make a historic visit to Dominique and to plead publicly for mercy. Cahill was so profoundly moved by Dominique’s extraordinary life that he was compelled to tell the tragic story of his unjust death at the hands of the state.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    March 10, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415963807
      • File size: 106929 KB
      • Duration: 03:42:46

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Author Thomas Cahill's tone is grave. How could it be anything else when he gives a personal account of meeting an unjustly prosecuted young man waiting for execution on death row? Cahill concisely, dispassionately reads the onslaught of disturbing facts about Dominique Green's abused childhood and flawed Texas trial. Cahill's then allows us the privilege of meeting the young man whose 12 years of imprisonment have made him "the person [he] always wanted to be." Away from the streets, Dominique is able to receive and give mentorship, create a sense of family he's never known, own his intellectual gifts, write powerfully, and publish the lyrical works of other prisoners. Despite support from all over the world, including his hero, Desmond Tutu, the terrible outcome will outrage listeners. S.W. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 26, 2009
      “His face has the dignity of a Benin bronze.... His countenance is suffused with an aura... goodness.” This is Cahill’s opening description of Dominique Green, whose life and death the bestselling author (How the Irish Saved Civilization
      ) recounts in a distinctly hagiographic tone. Green was a young African-American executed for murder in Texas in 2004, who Cahill and many others believe was innocent and convicted in a sham trial. Cahill’s “saint” Dominique suffered (among other travails, he was abused by a schizophrenic mother), sinned (he turned to drug dealing, but only, he said, to support his younger brothers) and redeemed himself in prison by educating himself and aiding his Death Row comrades, whose quoted testimony to Dominique’s qualities is more convincing than Cahill’s own praises. But Cahill makes Green more than saintly, a Christ-like figure (“like the peaceful Jesus of the gospels, Dominique was on the verge of... transfiguration”). Given the spiritual and literary license Cahill takes, one must read this less as a reasoned argument than an impassioned, very personal plea against racism, poverty and the death penalty.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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