Execution’s Doorstep: True Stories of the Innocent and Near Damned

by Leslie Lytle

Execution's Doorstep tells the true stories of five lives trapped in a living sentenced to die for a crime they didn't commit. Since capital punishment was reinstated in the mid-1970s, over 120 individuals have been proven wholly innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced to death. But this statistic, as horrifying as it is, does not begin to tell the whole story. Leslie Lytle confronts the human suffering behind these miscarriages of justice in her effort to reveal how and why they occurred. Drawing on extensive interviews and archival research, Lytle guides the reader through the fateful crimes, the arrests, the trials, the incarcerations, the struggles to prove innocence, and the difficult readjustments to life in the free world. Execution's Doorstep is more than a gripping human-interest story. As Lytle shows, the criminal justice and capital punishment systems that we have established to protect us are fallible and subject to the same incompetencies, petty corruptions,and politicizations to which all human institutions are prone. As we relive these heart-rending stories of innocents damned, this book poses a simple can we trust the life and death of any man to a system run by men?

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published November 28, 2008

Reviews

[Snotchocheez · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one really likes to be proselytized to, particularly not on Goodreads, a place where book lovers congregate to discuss their favorite books, not debate political views. {ok, I guess there are some political zealots that use GR as their pulpit; I avoid them like the plague.} I apologize in advance for my blather (or if my views run counter to yours. My recent read of Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy, a remarkable look at jaw-dropping injustices in the US legal system, re-awakened my long and deep-seated antipathy for my country's love affair with capital punishment. Over 60% of our United States still, even when it's been clearly shown to not be an effective crime deterrent, execute their worst offenders. Even when some of those executed were found not have done the things they were executed for. That, to me, is absolutely unconscionable. Not to beleaguer the point, but I feel that if even one innocent person has been executed (and, according to a study by Stanford Law, there's been at least 30 unjustly executed persons in the US since 1900), then we as a society are just as guilty of systemized murder as the real murderers are.

Fresh on my mind were two things this last week: 1. An article on Huffington Post about the last week of a man on Oklahoma's Death Row, scheduled to be executed this Thursday, Jan 29th, who adamantly maintains his innocence: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6531184 ; and 2: This bizarre, random shopping trip I made last Thursday (which is responsible for my finding and reading this book):

I often, with my daughter in tow, tour the 'dented can' stores for good buys. There are several around here in this part of Marshall County, Alabama. One of them was a recent find, somewhat off the beaten path near my house. I'd gone about half a dozen times in the past, chatting up the proprietor behind the counter, a man (perhaps) in his late 50s. As he bagged my groceries and made small talk about how big my daughter was getting and a rain storm/cold front slated to come through the area, my attention was drawn (as it had in prior visits to the store) to a homemade poster with several photos pasted on construction paper, with a heading "NORTHWESTERN LAW 2000' Recognizing his face in some of the photos, I asked if he or his family graduated from there. He said no, then walked over to the display. "Recognize anyone in these pictures?" he asked. "Well I see you and your wife", I said. "This lady we're standing with is Susan Sarandon" "And there's Tim Robbins!" I say. "And this one is Sister Helen Prejean" "Oh" I say, "That's who Susan Sarandon played in "Dead Man Walking", right?" "Yep, that's the one." "But, why were you with them?" "I guess you can say I'm one of those dead men walking, alive to tell the tale" Long story short: he briefly tells me of his five years incarcerated (two in Marshall County Jail..a mere 400 feet from where I paid my car license fees on Wednesday...and three years on Death Row 6 hours away in Holman Prison near Mobile) for being erroneously convicted for killing his wife. I was just floored. Unfortunately my daughter was getting surly, so I couldn't stay to talk to the proprietor to hear his story. I had just enough time to recommend Stevenson's Just Mercy ("Oh yeah, I've met him!", he says evidently while traveling with an "Abolish The Death Penalty" tour with a group of exonerated former Death Row denizens and anti-Capital Punishment advocates.) He then recommends to me Ms. Lytle's Execution's Doorstep "My story's in there. We gave a copy to the library if you want to read it. It might still be there".

So yeah, it was at our library, and yeah, I (with goosebumps) read about my neighbor's plight.)

______________________


So, yeah, the book: Leslie Lytle (another Anti-Capital Punishment advocate) assembles (in her 2008 book) five accounts of men on death row who were exonerated by way of exculplatory (non-DNA) evidence. Spanning twenty years, and representing five different states (New Mexico, Florida, Louisiana, Illinois, and Alabama) these five men, from varying socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities (3 White, 1 Hispanic, 1 Black), and education levels (3 of them with college degrees, all high school graduates), all convicted of murder with what could only be deemed insanely convoluted evidence. A couple of them were just a few days from being executed. The common thread among all of them was the zeal that law enforcement (from the police departments and investigators all the way up to the District Attorneys and even judges) put forth in convicting them, even when, to an impartial observer, the charges seemed ridiculous. Especially the last two men featured in the book: a man in Chicago convicted of 7 counts of murder (including the deaths of his wife and young daughter) for setting fire to their apartment building, and the last, my neighbor, a well-respected church deacon, convicted of killing his wife, in a case straight out of Turow's Presumed Innocent (literally, complete with framing someone with murder with planted semen). His case the prosecution put together against him made zero sense, yet the lengths they went to put the guy away were laughably transparent and weak, like quashing--or conveniently losing--key exculpatory evidence, or not allowing a change a venue (where, here in Marshall County, literally everyone knows everyone, or knows someone who knows someone who knows everyone.) (Worst, in 1997, in one of his retrials, two female jurors, who in jury selection interviews strongly believed that adultery {the worst offense my neighbor was guilty of} was punishable by death...because it says so in the Bible. And they were allowed to remain on the jury panel of twelve to decide this guy's fate. Really.)

Each of these guys' stories that Ms. Lytle has compiled is absolutely compelling, although the presentation is a little awkward at times. It was really disappointing to see a book on such a compelling topic so badly edited: typos, misspellings, grammatical errors abound (which give the work an amateurish DIY feel that does the five men--and Ms Lytle--a disservice).

Given that this, a 2008 book, has only been reviewed 7 times on Goodreads, I'm presuming it's not readily available unless you hit up a law library or something. That's unfortunate, as there's plenty here to give pause to even the staunchest of capital punishment supporters. Maybe someday we as a society might actually learn something from accounts of misjustice like these.

(Thank you so much, R.P., for sharing your story with me. I hope you don't mind I shared a small part of it with my GR friends).

[Meg Clayton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Execution's Doorstep examines the truly compelling stories of five men condemned to death for crimes they did not commit. These heartbreaking narratives - delivered in extensively researched detail and beautiful prose - are the ones with the happiest endings, the ones in which the falsely accused are eventually exonerated and released, leaving the destroyed lives and the lost years and "Why me, God?" As Madison Hobley - now a stay-at-home dad with two sons - put it after spending years of his life on death row, "I'm so grateful that the truth set me free, but I don't have any trust. If you can't trust a police officer, if you can't trust a state attorney, if you can't trust a judge, who can you trust?"[return][return]Lytle's reference in her conclusion to a Stanford Law Review-cited study suggesting that from 1900-1987 this country executed at least twenty-three people who were likely innocent drives the point of these stories of miscarriage of justice home, leaving this reader, at least, imagining myself in these men's shoes.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lytle's research into the true stories of men exonerated after spending time on death row is important and should be required reading for everyone involved in the criminal justice system.

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Detailed chronological accounts of individual's imprisoned on death row exoneration.