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

by David R. Dow

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Book cover for Killing Time

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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% 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.

  • ISBN10 0434020141
  • ISBN13 9780434020140
  • Publish Date 4 February 2010
  • Publish Status Out of Print
  • Out of Print 12 May 2021
  • Publish Country GB
  • Publisher Cornerstone
  • Imprint William Heinemann Ltd
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 288
  • Language English