Bad Blood - Death Case Lawyer vs. Texas Court | The Marshall Project

Bad Blood | The Marshall Project

by Maurice Chammah



"On Wednesday, the judges of Texas’ highest criminal court told a defense attorney named David Dow he would not be able to practice in front of them for the next year. The Court of Criminal Appeals decided that Dow had filed a motion to stop the execution of his client, Miguel Angel Paredes, too late, and that since he’d done the same thing in a different case in 2010, he will now be suspended.

Neither the court nor Dow, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center and one of the best known death penalty defense attorneys in the country, will comment publicly. But this move is the latest evidence of an ongoing feud in Texas between lawyers who appeal on behalf of inmates facing executions, Dow chief among them, and the judges who rule on their claims.

On the surface, the fights have been about deadlines, but, as criminal justice blogger Scott Henson described Dow’s relationship with the judges back in 2009, “Basically these folks just don't like each other on a level that transcends any given issue.”

Miguel Paredes was executed last October for a triple murder of gang rivals, committed in 2000. The summer before the execution, he wrote a letter to Dow asking for help, and Dow volunteered — without being appointed to the case — to investigate Paredes’ claims. It took a while owing to Dow’s busy schedule, but he found that Paredes’ original lawyer had called no witnesses at the trial and that Paredes was allowed to waive an early appeal while on anti-psychotic medications.

Dow filed an appeal and a call for a stay seven days before the execution. The court said he should have filed it the day before. The court has explicitly said the deadline is seven days before an execution, but in practice attorneys know that they must have it in eight days before. It wasn’t the first time Dow had clashed with the court over deadlines.*****"

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