Guarding Death's Door

(4 of 10)

But even back then, Earle felt more hesitant about the death penalty than he let on. He had prosecuted only two death cases, and they had taken a lot out of him. Physically, capital cases require weeks if not months of work. More important, Earle found that his get-tough bravado afforded only weak protection against the emotional turbulence of a capital case. Working every day to ensure someone's death--even if he deserves it--can test one's humanity.

"At first, I thought justice was vengeance," he says, settling back into the chair in his second-floor office, which is not far from the pink-granite capitol. "D.A.s feel they have to give voice to the anguish that victims feel. And I tell you, that's a righteous anger. You look at these guys"--the killers, he means--"and some of them are monsters, just awful." Many prosecutors don't concern themselves with why they become awful, but Earle has a theory: "People learn to act through what I call the ethics infrastructure, that network of mommas and daddies and aunts and uncles and teachers and preachers"--he continues the list for some time--"who all teach us how to act. And that infrastructure has atrophied. When I was growing up"--Earle is 61 and was raised outside Fort Worth--"my mother had seven sisters and a brother. My dad had six siblings. So I had all these aunts and uncles plus my mother and father, and that structure is powerful. People don't have that now. And nobody is taking care of the children.

"So it's almost as if most of the people we send to death row, it's like we can say, 'Look what we made you do.' Most of them--if they had someone who had intervened in their life at an appropriate point, this would not have happened. And that's sad to realize. That doesn't necessarily make you squeamish about using the death penalty, but it does make you more discerning about it."

Earle has always been hard to pin down politically and culturally. He's not an unreconstructed liberal--and there are plenty of those in Austin--nor a conservative Democrat. He's an oddity. He grew up on a cattle ranch yet never eats beef. (Though when teased about that at a restaurant recently, Earle ordered the venison to show he would eat red meat.) He drives the beat-up pickup required for a Texas politician, but it's a Nissan. He has the scraggly hands of someone who broke several fingers playing football as a young man, but he has a deep fondness for academics. Three years ago, he and his wife Twila taught a University of Texas (UT) course earnestly titled "Re-Weaving the Fabric of Community."

His weak spot for intellectuals was evident in 1978, when he got his first death case. A young police officer, Ralph Ablanedo, had stopped a red Mustang for a traffic violation on a spring night. Prosecutors said the passenger, possibly fearing that the cop would find the drugs he was carrying, reached for his AK-47. Officer Ablanedo was shot several times (he was rushed to the hospital but died in surgery). A frantic chase ensued. The gunman, David Powell, fired at other officers but eventually surrendered to police.