Many readers might be surprised by A SAINT ON DEATH ROW: How a Forgotten Child Became a Man and Changed a World, since they were expecting your next book to be the sixth installment of your hugely popular series, The Hinges of History™. Who was Dominique Green? What about him and his story compelled you to so significantly alter the long-planned course of your work?

Dominique Green was a young man who spent twelve years on Texas Death Row before being executed. I met him only a year before his death—in Polunsky Unit, Livingston, the antipathetic Death Row facility that stands about an hour outside Houston—but he so impressed me as a remarkable human being that I could not get him out of my thoughts. My first encounter and my subsequent experience of knowing him made such an impact on me that I felt I had no choice but to write a book about him.

How did you come to befriend Dominique? After all, most historians don't find themselves visiting death row very often.

A friend of mine, Sheila Murphy, a retired judge from Chicago, was helping with Dominique's legal appeals. She knew I was going to be in Houston just before Christmas 2003 and she urged me to visit Dominque while I was there.

Did you have an opinion about death row and the death penalty before you visited Dominique? Were your feelings changed by the visit?

I have to admit that I was once in favor of the death penalty. I professed the usual unconsidered, knee-jerk opinion. The truth was I had never thought deeply about it or studied the issues surrounding it. By the time I visited Dominique, I had changed my opinion. This was because I had read too many stories about the convictions of innocent people. And I suppose more living and the wisdom that descends with age had given me a better appreciation of how many mistakes are made even by well-meaning folk. And when you add politics to any program—and the death penalty issue is fraught with politics—you might as well be lighting a fire. You are certainly unlikely to get the kind of calm deliberation that makes for better, gentler human actions and institutions. But my coming to know Dominique, who was basically railroaded into a capital conviction, left me with no doubt that the U.S. reliance on the death penalty is unjust and immoral.

In A SAINT ON DEATH ROW you describe the inner peace and innate sense of goodness that radiated from Dominique. What do you think others can learn from Dominique? How did he affect the limited number of people that he came into contact with on death row? How did he affect you?

Why do some people make peace and beauty, while others make war, contentiousness, and ugliness? God only knows—and I mean that literally. The only proposition I know of that makes sense of our human tendencies to both good and evil is that some of us respond to God's grace while others turn away. It's not important whether a person realizes that what he's responding to is God; what's important is that he or she respond to the good that is held out to them—principally by other human beings—and that they reject the whispered invitation to evil, to cruelty and destruction, an invitation we all hear at different times in our lives. Dominique responded to the good and became a saint on Death Row, a person whose astonishing example helped other prisoners respond to the good, as well. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to share with my readers his remarkable example. Though the book ends in his death, it does not end in despair. It shows a way to hope for us all, even for those who have been despised and rejected by others.

You've said that one of the first questions people ask you when they hear Dominique's story is "did he do it?" Why, in your opinion, is that exactly the wrong question and what is the "right" one?

Which of us would want to be judged entirely by our worst actions? All of us need a certain number of free passes. In our society a good lawyer is one of those free passes. Recently, many financiers have collaborated in destroying the fortunes of millions of others. Which of those financiers will spend long years in prison to make up for the destruction they have caused in the lives of so many? Very few, perhaps none. Why is this? Because they will all have good lawyers. Why are all the people on Death Row from poor (and often from minority) backgrounds? Because they had no money to pay for lawyers and so could not "lawyer" their way out of their difficulties. Does anyone really believe that there are no millionaires on Death Row because no millionaire has ever committed a capital crime?

Justice in our country is a set-up for people with the money to pay lawyers. In certain parts of the country, such as Texas, the "justice" system is so stacked against the poor that they have no way of getting justice. The right question to ask about a convict is not "Did he do it?" but "Did he receive a fair trial?" and "Were his appeals handled fairly?"

At several points in Dominique's short troubled life, interventions both small and large might have made the difference between the streets and a home, selling drugs vs. school, an abusive mother vs. a loving home, and, finally life vs. death. But none of these interventions happened until it was far too late. Why? What would you like to see done differently today and going forward for kids like Dominique?

As a society we have decided that we would rather not intervene positively in the lives of troubled children; we prefer to wait till the troubled child is old enough to be incarcerated. There was a place near Jerusalem where the ancient Canaanites used to offer their living children on a lighted pyre to evil gods; in later discourse the place is called Gehenna and it became a synonym for Hell. But offering children to evil gods is not just something that happened long ago: we are still offering our children to evil gods. We now have more people in prison as a percentage of population than any other country in the world. If Americans wish to reverse this trend, we must develop programs of effective intervention in the lives of troubled children and their troubled families. Are we so unimaginative that we cannot do this? Of course not. But we do not give the lives of children, especially poor children and minority children, the value they ought to have. My children are not just the ones who live with me in my house; in a sense, all children are my children. How can an adult love a child, his or her own child, and then refuse to consider the plight of other children?

Some readers might make the argument that criminals should be punished and that if one of your own family members were murdered that you would probably want the death penalty imposed, too. Essentially they are talking about the problem of anger and vengeance. What would you say to them?

The most likely estimate is that one of every eight persons condemned to execution is innocent. The amount of mistakes made by our criminal justice system—especially, but not only, in the Southern states—is staggering. A new project called the Innocence Project is gradually freeing hundreds and hundreds of wrongfully convicted prisoners throughout the country by effective use of DNA evidence. Some of these innocents have already served prison terms of twenty years and more. Eye-witness accounts are notorious for their erroneousness. So, let's say a friend or family member has been murdered. Is that good enough reason for putting someone to death, someone who may later be found to have been innocent? Put the supposed murderer in prison for life, so that if he is later found to have been innocent, his eventual exoneration will be more than just a form of irony. Beyond the issue of justice there is also the issue of effective use of taxpayers' money. Because, even in a state like Texas, which has scant regard for the lives of the poor and minorities, the use of the death penalty forces the state to spend tens of millions of dollars each year beyond the costs of incarceration—just in answering legal appeals by those who have been sentenced to die. The only way Texas or any other state could further curtail such appeals would be by tearing up the Constitution of the United States of America.

Did Dominique know there was a possibility that you or someone else might write a book about him someday? If he could speak to your readers now, what do you think he would say?

Dominique told Sheila Murphy, who became his best friend and substitute mother, that he hoped I would write such a book. With that in mind, he gave Sheila all his writings before he died. It is my hope that in "A Saint on Death Row" dear Dominique Green will speak to many readers in his own smiling, hopeful, playful words, words that can be of comfort to everyone.

Click here to read a Q&A about Mysteries of the Middle Ages

Click here to read the previous Q&A where Cahill intervivews himself, posing the most difficult questions hurled at him during his book tours.