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David R. Dow  

David R. Dow has defended over 100 death row inmates in 20 years. He is the Cullen Professor at the University of Houston Law Center and the Rorschach Visiting Professor of History at Rice University.

He teaches and writes in the areas of contract law, constitutional law and theory, and death penalty law.

At the UH Law Center, Dow runs a death penalty clinic in which law students assist in the representation of inmates facing execution.

Over the past twenty years, Dow and his team have represented more than one hundred death row inmates at every stage of their state and federal appeals.

He is also the founder and director of Texas’s oldest innocence project, the Texas Innocence Network, an organization that uses UH law students to investigate claims of actual innocence brought by Texas prisoners.

The author of six books and scores of scholarly articles, Dow's work also regularly appears in such popular publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Houston Chronicle, and The Daily Beast and his TED talk on the death penalty has been viewed more than half a million times.

Dow’s critically acclaimed memoir, The Autobiography of an Execution, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award and the winner of the 2010 Barnes & Noble Discover Award for nonfiction.

His most recent book, Things I’ve Learned From Dying, will be published in January 2014.

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