About

The trial lawyer

Patrick Metze grew up in Levelland, on the South Plains west of Lubbock. He took his B.A. from Texas Tech University in 1970 and his J.D. from the University of Houston in 1973, and he was admitted to the Texas bar in April 1974. He went home to Levelland to practice, and for three decades he defended people accused of crimes, many of whom could not pay him. He built the practice around them, which meant earning less than lawyers who didn’t. Public service was the work; private practice was the structure.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals appointed him to represent two men on death row in their state habeas proceedings. He was one of fourteen lawyers qualified to serve as first chair in a capital murder trial anywhere in the forty-five counties of the Ninth Administrative Judicial Region. Published opinions from 1981 to 2013 name him or his firm as counsel, from a capital murder appeal to a capital murder trial.

His community was the West Texas defense bar. He served as president of the Lubbock Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, and he sat on the board of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association from 2008 to 2014. When he began teaching he brought that bar with him. His 2010 column names the nine local defense lawyers who mentored his students that year: Chuck Lanehart, Danny Hurley, Jack Stoffregen, Dwight McDonald, Steve Hamilton, Mark Snodgrass, Robin Matthews, Charles Chambers, and Laurie Key.

The teacher

In the fall of 2007 he went back to Texas Tech, the school he told The New Yorker he had revered since he was twelve, to teach in its law school’s criminal clinic as a visiting professor. In May 2008 he gave up his private practice to join the faculty full time as director of the Criminal Defense Clinics, and in 2012 he was promoted to Professor of Law, with tenure. He created the Capital Punishment Clinic, which placed his students with the Regional Public Defender for Capital Cases. In 2010, under his leadership, the law school was selected to house the new Caprock Regional Public Defender Office, which defends poor clients in rural counties across the region. In 2016 he started the school’s Innocence Clinic with the Innocence Project of Texas.

The work was not abstract. A student in his clinic stood up in court, on the record, for a real client whose freedom was on the line. In the first two months of his first semester, his students handled fifty cases. In his second year they handled 169 cases for 114 clients. By the clinic’s own count, every semester added at least 1,600 hours of free representation for people who could not afford a lawyer. Nearly every column he wrote over eighteen years opens the same way, with his students “busy representing real people in real cases in real time,” and each one names every student in the clinic. In his very first column he borrowed a student’s version of the idea. LaShonda Taylor had called it “real people, real cases, real life, real lawyering,” and he told his readers the students were looking forward to more of it.

In 2013 the clinical program he directed won Texas Tech’s Teaching Academy award for departmental excellence in teaching, with a $25,000 prize. The money went, as he wrote that spring, to bring “lawyers, teachers, storytellers, and activists committed to the rights of the individual” to the school for the students. Over the following years that meant Katheryn Kase and Ken Murray of the Texas Defender Service, Sister Helen Prejean, David Dow, and former clinic students who came back to tell the next class how they had opened practices of their own.

The Capital Punishment Clinic put his students inside the Regional Public Defender for Capital Cases, whose region in 2012 covered 127 Texas counties. They sat in on the office’s biweekly staffings, where every case was discussed and every strategy tested, and they worked beside its trial teams. In the spring of 2012 he reported that his students had “experienced such exhilaration in saving the lives of three of their clients.”

The abolitionist

A thread runs through nearly everything Patrick has written. He believes the death penalty, as practiced in Texas and in the United States, is morally indefensible and constitutionally beyond repair. His scholarly position is not “reform the system.” It is “end it.” That position is grounded in his trial work, in his reading of the Eighth Amendment, and in his clear-eyed accounting of who the system has killed and who it has spared.

In Death and Texas: The Unevolved Model of Decency (90 Neb. L. Rev. 240, 2011) he counts 146 separate ways to commit a capital crime under Texas law, walks every subsection of Penal Code §19.03, documents that only one white person has ever been executed in Texas for killing a Black person, and concludes that Texas’s capital scheme has “unevoled” into the kind of arbitrary, capricious, racially disproportionate system the Supreme Court struck down in Furman v. Georgia in 1972. He calls not for narrower rules but for repeal. He ends the article on State v. Makwanyane, the 1995 South African case that abolished capital punishment after apartheid, and on Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s response to it: that abolition was a mark of “reverence for life.” Patrick believes Texas could do the same.

In Nothing Changes, It All Remains the Same: Modern Capital Punishment (Human Sacrifice by a Different Name) (47 Tex. Tech L. Rev. 179, 2014) he extends the argument: the modern capital ritual is ritualized human sacrifice with a different vocabulary. In Dissecting the ABA Texas Capital Punishment Assessment Report of 2013 (51 Akron L. Rev., 2017) he treats Texas’s “surprising improvement” with the wry, unconvinced precision of a man who has watched the legal establishment misread its own data for forty years. In Troy Davis, Lawrence Brewer, and Timothy McVeigh Should Still Be Alive (6 Charleston L. Rev. 333, 2011) he makes the moral case for abolition through three executed men, none of whom, he argues, the state should have killed.

He has not stopped making the argument because he believes the argument still needs to be made.

The man

He ended every year-end column the same way. He hoped his students’ commitment to the poor would last their whole careers, then added, “Or, at least it better.” He told them what he always told them, that practicing law “is about treating each client as a valuable individual, doing their very best for each client one at a time.” Most years, after naming the winner of the Lubbock defense bar’s Clifford Brown Award, he wrote, “I only wish I had awards for all the students, they all deserve one.”

He reported the law school’s chili cookoff every spring from 2011 to 2024. In 2014 his clinic won first place and “bragging rights that once again CDC had the ‘best real chili’ at the cookoff.” In 2015 it placed second and kept its bragging rights, he wrote, “even though the judges were wrong AGAIN.” He printed that line every spring for the next four years.

He kept his own feelings mostly out of print. They got through once, in the spring of 2010: “I’ll miss you all more than you will ever know. What a wonderful group!” At the burgers-and-beer sendoff he threw for his graduates every spring, he told The New Yorker, he always cried.

The sharpest words about the justice system in his columns belong to his students, because he chose to print them. In 2008 Aaron Holt, a self-described “semi-conservative DA-wanna be,” wrote, “I learned that criminal defendants are people too.” In 2009 Tifanee Baker wrote about “the indigent clients that are left in a cell for a month or longer before they get appointed an attorney.”

Long before he was a professor, young lawyers called him, emailed him, and walked into his office with questions, because they knew he was approachable and knew the law. One kind of question came up again and again, and he answered it with a question of his own: what does the statute say? They were asking him something they could look up themselves, and he never claimed to carry every law in his head. So, tongue in cheek and without any real heat, he started telling them, “Read the goddamned statute.” For obvious reasons, it soon became RGDS. He closed every year-end column from 2009 to 2025 with “Remember to RGDS,” and in the last one he named two graduating students, Kalee Gore and Aiya Almzayen, RGDS Champions.

How it ended