About

The teacher

From the fall of 2007 through the end of 2025, Patrick Metze served as Professor of Law and Director of the Criminal Defense Clinic at the Texas Tech University School of Law in Lubbock. Over the years his clinical responsibilities expanded: in addition to the Criminal Defense Clinic, he directed the Capital Punishment Clinic beginning in the spring of 2012, and he was at the founding of the Caprock Regional Public Defender Clinic in 2011, which represents indigent felony defendants across more than a dozen rural West Texas counties.

The work was not abstract. A student in his clinic stood up in court, on the record, with a real client whose freedom or life was on the line. In his first semester as director, the clinic handled 50 cases. By 2010 the dockets were running over 160 cases a year for more than 100 clients. By 2025 the caseloads had grown to roughly double what the clinic catalogue promised, and they had stayed at that level. Across eighteen years, his students logged thousands of hours of pro bono representation of poor people in criminal court each year. Many of those students became criminal defense lawyers themselves. He brought the most distinguished of them back to address the next class. He named every student in his annual reports, eighteen years on.

In 2013, the Provost’s office at Texas Tech awarded the three Criminal Defense Clinics the University Departmental Award for Teaching Excellence. The $25,000 prize that came with it Patrick directed, in his own words, “to fund the expenses of lawyers, teachers, storytellers, and activists committed to the rights of the individual to come to our school for the benefit of the students.” The fund brought Sister Helen Prejean, David Dow, Ken Murray, Dick Burr, and others to Lubbock to speak to the students about the work he had trained them to do.

The Capital Punishment Clinic, founded in 2012, placed his students alongside the Regional Public Defender for Capital Cases, the only statewide defender for death-eligible prosecutions in Texas, covering 127 counties. His students sat in on biweekly office staffings, attended trials, and in some years took part in the literal saving of clients’ lives. He once reported, in a single sentence that he then let stand, that a single semester of his clinic had seen “the lives of three of their clients” spared. That was Spring 2012.

The phrase he chose, early on, to describe what his clinic did was a phrase he heard from a student named LaShonda Taylor in his very first year: “Real people, real cases, real life, real lawyering.” He adopted it as his refrain.

The trial lawyer

Before he was a professor, Patrick spent decades practicing criminal defense law in Texas. The Tech faculty was, in his own words, a “new life of passing along the lessons I learned along my way.” Those lessons were earned the way they always are: in front of juries, in front of judges, in conference rooms with prosecutors, on appeal, in the moments when a person’s future depended on a single sentence in a single brief. His scholarship and his teaching are grounded in that, not in seminar rooms.

He took his B.A. from Texas Tech University in 1970 and his J.D. from the University of Houston in 1973. He was in active criminal practice for the next three decades, including representations in capital cases. He built his private practice around pro bono defense for poor clients, a deliberate choice that meant earning less than other criminal defense lawyers in his field. Public service was the work; private practice was the structure. The criminal defense bar in West Texas, which he names with characteristic specificity in nearly every annual report, was his community before it became his student pipeline. Chuck Lanehart, Danny Hurley, Dwight McDonald, Steve Hamilton, Trey McClendon, Robin Matthews, the Hazelwoods, Laurie Key. He has been honoring those names in print for nearly twenty years.

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

What the alumni-newsletter columns reveal about him, year by year for eighteen years, is the rest of the picture. He is loyal: the same colleagues are named in his annual gratitudes a decade after they have moved on. He is modest: he refused credit for the clinics, redirecting it to the students every time. He is dryly funny: he reported the law school’s annual chili cookoff results every year, with an opinion of the judges. He is private about his own feelings: in eighteen years of writing he let himself off the leash once, in Spring 2010, with a single sentence, “I’ll miss you all more than you will ever know. What a wonderful group!” That is the strongest first-person emotion in the archive, and he was carefully bounded after.

He is angry at the criminal justice system, but he routed the anger through his students’ words rather than his own. Tifanee Baker’s 2009 reflection on a system that “leaves indigent clients in a cell for a month or longer before they get appointed an attorney” appears in his column because he chose to print it. Aaron Holt, a “semi-conservative DA-wanna-be” who left the clinic having “learned that criminal defendants are people too,” appears for the same reason. The clinic’s political argument was the work the students did; he let the students say so.

He had private vocabulary he never explained. “RGDS.” “The Gold Card.” Eighteen years on, in his final 2025 column, he named two graduating students as “RGDS Champions,” still untranslated. He wrote for an audience that knew him, and he was content for the rest to look on.