Bush's insistence that no innocent person has been executed on his watch begs the question: How does he know? The claim is questionable for a number of reasons, particularly since Bush has endorsed efforts that actually increase the likelihood that an innocent person will be condemned. Bush campaigned for and, once elected, signed into law an act designed to limit appeals by death-row inmates and speed up the time between sentencing and execution from an average of nine years to seven or less. The law would probably have resulted in the wrongful execution of the seven men released from the state's death row, had it been in effect during the previous 12 years, since all seven served more than seven years on death row before their release.

Bush also vetoed legislation, unanimously approved by the Texas Legislature, that would have made modest improvements in the quality of attorneys provided to indigent defendants, despite the fact that the state has, by any objective measure, one of the worst systems of indigent criminal defense in the country (only three of the state's 254 counties have full-time public defender offices).

Although incompetent trial attorneys have been directly responsible for several high-profile cases that led to wrongful death sentences, the state of Texas leaves funding of criminal defense almost entirely to local governments. Of the $153 million in federal criminal justice grants the state has received since Bush took office, not one penny has gone to indigent defense. This has changed little since Gary Graham's arrest 19 years ago. His court-appointed trial attorney failed to even interview several witnesses to the murder who said they were certain that Graham was not the killer, and those witness were never called to testify for Graham at trial, his lawyers claim.

Granting clemency, meanwhile, is an extra-judicial proceeding to which any governor may bring any standard he desires -- or no standards at all. Bush says he reviews each and every death sentence. But the sheer volume of executions in Texas militates against any serious review.

Even Bush's former counsel, Judge Alberto R. Gonzales, says that a typical execution would receive no more than 30 minutes of the governor's time.

Because Bush doesn't have the time to review these cases, he relies instead on jury verdicts, which he admits he is loath to reverse, and the recommendations of his hand-picked Board of Pardons and Paroles. But the BPP does not seriously review these cases. In fact, it has been shown to be little more than a clumsy charade of clemency review.

In 1998, Judge Sam Sparks of the U.S. District Court in Austin, Texas, found that the board hadn't held a single hearing on a death-row clemency appeal nor conducted a single meeting among its members -- not even a telephone conference call -- nor investigated a single case in 25 years. "It is incredible testimony to me," Sparks said, "that in 70-plus cases, in an 18-member board, that no person has ever seen an application for clemency important enough to hold a hearing on, or to talk with each other about." Nevertheless, Bush has not contravened the board in a single case.

When the board declines to recommend clemency, Bush can stand up and say the case has been thoroughly reviewed by the courts and by the board, and salve any guilt he may have about executing a possibly innocent person by insisting that he was powerless to do anything more than grant a one-time 30-day reprieve. What the governor doesn't say is that he could also order his board to hold a hearing or investigate a case or ask it to reverse one of its decisions because he has examined the evidence and has doubts about an individual's guilt.

Bush doesn't do that not because he is powerless, but because he has made a conscious decision to not seriously review nearly all the 126 (since an execution May 9) death sentences that have crossed his desk.

Is Gary Graham innocent? It's hard to say. In addition to the questionable witness identification, his lawyers will also argue that crime scene witnesses who would have testified that Graham was not the assailant were either not put on the stand or were not asked if Graham was involved. Also, while Graham was found with a .22 pistol, police concluded it was not the .22 used in the murder.

Graham's lawyers believe that a jury will acquit him if it hears the critical evidence never presented at his trial. But that will only happen if he's granted clemency. And in George W. Bush's Texas, that's probably expecting too much.

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