In a clever appeal to Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s political impulses, advocates for condemned inmate Gary Graham are floating the idea that calling off Graham’s Thursday evening execution would be a “win-win” for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
It would be “the right thing morally and the right thing politically,” as Northwestern University law professor Lawrence Marshall said on WBBM-Ch. 2 this week.
Not only would Bush be serving justice by not sanctioning an execution based largely on the recollection of one witness, but, they say, he would also show himself to be thoughtful, deliberative, cautious and, yes, compassionate in the administration of the death penalty–George Ryan in cowboy boots.
One problem, though. Illinois Gov. Ryan was in a position to appear thoughtful, deliberative and so on about the death penalty Jan. 31 when he declared a moratorium on executions here. He’d pushed the figurative plunger only once–for the March 1999 execution of Andrew Kokoraleis, one of psycho serial sex-predator Robin Gecht’s odious droogs–in a relatively non-controversial case.
So when he denounced our capital system as “fraught with error,” he was pointing a finger at others, not himself.
Bush, in contrast, is at risk for metaphorical carpal tunnel syndrome from pushing the figurative plunger so many times–134–during his terms in office. He’s quite vested in the system by now, and so intones expressions of confidence in it like a mantra.
Earlier this month, after a Tribune analysis of Texas’ executions revealed more than a third of the cases were marred by some combination of threadbare evidence, slimy witnesses, inattentive defense lawyers and pseudo-science–and after the release of a Columbia University study showing more than a third of the capital convictions in Texas courts are reversed on appeal–Bush said all those he’d dispatched had “full access to a fair trial” and that “in every case we’ve adequately answered innocence or guilt.”
Wednesday, as those protesting the Graham execution dogged Bush during a campaign swing in Los Angeles, he again defended Texas courts as “fair and just” and added, “As far as I’m concerned, there has not been one innocent person executed since I’ve become governor.”
It’s the old “that’s my story and I’m sticking to it” strategy. And while it may seem a bit shallow under the circumstances here, it’s likely to be more of a political win for him than granting Graham (now known as Shaka Sankofa), a real chance to prove his innocence of the murder for which he is to die.
Think of the system of capital trials as a machine that makes parachutes. And think of the haphazard combination of appellate judges, volunteer lawyers, private investigators, journalists and college-student investigators as the quality-control team that rather too frequently finds that these parachutes are defective.
In Illinois, Ryan saw how many untrustworthy parachutes were coming out of the machine and said, in effect, “We will keep making parachutes, but we will not use them.”
A cynic might ask–in fact he does ask–why we continue to churn out parachutes while discussing ways to fix the machine. But Ryan’s response beats the response from Bush, which amounts to, “Holes? I don’t see any holes! These parachutes are all of finest quality!”
For Bush to back away from the Graham execution would be tantamount to second-guessing the system upon which he has so frequently relied. It would require him to say, no, the word of one witness who was 35 feet away and says she saw Graham kill a man in 1981 is not enough; no, to execute a man whose famously incompetent lawyer didn’t call available witnesses on his behalf shocks the conscience.
Were Bush to do that, he’d have to spend the summer explaining why this one shabby case rose above so many other shabby cases that didn’t happen to attract the scrutiny of the national media. It would be a distracting task unlikely to inspire voters.
It would not compare to putting on hold the execution of an almost certainly guilty man for a hail-Mary DNA test, as Bush did recently in another case. That was easy. Sparing Graham’s life will be tough–a win-lose proposition. Don’t expect it.
Expect, instead, the equivalent of a last-minute phone call to the execution chamber with one word for Gary Graham: Geronimo!
