Gary Graham's execution in Texas may yet have redemptive value if it marks the beginning of the end of capital punishment in the United States. More than many recent cases, Graham's displayed the essential fallibility of the death penalty. He was convicted with no physical evidence, on the testimony of a single eyewitness, and given poor legal representation in a state with a troubled history of unequal justice for black men, especially those, like Graham, accused of killing a white victim.
Graham's case attracted attention in part because of its political patina. Texas Governor George W. Bush has executed more people in his five years in office - 135 - than any other governor, and now he is running for president on a platform of being a ''compassionate conservative.'' This heightens interest in Texas cases just as Karla Faye Tucker attracted attention in 1998 because she was the first woman executed since the Civil War.
The more attention is paid to individual cases like Graham's, the more Americans are able to break through the complacency that allows the mechanistic application of lethal injections and electric volts.
But Graham's case, chilling as it is, shouldn't obscure the individual humanity of the 221 other people coolly put to death in Texas since the Supreme Court declared capital punishment constitutional in 1976, the 76 executed in Virginia, the 42 in Missouri, the 48 in Florida, or the 28 in Oklahoma. As the death rolls mount, so do the chances that states are making fatal errors.
Increasingly, the public is rethinking its reflexive support for capital punishment, and for good reason. A landmark study released earlier this month by the Columbia Law School examined all capital convictions and appeals between 1973 and 1995 - nearly 5,500 cases. The report said courts found ''serious reversible error'' in two-thirds of the trials. When the cases were reversed or retried, 82 percent of the accused got a lesser sentence than death, and 7 percent were found actually not guilty of the capital crime. Once the accused is executed, of course, the ''serious errors'' found in such cases become irreversible.
Defiant to the end, his appeals exhausted, Gary Graham said Thursday: ''They are murdering me tonight.'' The only western nation that still administers this barbaric punishment must look inside its soul for reasons to continue a system that surely puts innocent people to death.
© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company
###
