Bush treads a treacherous path as Graham execution nears

Ian Christopher McCaleb/CNN

June 22, 2000
Web posted at: 3:36 p.m. EDT (1936 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Texas Gov. George W. Bush spent much of his Thursday within the confines of the Texas state government complex in Austin, attending to state business early in the day and contemplating the significance of a crucial ruling from the state's Board of Pardons and Paroles on the fate of convicted murderer Gary Graham.

That decision arrived in the middle of the afternoon on Thursday, when the board decided not to grant Graham a reprieve, commutation or a pardon. His fate now falls upon the Supreme Court, which -- though very unlikely -- could move to stop the execution later in the afternoon.

The Graham case has tugged at Bush in recent days, as pressure has been heaped upon the Lone Star State's chief executive -- this election's presumed Republican nominee for the presidency -- to halt the process amid hints that Graham's defense lawyer ignored crucial evidence during his murder trial.

Bush appeared ragged during campaign stops in California on Wednesday after being shadowed by anti-death penalty protesters at a number of fund-raisers and stump appearances.

Bush has presided over 134 executions since moving into the governor's mansion. As much anguish as the Graham case can be causing him -- he's hamstrung by state law in this case and was not able to make a decision until the pardons board issued its decision -- there's a deeper consequence to this murky, complicated story.

It is now very unlikely that Bush will make a move to overrule the board's decision.

Should Graham be executed Thursday evening -- a likely event, given the paucity of reprieves granted in the state since the death penalty was reintroduced in 1982 -- Bush is certain to face a public relations offensive the likes of which he has not yet had to deal with as a presidential candidate.

And should Texas continue to execute death-row prisoners at its current rate heading into November, Bush could find a tactic used by his father in the 1988 presidential election turned on its ear and turned back against him. Indeed, the Democratic political machine must be licking its chops at the opportunity to turn Gary Graham into this year's campaign centerpiece -- the anti-Willie Horton.

And most of us thought the name Willie Horton would have been lost to history by now.

The Graham case

The 36-year-old Graham, who has taken the African name "Shaka Sankofa" while in prison, was convicted of fatally shooting a man in the parking lot of a Houston supermarket in 1981. He pleaded guilty to a string of robberies that left two people wounded in the early 1980s, but his murder conviction was based largely on testimony provided by one eyewitness.

The woman who identified Graham as the killer was said to have been seated in a nearby car as the shooting occurred. Six other witnesses who claimed to have been nearby said they could not identify Graham, or that someone else was responsible for the shooting. None of these individuals were called to offer testimony during Graham's murder trial.

Graham's case has been reviewed by a jury and several judges. Texas' capital punishment procedures are designed to insulate the governor from most of the judicial deliberations that are undertaken in individual cases, with the governor only stepping into the process in the hours before a scheduled execution, after he has taken time to review case specifics and court rulings.

Bush said Wednesday that as Texas governor, his first job is to see that the state's laws are carried out. Should Graham be executed, and should political debris fall about him afterwards as a result, Bush said he was prepared to bear the consequences.

Condemned prisoner Gary Graham is shown in a visitation cell on Texas' death row in Livingston, Texas, in this file photo.

"I'm going to uphold the law of the land and let the political consequences be what they may. If it costs me politically, it costs me politically," a somber, deliberative Bush said in California on Wednesday.

"No case is an easy case," he continued, adding: "I also keep in mind the victims, and the reason I support the death penalty is because it saves lives. That's why I support it, and the people of my state support it too," he said.

Bush would appear to be ready to follow the letter of the law, and advisors have been quick to point out in the course of the last day that the governor combs over case records thoroughly as each impending capital punishment case reaches his desk.

Still, his reserved comments on Wednesday indicate he knows he's got some negative consequences coming in the mail. Proponents and opponents of the death penalty converged on the state prison in Huntsville on Thursday to make their views known in the hours wrapped around Graham's execution, which is scheduled for 6 p.m. CDT.

Luminaries such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Bianca Jagger, an Amnesty International activist, have descended upon Texas to protest Graham's sentence.

"Mr. Bush has the power, based upon reasonable doubt, to stay this execution," Jackson said Wednesday. "The moral burden is upon him."

Added Jagger, "The death penalty is being applied in the United States as a fatal lottery."

A number of groups plan to protest in favor of capital punishment, but some of the more high profile organizations in attendance -- the withering Ku Klux Klan, for example -- bear so much unsavory symbolic baggage that Bush has surely been advised to stay away from both sides.

State operatives insist that Bush is caught in the middle of something that he has very little control over, and is being victimized by national media intent on creating a pivotal election-year issue to heap atop other, less provocative issues like health care, tax cuts and Social Security.

"I think a lot of people are losing sight of the fact that this is a legal case, and that this is reviewed and decided by judges and that we have a jury system in this country and you have put faith in the jury system," Roe Wilson, the assistant Harris County district attorney, told CNN. "And the jury in 1981 decided he was guilty of capital murder and sentenced him to death."

That verdict has been upheld "by every single court that has looked into the case," she said. "So I don't think this should be tried by public opinion, and I think that the press attention is something that has been generated by the defense to try to manipulate the outcome of the case."

Horton redux

With Graham likely to be executed by dusk on Thursday, the Bush campaign has likely already kicked into high gear to stem the avalanche of talk show chatter and Democratic public relations subterfuge that is all but certain to follow.

Graham's face could become the stuff of anti-death penalty legend, as could the well-known faces of some other recent executed Texas death row inmates. Betty Lou Beets, executed earlier this year for killing of two of her husbands, could reappear, as could Karla Faye Tucker, a convicted murderer put to death in 1998 despite her claims that she had become a born-again Christian, and in spite of desperate international pleas -- one coming from the Pope himself -- that her life be spared.

Any of those faces, manipulated properly by Bush's opposition -- the Democratic presidential campaign of Vice President Al Gore or party and advocacy organizations aligned with Gore -- could exact the sort of damage that Willie Horton meted out to 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.

Dukakis, who lost to Bush's father in November of 1988, lost that election in part because the menacing face of Horton appeared over and over again in a series of ads that portrayed the one-time Massachusetts governor as soft on crime.

Horton, a longtime criminal, had been furloughed from a Massachusetts state prison due to overcrowding in 1987, and while out committed a violent rape and murder. The ad campaign was devastating to the Dukakis campaign, which never managed to put its thumb on an effective method to counter the GOP's ad onslaught.

Use of a picture of Graham or others in television ads decrying Texas systematic administration of death sentences could have a similar deleterious effects on Bush. Public opinion in the issue is hard to gauge right now, and the Bush camp will have to tread carefully in the coming months.

A recent Gallup poll suggested that 66 percent of Americans support the death penalty as a deterrent to violent crime, but many of the poll's respondents expressed concern that innocent people are facing execution.

With new moves afoot in Congress that could lead to an overhaul of federal capital punishment procedures -- including revised DNA testing options -- and with Illinois GOP Gov. George Ryan's recent moratorium on executions in that state, the public is likely rethinking the entire issue.

Bush is in an inenviable spot -- he'll have to bear the consequences of the Graham case, counter Democratic campaign strategies, and second-guess the public shake-out on capital punishment come November.