DNA testing and the increasing awareness of false convictions have changed the dynamics of the death-penalty debate. But the wheels of death roll on.

GARY GRAHAM VOWED TO "FIGHT them like hell!" and he did, for nearly two full decades. It did him no good. The state of Texas killed him in June, just as they'd planned.

Graham's hotly contested case was the latest high-profile cause celebre on Texas's death row. His was the 222nd lethal injection since this state resumed executions in 1982; the 135th state killing overseen by George W. Bush, who still believes everyone ever executed in Texas was guilty.

Like the 1998 execution of Karla Faye Tucker, Grahams execution was accentuated by the macabre. Passionate demonstrators--both "for" and "against" the death penalty--created an eerie carnival-like atmosphere. Attending lawmen allowed the good ol' boys from the Ku Klux Klan to parade up and down one sequestered street, while members of the New Black Panther Party enjoyed some kind of Texas-style affirmative action as they marched along another blockaded street, then posed with unloaded weapons and mugged for the cameras. High-profile abolitionists like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Bianca Jagger, came to Huntsville, Texas. The media swarmed on the Walls Unit like a plague of high-tech locusts.

A few Saturdays later I asked a dozen friends and coworkers in this Texas prison if they remembered what had happened a month earlier in Huntsville that made worldwide news. Not a single person remembered.

How could even those of us in prison forget a case like Graham's so easily, so completely, so soon? And what of the majority of executions, in which the condemned die as they have lived--not so much in infamy but in social abandonment, cultural anonymity, and public silence?

THE LIVES, OF THOSE KILLED IN our names are quickly forgotten once the crowds move on. But the debate over the death penalty is not the same struggle it has been for the past twenty years.

Without warning or fanfare, Republican governor George Ryan of Illinois recently declared an abrupt halt to his state's death machine, after learning that thirteen men sentenced to death there since 1977 had been released when their innocence was proven by additional post-trial investigations. During that same period of time, twelve other men were executed in Illinois. "I have grave concerns about our state's shameful record of convicting innocent people," Ryan said. "There is no margin for error when it comes to putting a person to death."

Ryan's honesty seemed to be a catalyst that gave political permission to other lawmakers around the country. Moratorium campaigns are currently viable in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, and Missouri. In Oregon, Kentucky, and New Hampshire, genuine grass-roots abolition initiatives have spread in state legislatures like wildfire. In Florida, where yet another Governor Bush is in power, Circuit Judge Robert P. Cates recently overturned the sentence of a man condemned to die in 1993, the twenty-first time a wrongful conviction and death sentence has been overturned in that state....