USTIN, Texas - George W. Bush is proud to call himself "the law-and-order governor." And rightly so. In five years in office, he has overseen the executions of 113 death row inmates, more than any other governor in any state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
But the relentless efficiency of his state's death-row machinery is about to intersect, vividly with Bush's pursuit of his party's presidential nomination. In the five weeks before the Iowa and New Hampshire presidential contests, Texas is scheduled to execute eight more people, among them convicts whose cases have become significant in the debate about the death penalty.
Two of the eight committed their crimes as juveniles. One claims to have been convicted on the basis of a faulty DNA test. One is a paranoid schizophrenic whose condition went untreated - until he killed.
And then there's Johnny Paul Penry.
Even supporters of capital punishment have been troubled by the Penry case. There is no excusing his heinous crime: In 1979, while on parole for a rape conviction, he broke into the home of Pamela Carpenter, raped her, then stabbed her to death with the scissors she was using to make a Halloween costume for her niece.
But Penry has the intellectual capacity of a 7-year-old. He never got past the first grade and spent his childhood years in and out of mental institutions. Court records describe how his mother beat him as a baby and dipped him in scalding water. She forced him to eat his bodily wastes, according to those records.
Penry's execution is sure to gain national attention, because the US Supreme Court ruled in his case in 1989 that the death penalty is not a constitutionally prohibited ''cruel and unusual punishment'' for mentally retarded individuals. He is scheduled to die by lethal injection Jan. 13.
Bush has not spoken publicly about the Penry case, and, in keeping with his normal practice, he would not examine the facts of the case until the date set for execution. Bush has never granted such a reprieve. And it was the governor's opposition last spring that led to the scuttling of a bill that passed one house of the Texas Legislature. It would have banned executions of the mentally retarded.
The case of another Texas convict, Larry Robison, who has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, poses another issue: whether the mentally ill should be executed. In a bloody rampage, Robison slaughtered two men, two women, and an 11-year-old boy near Fort Worth in 1982.
Before he launched his murderous spree by decapitating and sexually mutilating his male housemate, Robison had no history of violence. His illness had been diagnosed when he was 21, but he was turned away from treatment because he lacked health insurance. He has requested Jan. 21 as an execution date, because he wants to die on a night of a full moon.
The scheduled executions of Glen McGinnis (Jan. 25), Anzel Jones (Jan. 26) and David Hicks (Jan. 20) offer other looks at the death penalty and how determinedly Texas and Bush enforce it. McGinnis and Jones were juveniles, 17 years old, when they committed their brutal crimes. Hicks said faulty DNA analysis helped convict him of a crime he did not commit, the rape and murder of his grandmother.
The death penalty has not emerged as a campaign issue in a nation where roughly two out of three voters and three out of four Republicans endorse the practice. In Texas, the most prominent victims' rights organization speaks for many when giving Bush its wholehearted support.
''Governor Bush has been a very receptive and reasonable governor when it comes to issues of crime and criminal justice,'' said Dianne Clements, president of Justice for All, the Houston-based victims group. ''There is poll after poll that proves the citizens of Texas support the death penalty, the ultimate punishment.''
Clements defends the use of the death penalty, even in those cases where the offender was 17 at the time of the crime or mentally disabled. ''If they are competent to be convicted, then so be it,'' she said.
But death penalty opponents contend Bush's record-setting embrace of capital punishment may yet be a negative factor for him in the 2000 election. He shows a callousness, they said, toward the solemn issues that arise from government's ultimate power: taking the life of its citizens.
Beyond the overall support given to capital punishment in the polls, ''the realization is growing that the death penalty, like a lot of other things that government does, has serious problems,'' said Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta.
''People reasonably expect that the governor of Texas ought to be concerned about executing the mentally retarded or those who had poor legal representation,'' Bright said. ''If you are going to be executing those who were children when they committed the crime or people who are mentally ill, the governor ought to at least be engaged. You don't get the sense that Bush is engaged at all.''
Bush reinforced such doubts when, in a magazine interview last summer, he mocked the 11th-hour plea for mercy by a convicted double murderer, Karla Fay Tucker, imitating her by whimpering ''Please, don't kill me.''
Tucker, whose born-again faith and repentance for her crimes were cited in requests for mercy made to Bush by such figures as Pope John Paul II and televangelist Pat Robertson, was the first woman to be executed by the state since the Civil War.
And in a recent case that spurred headlines across the country, Texas authorities used an airplane and a team of medical attendants to fly David Long from the intensive care ward of a Galveston hospital to the death chamber in Huntsville on Dec. 8 so he could be executed on his appointed date. He had tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of antipsychotic drugs.
''Putting him on life support and flying him out of the hospital so they can kill him? People are asking, `What the hell are they doing down there?''' said George Kendall, who heads the NAACP's death penalty project in New York. ''There is a growing volume of cases in Texas that make it sound like however the system is supposed to work, this is not it.''
At a time when the well-publicized releases of dozens of death row inmates found innocent by DNA testing has sparked a national movement for a moratorium on capital punishment and led to a slight downtick in support for the practice in public opinion polls, foes of the death penalty said they hope to use the upcoming primary season to publicize their cause and pressure Bush to intervene on behalf of those scheduled to die.
Bush's legislative record raises further issues. Despite repeated judicial criticism of the way Texas provides legal services to indigent defendants in capital punishment and other criminal cases, via a court-appointed patronage system, Bush vetoed a bill that would have reformed the system and established an independent public defender's office this year.
In a chapter on the death penalty in his campaign autobiography, Bush said that he treats his ''profound'' responsibility in capital punishment cases ''thoughtfully and carefully,'' but that he limits his decisions on whether to intervene to two matters: ''Is there any doubt about this individual's guilt or innocence? And, have the courts had ample opportunity to review all the legal issues in this case?''
As a matter of political philosophy, Bush said, he does not believe he has the right to ''replace the verdict of a jury with my own'' in order to show mercy or for potentially mitigating factors like age, mental illness, or mental retardation.
''I support the death penalty because I believe, if administered swiftly and justly, capital punishment is a deterrent against future violence and will save other innocent lives,'' Bush said.
Bush, as governor, is the only candidate who has to concern himself with particular death penalty cases, but he is far from alone in his general views. All five of his Republican adversaries support the death penalty, as do Vice President Al Gore and former senator Bill Bradley, the two men squaring off in the Democratic primaries. Bush's Democratic opponents in the last two gubernatorial elections each sought to show that they were tough on crime by enthusiastically endorsing the death penalty.
''There is strong support for capital punishment in Texas,'' said Tony Fabelo, who as director of the Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council serves as the governor's top adviser on criminal justice issues. Fabelo said Bush should be credited for the way his reform of the juvenile justice system and his ambitious prison construction program have helped cut the Texas crime rate and modernize its institutions.
A GOP pollster, William McInturff, who conducts public opinion surveys for the campaign of Senator John McCain of Arizona, said the governor risks little damage in approving the executions in January. The electorate's general position on capital punishment, said McInturff, is akin to that of one voter who told the pollster, ''I'll tell you where I stand on the death penalty: right next to the switch.''
Noting how President Clinton showed he was tough on crime during the 1992 campaign by approving the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, a mentally retarded Arkansas man, McInturff said the only political risk when applying the death penalty is ''that you don't want to appear you are being glib with that responsibility.'' And after the fallout over his comments about the Tucker case, McInturff said, ''I'm sure G overnor Bush is most attuned to that.''
Because Texas has a system of government that curbs the governor's power, Bush can technically give a death row inmate just a 30-day reprieve from execution. But he appoints the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which has the authority to grant clemency and commute sentences and has never varied from Bush's position on the 113 executions and one act of clemency during his tenure.
Bush has the authority, though he has never had to use it, to overrule an act of clemency by the board. ''My appointees ... reflect my no-nonsense approach to crime and punishment,'' Bush said. In the single case of clemency, Bush and the board agreed with the Texas attorney general that serial killer Henry Lee Lucas had made a phony confession to the 1979 rape and strangulation of an unidentified woman for which he was sentenced to death.
The probation and parole board holds no public hearings, votes by phone or fax, and does not explain its reasoning. The secretive and casual nature with which the board makes decisions spurred one federal judge last year to call it ''appalling'' and ''incredible'' and an ''extremely poor'' process.
Similarly, the Texas system of having elected judges appoint their favorite lawyers for impoverished defendants was called a ''farce'' and a ''travesty'' by another federal judge after a series of abuses, including defense lawyers who slept in court or abused cocaine, became known last year. The problem was exacerbated when the federal government cut off all funds to resource centers that provided help to death row inmates.
Bush publicly defended the state's clemency and indigent defense systems. He vetoed the bill to create a new public defender's office, and without his support, the proposed legislation to reform the clemency process died in this year's Legislature, along with the bill to ban executions of the mentally retarded.
''These are the tangential ways Bush helps create an atmosphere,'' said Maurie A. Levin, an Austin lawyer who represents death row inmates. ''To me, killing a retarded guy and a juvenile in the same month when you are running for national election says a lot about you.''
