BUSH'S ROAD TO VICTORY IN 1994. Ann Richards was the most popular governor of Texas in 30 years. In 1992, her approval rating was 73 percent, but the following year it dropped 10 points. With the gubernatorial election a year away, Bush believed that she was vulnerable, and he took the opportunity to jump into politics.

Richards was responsible for bringing in a state-wide lottery system which had the potential of improving the Texas economy. She initiated programs for immunizing poor children and presided over the state's largest prison construction agenda. But Richards signed a $2.7 billion tax increase during her first year in office, and the state's budget jumped by 30 percent..

When several people were contemplating if they should challenge her in the 1994 election, polls showed that 42 percent of Texans considered voting for someone other than Richards. Bush spent three months in 1993 consulting with friends and political allies. They urged him to run for governor and to focus his campaign on four issues --- limited government, local control of schools, family values, and individual responsibility.

Rob Mosbacher and Tom Luce were also considering running for the state's top office. Mosbacher served as Bush's father Department of Commerce secretary and chaired the elder Bush's 1992 campaign. Luce ran against Richards but lost in 1990. When both of these Texans opted out of the 1994 gubernatorial race, Bush found himself the leading GOP candidate, primarily due to name recognition. Against the advice of his wife, Bush announced his candidacy in September. On November 8, Bush formally began his campaign.

Bush and Richards easily won in the March 8, 1994 primaries. Bush defeated Ray Hollis, a building demolition expert who, like Bush, had no political experience. When Richards claimed that the state was leading the nation in economic recovery, Bush fired back that Texas was in despair. He quoted statistics that indicated unemployment was on the rise.

Bush ran another series of attack ads, accusing Richards of being too soft on landowner rights and environmental fights. Bush claimed that his opponent allowed the federal government to intervene and declare parts of 33 counties a critical habitat for some endangered species. He avoided discussing abortion. He said, "It's not an issue in the 1994 governor's race." And his campaign literature stated, "The United States has settled the abortion issue" However, Bush did say that he opposed abortion except in instances of rape and incest and when a mother's life is in danger -- a fundamental change from that reported by Teague in 1978. Bush won the election, and as Governor, he signed several pieces of anti-abortion legislation.

He attacked the incumbent for being lax on crime. Even though the overall crime rate was lower since Richards took office, Bush was quick to point out that violent crime had increased 5.8 percent since she took office. Even though Bush promised to run a positive campaign, his first television commercial showed an assault on a woman and a sheet being placed over a dead body with the announcer saying, "The third most dangerous state in the state." The next day, Bush ran a series of ads which accused Richards and the Texas Education Agency of lowering standards in public schools.

Meanwhile, Richards continued to run a positive, issue-oriented campaign, but she made the fatal mistake of referring to Bush as "Shrub," "Junior," and even a "jerk," although she claimed that the comments were meaningless. For the next several days, that comment dominated the news. When Richards attacked Bush for lacking political experience, he responded that his credentials included management skills in the oil business and with the Texas Rangers. Richards eventually turned to the offensive and painted a picture of Bush as an unsuccessful businessman. She used official records to show that all of Bush's oil business ventures lost a total of $371 million. Supporting documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission, she said that her opponent earned $1.38 million while serving on the board of directors of several firms which teetered on bankruptcy -- Harken Energy, Tom Brown, Incorporated, and Caterair International. Just nine days before the general election, Bush resigned from the board of Tom Brown and netted $300,000 by cashing in options..

Bush defeated Richards 53.5 percent to 45.9 percent in the November general election. Fifty-six percent of the state's males voted for Bush, primarily because of his hard-line positions on crime and taxes. And about 75 percent of those who identified themselves with the Christian Right voted for Bush. He was able to build an approval rating higher than any Texas governor in modern times. According to an April 1999 poll, his popularity was based more on his name than on substance or accomplishment.

CAMPAIGNING IN 1998. In 1998, the entire nation was entering the longest phase of a prosperous economy. But there were still many Texans who continued to live in poverty. Texas ranked fiftieth -- dead last across the nation -- in per capita spending on government programs. Nearly 33 percent of children were not covered by health insurance, ranking Texas 13 points higher than the nation as a whole. Seventeen percent of Texans lived below the poverty level, three points higher than the national average. And child poverty stood at 29 percent..

Armed with a war chest of $13 million and propelled by a robust economy, Bush took on Democratic challenger Garry Mauro, the Texas Land Commissioner. Bush took a commanding 50 point lead out of the gate, and he never looked back. He promised voters another property tax cut, more welfare reform, and a tougher stance on juvenile crime. He also campaigned nation-wide, helping to raise over $10 million for Republican candidates and GOP organizations while appearing at 72 fund-raisers.

The incumbent governor boasted of his successes as he entered his second term. He took responsibility for more local control of public schools and tort reform in the courts, and he bragged that parole rates for criminals were the lowest in the state's history. He campaigned in the Latino community where one in three was uninsured. He won in El Paso county which had a high Latino population. Across the state, he received 49 percent of the Latino vote, 65 percent of the women's vote, 27 percent of the Black vote, and 75 percent of the independents' vote.

FOLLOWING THE MONEY TRAIL.

Bush's corporate friends were frequently rewarded by the governor with appointments, and he pushed for legislation to benefit many of their businesses. Enron Corporation of Houston headed the list, pouring $550,025 into Bush's campaign coffers. Enron was followed by the Sanchez family, $320,150; Vinson & Elkins, $316,700; and Hicks, Muse, Tate, and Furst, Incorporated, $290,400.

The fifth largest contributors were the Bass brothers. Two of the brothers were members of the elite Team 100 which gave significant donations to the Republican National Committee when George H. Bush ran for the presidency in 1988. Throughout Bush's political career, the four brothers -- one of whom was Bush's classmates at Yale -- contributed more than $275,000 to his campaign. Next came the Sterling group, $259,000; Pilgrim's Pride Corporation, $231,750; Farmers Group of Los Angeles, $223,500; Sam and Charles Wyly and their business groups in Dallas; and the tenth was Arter & Hadden.

Fifty-five Texan oil refineries and industrial corporations contributed $1.5 million to Bush's two gubernatorial campaigns. Enron and Sterling, the first and sixth biggest donors, were accused of producing high amounts of air pollutants. But Bush was able to enact legislation which grandfathered industries such as theirs, and consequently they were not compelled to comply to the new state standards.

Bush made numerous appointments to state boards and commissions. All but one appointees to the Texas Board of Regents contributed a total of $419,406 to his gubernatorial campaigns. The Sanchez family, the second highest contributors, were led by A. R. "Tony" Sanchez, an oil executive. He alone gave $101,000 to Bush's campaign. He was the CEO of Sanchez-O'Brien Oil and Gas Corporation. Bush appointed Sanchez to the Texas Board of Regents. .

In 1995, Donald Evans, the executive officer of Tom Brown, Incorporated, a Midland oil and gas company, was appointed chairman of the University of Texas Regents. This came immediately after he gave $26,500 to Bush's gubernatorial campaign in 1994. Earlier in 1989, Bush was appointed an outside director to Tom Brown, Incorporated, and he was given $12,000 in stock options every year. Bush was also on Tom Brown's compensation committee that voted an annual pay increase of $75,000 and a bonus of $35,000 for Evans. Bush left Tom Brown in 1994 when he was elected governor.

Rita Loeffler, wife of a former Texan governor, gave Bush $56,106, and she was appointed to the regents. Charles Miller, a Houston investment manager, gave $60,000 to Bush's campaign; and Woody Hunt, an El Paso home builder, threw in $39,800. Both were rewarded with appointments to the Board of Regents..

Like many big-state governors, Bush scheduled hundreds of meetings with business executives and lobbyists. Overall, 46 percent were donors, according to an analysis by the Campaign Study Group of Springfield, Virginia. Together with their families and companies, these contributors accounted for about one-tenth of the record-setting $41 million that Bush raised for his two gubernatorial bids. Bush claimed that his contributors -- some of whom he appointed to state boards -- got no special access. He said, "I believe what I believe because it's the right thing to believe, not because somebody's given me money." On the other hand, Bush rarely spent time with labor officials who objected when Bush wanted to move some state employees onto private payrolls, environmentalists who faulted his air pollution record, and consumer activists who opposed tort reform.

THE RICHARD RAINWATER CONNECTION. Richard Rainwater, Bush's major business partner in the Texas Rangers, was one of the largest single contributors to the Bush camp. In Bush's tenure as governor, over 60 percent of his war chest came directly from Rainwater or from companies where the two were business partners. In return, Rainwater was able to pad his bank account as a result of Bush's policies. The state teacher retirement fund sold three office buildings to Rainwater's real estate company at bargain prices. On two occasions there were no bids. The fund invested $90 million in the Frost Bank Plaza in Austin, and sold it to Rainwater's Crescent Real Estate for $35 million. Bush signed a law that gave his former baseball team co- owners -- including Rainwater -- a $10 million bonus payment when a new Dallas arena was built. UTIMCO invested $20 million in Rainwater companies. Rainwater also owned HCA, a hospital conglomerate. When a bill came across Bush's desk providing for a patients' bill of rights, it was promptly vetoed by the governor.

Bush also proposed a cap on business real estate taxes that would have saved Rainwater millions on his various properties. As governor, Bush frequently gave himself credit for lowering taxes in Texas, but he neglected to say that property taxes increased in his state. When asked about the rise in property taxes, Bush passed the blame onto the public school system, saying that they had the power to control property taxes. However, his proposal was defeated in the legislature. But as owner of the Texas Rangers, Bush pushed for a tax increase in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in order to build a new baseball stadium.

After Rainwater left Bass Enterprises, he created Columbia/HCA which soon emerged as the nation's largest privately-owned hospital chain. In 1995 and 1996, Columbia/HCA contributed $489,000 to congressional candidates and to the RNC and DNC. Columbia/HCA employed 13 lobbyists in Washington D.C. and donated heavily to the Federation of American Health Care Systems. The medical giant also employed 33 lobbyists in Florida alone, and their objective was to pressure state legislators to enact favorable legislation. In 1996 Columbia/HCA paid lobbyists $200,000 in campaign for them. Republican Congressman Bill Frist of Tennessee is their largest ally, since he owns $25 million in stock in the company..

Federal agents raided its headquartered in Florida, Texas in 1997 after the Justice Department suspected Rainwater's company was defrauding the government. Investigators began a probe into the financial records of Columbia/HCA and found numerous errors in medication and highly low number of nurses. The company was also under investigation for allegedly paying kickbacks to physicians for referring patients to company facilities. Additionally, records indicated that the conglomerate had been defrauding the Medicare program for years.

The size of the management department at HCA/Columbia shrunk by about one-third after many of the executives were ousted when alleged violations of defrauding the federal government occurred. These included Richard Scott, who headed Columbia/HCA's development into a $20-billion health care empire, but then his aggressive business practices were blamed for the company's fall. He was replaced shortly after the investigations were revealed in July 1997 by Thomas F. Frist, Jr., who had been chairman and chief executive of Hospital Corporation of America, which merged with Columbia in 1994.

In 1999, two middle-level executives were convicted of fraud in cases relating to Medicare fraud. A year later, Columbia/HCA agreed to a record $745 million settlement. Health care experts and others involved in the company's lawsuits expected the financial toll to eventually come to more than $1 billion. The New York Times (May 19, 2000) reported that Columbia/HCA was accused of exaggerating patient diagnoses to reap higher Medicare reimbursements and then charged the program for expenses it was not entitled to by disguising their actual nature. There were claims of fraudulent laboratory billing, including billing the government for unnecessary tests on patients; improper diagnoses that tended to make patients seem sicker than they were, leading to higher Medicare payments; and the disguising of non-reimbursable expenses as reimbursable ones. The latter included designating marketing personnel whose salaries could not be charged to Medicare, as community educators engaged in familiarizing residents with available Medicare services. Columbia/HCA was also allegedly able to charge Medicare for the acquisition expenses it incurred in purchasing numerous home health care agencies by paying the sellers unrealistically low prices but then hiring them at inflated but reimbursable fees as management consultants to help run those agencies. Some former owners of those agencies settled related federal charges earlier.

In 1995, Bush vetoed the Patient Protection bill which was a basic patient's bill of rights. Bush attempted to justify his decision to veto the bill by saying that it "unfairly impacts some health care providers while exempting others." Even though he authorized the state's insurance commissioner to implement parts of the bill, Bush was clever enough not to include a key provision -- to allow patients to see physicians outside their own networks. That would have been certain to cut into the profits of Columbia/HCA.

Also in 1997, Bush proposed the privatizing mental hospitals throughout the state. This suggestion came just after Rainwater had developed Crescent Real Estate Equities Company which was focusing on building a chain of mental health facilities. In 1997, Crescent purchased 95 mental hospitals from Magellan Health Care Services in Atlanta, and it also formed a partnership with Magellan's Charter Behavioral Health Systems. This made Rainwater's company the nation's largest provider of mental health care services. The same year, Bush also proposed slashing property taxes in Texas. This would have saved Crescent $2.5 million annually in state taxes. After passing the House, the bill was rejected by the Senate, and a watered-down version of the legislation was eventually enacted into law.

Later in 1997, Bush passed into law another bill which created a tremendous windfall for Crescent. The law allowed cities to raise taxes to finance professional sports' stadiums. Rainwater used Crescent to purchase 12 percent of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. A new stadium was constructed and upon completion in 2001, Rainwater will net $10 million. Ross Perot and Hicks, the major partners in the purchase of the Texas Rangers from Bush and his associates, also saved millions of dollars the following year as a result of a tax hike.

The Texas Teachers Retirement System sold two office buildings and a mortgage on a third one to Crescent. Two of the sales were consummated without a public auction, and the State Teachers Retirement System refused to disclose the initial bids on the third. Bush owned approximately $100,000 in Crescent stock at the time of these transactions.

MORE FAT CATS FUNNEL IN MONEY TO THE BUSH CAMPAIGN. Bush continued to cater to big money interests in Texas. The University of Texas Investment Management Company (UTIMCO)managed the university's financial assets. UTIMCO, chaired by Hicks who purchased the Texas Rangers from Bush and his partners, invested approximately $8.9 million in Crescent real estate. Hicks successfully lobbied to move $1.7 billion of UTIMCO's assets into private investments, and one-third of that money was funneled into Texas businesses which are run by Bush's cronies. A month after Hicks bought the Texas Rangers, he ran a UTIMCO meeting where the directors approved a $96 million into Maverick Capital Fund of Dallas which was a hedge fund operated by Sam and Charles Wyley, long time friends of the Bush family.

Convicted felon A. Glenn Braswell, a Florida-based mail-order magnate, contributed $220,000 to Republican causes since 1998. That including $25,000 to Bush's gubernatorial re-election campaign in 1998 and another $125,000 in soft money donations to the Florida Republican Party, federal and state records indicated. Earlier, Braswell served seven months in federal prison for perjury and mail fraud. During the same period of time, Braswell received unusual promotional help for his health care business from Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Ron Tepper, the editor of the Journal of Longevity, told Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that Braswell and Jeb Bush were good friends and that "they've had lunches and meetings." He also said that Braswell had met George W. Bush. However, Katie Baur, Jeb Bush's communications secretary, said that the Florida governor did no special favors for Braswell. She added, "To the best of our knowledge, they (Jeb Bush and Braswell) have met once or twice at a fund-raiser."

The Journal of Longevity -- a monthly magazine that served as an advertising vehicle for anti-aging formulas, sex-drive enhancers, and other Braswell health products -- featured a July 2000 article that ran under the byline of the Florida governor. Braswell sought out Jeb Bush to write the article because both he and his brother, George W. Bush, "are sympathetic to alternative medicine" -- a position that he said stood in contrast to the Al Gore's "silence" on the issue. In mid-2000, Tepper said he asked Ann Herberger, finance director of the Florida Republican Party, if Jeb Bush would write an article for the magazine. When the staff member approved, Tepper said he assigned one of his own staff members at the Journal of Longevity to prepare a draft for the approval of the Bush staff aide.

Isikoff revealed that the Texas governor worked quickly to squelch any controversy about the relationship between Braswell and the Bush family. In September 2000, Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett said the gubernatorial campaign returned the $25,000 contribution that Braswell made in 1998. Bartlett indicated that Bush had a standing policy of refusing campaign contributions from "convicted felons."

In the Journal of Longevity article, Jeb Bush boasted of his commitment -- and that of George W. Bush -- to new health-care approaches that meet the needs of senior citizens. Jeb gave more emphasis to "alternative" medical treatments, citing the "growing popular demand" for natural "therapies and nutrients" -- the same sort of products that Braswell marketed in his direct-mail business. The article was accompanied by a color photo of the two Bushes standing side by side.

Dr. Stephen Barrett, chairman of Quackwatch, a group that monitors health industry claims, explained that over 20 years, Braswell's companies were repeatedly chastised by federal regulators for their advertising and labeling practices. By agreeing to appear in Braswell's magazine, the Florida governor was lending his name and prestige to his companies' product lines, Barrett said. "Here you have a prominent and popular governor who is appearing to endorse these products," said Barrett.

When Isikoff asked for a copy of any letter of protest the governor's office that was sent to the Journal of Longevity, Baur instead faxed Newsweek a copy of a brief memo that was written by Tepper, apologizing for an "editing error" that resulted in the magazine publishing a version of the article "that was not the version approved by Governor Bush." The letter was dated August 23, 2000, the day after Isikoff showed up in the offices of the Journal of Longevity in California where he inquired about Braswell's ties to the two Bushes.

Braswell was considered one of the country's biggest mail-order marketers of "natural" medicines. Operating through a company called Gero Vita International and several related firms, his products were promoted for their abilities to relieve a wide range of ailments, ranging from arthritic pain to memory loss. Some of his most popular products claimed to boost sex drive. But Braswell's promotions drew complaints by federal regulators and consumer groups. In 1983 federal court records showed that Braswell was convicted in Atlanta of perjury and mail fraud stemming from a Postal Service investigation into allegations that he had promoted a purported baldness cure by using faked "before and after" photographs of hair growth on a man's head.

In the 1990s, Braswell became involved again with federal regulators and consumer groups over his advertising techniques. In 1995, the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus concluded that Gero Vita International could not substantiate claims for one of its products, a GH3 Anti-Aging Pill. A company advertisement proclaimed that the pill "improves memory. ...Sex Drive! and reduces chance of Heart Attack by 83 percent!" The group called the claims "exaggerated and overstated" and "misleading to consumers."

Because Gero Vita products were ordered from a Canadian postal address, the Food and Drug Administration that same year imposed an "import alert" on some of the products. The agency acted after determining that certain Gero Vita products were being promoted as "drugs" that could cure various ailments -- without receiving FDA approval. Brad Stone, an FDA spokesman, told Newsweekthat the alert was still in effect. Sheldon Lustigman, a lawyer for the company, says Gero Vita since changed the formulas on the products and asked the FDA to lift the ban.

IRS agents raided the Marina del Ray, California office of G.B. Data in June 1999, seizing documents and company computers, according to two former employees. Court records showed that federal prosecutors in Los Angeles in 1999 opened a criminal investigation with the IRS into some of Braswell's companies, including allegations involving the "transfer of funds" from G.B. Data to "off- shore accounts." According to the documents, prosecutors said they also investigated allegations involving an off-shore trading company and alleged efforts by Braswell and his employees to conceal documents from the government.

FOR THE RECORD. In his tenure as governor, Bush presided over a state that was:

Fiftieth in spending for teachers

Forty-ninth in spending on the environment

Forty-eighth in per-capita funding for public health

Forty-seventh in delivery of social services

Forty-second in child support collections

Forty-first in per-capita spending on public education

Fifth in percentage of population living in poverty

First in air and water pollution

First in percentage of poor working parents without insurance

First in percentage of children without health insurance

First in executions (an average of one every two weeks)

GUN CONTROL. As soon as Bush moved into the governor's mansion in Austin in 1995, he was confronted with the controversial handgun issue of legalizing concealed weapons. Less than two years before, the state legislature had approved a bill which would have allowed for a referendum on whether the state's citizens could carry concealed weapons. But Richards vetoed that proposal. Soon after Bush was elected, the bill was reintroduced.

The Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas (CLEAT) opposed the concealed weapons law, fearing that citizens would take the law into their own hands. But 79 percent of all Texans wanted to vote on a referendum on some sort of gun law. A survey showed that 64 percent of Texans strongly supported a requirement for gun owners to carry liability insurance and 61 percent believed in mandatory psychological testing of private citizens who wanted to carry concealed weapons. However, the NRA opposed the referendum requiring insurance and psychological testing.

Just days before the House voted on the bill, Bush received a huge setback when he read in the newspaper that his father had resigned from the NRA after its executive vice-president referred to federal agents as government thugs. It was reported that the irate governor immediately called his father, accusing him of undermining the concealed weapons bill just before a floor vote in the House. The right-to-carry bill was passed by the House, but Texas voters defeated the referendum.

A few weeks after Bush took office, the Senate Criminal Justice Committee easily passed the bill allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons, and it was immediately approved by the full Senate and signed into law by Bush. This ended a 125-year ban on concealed handguns in Texas.

However, controversy was sparked when six people were killed during a shooting spree in Corpus Christi. Then singer Selena Quintanilla Perez was murdered. Immediately, support for the concealed weapons' bill dwindled, as Texans were evenly split across the state.

Bush vowed that the new law would make the state "a safer place," and he promised Texans that license applicants would undergo rigorous background checks. But since the law took effect, a study conducted by the Los Angeles Times (October 3, 2000) showed that the state licensed hundreds of people with prior criminal convictions -- including rape and armed robbery -- and histories of violence, psychological disorders, and drug or alcohol problems.

James W. Washington got a license to carry a concealed weapon despite having done prison time in Texas for armed robbery. So did Terry Ross Gist, who left a trail of threats and violence in court records from North Carolina to California. A license also went to an elderly Dallas man with Alzheimer's disease. Still others committed crimes, ranging from double murder to drunk driving, after they were licensed. A frustrated commuter, Paul W. Lueders, shot and severely wounded a Houston bus driver. Audi Phong Nguyen ran with a Houston home invasion ring. Diane Brown James helped her husband kidnap a San Antonio woman to be their sex slave.

After five years, about 215,000 Texans were licensed to carry concealed weapons. The state conceded that more than 400 were licensed despite prior convictions, and more than 3,000 other licensees were since arrested. However, the state never released the names of individual problem licensees or any details of their crimes. The Los Angeles Times identified more than 200 of those people and examined their cases for the first time.

he Texas screening and license enforcement process was closed to public scrutiny and, by law, exempt from open record statutes. The state Department of Public Safety provided only lists with no names of those license holders subject to disciplinary action. Consequently, only a handful of licensees had previously been identified and publicly linked to crimes. But the Los Angeles Times investigation traced many of the most serious law violators. It relied on interviews, police reports, court records, and other public documents, as well as computer-assisted analyses of state and national databases.

The investigation also found that:

Because Texas authorities only have 60 days to conduct background checks, they routinely issued licenses before the process was completed. So far, retroactive revocation actions have been launched against the more than 400 who were licensed before out-of-state crime records caught up with Texas officials.

Background checks do not routinely include interviews with the applicant or with family and friends. State law requires only review of "local official records" and criminal history records. Applicants often do not want neighbors knowing they applied for the permit. "If there are no clues, no reasons to suspect a problem, then we don't go knocking on doors," said state police Major Lee Smith, whose troopers conducted the local checks.

Troopers do not routinely investigate an applicant's mental or medical history, beyond a search of local public records, unless suspicious information is found. Doctors and hospitals, concerned about patient privacy, also are reluctant to provide such information. Smith said, "Sometimes we get complete cooperation; sometimes not."

TORT REFORM. The second major confrontation that Bush had with the legislature centered on tort reform. The governor initially tried to cozy up to the two most experienced and powerful Democrats in the state: Dick Laney who was Speaker of the House and Bob Bullock, the Lieutenant Governor who ran the Senate. Between election day and January 1995 when Bush was sworn in as governor, he had met with nearly all the 181 members of the legislature.

The first confrontation with the Democrats came over the issue of tort reform which Bush referred to them as "junk lawsuits that clog our courts." After six weeks of haggling during mid-1995, the legislation came to a stand-still over the issue of punitive damages. Bush and the Republicans wanted a cap of $100,000 to be awarded to plaintiffs in the form of punishment. The Democrats wanted a maximum of $1 million. The two parties compromised at $750,000.

In his two terms as governor, Bush received $4.5 million from Texans for Lawsuit Reform and from the Texas Civil Justice League. This included $98,473 from the Texas Association of Realtors; $77,500 from the Texas Association of CPAs; and $60,500 from the Texas Medical Association. Bush supported Texas' lawsuit reform movement in his first administration by expediting measures to limit punitive lawsuits, making it difficult to sue doctors and businesses.

Farmers Insurance Group was the eighth largest contributor to Bush over his career. Bush received $4.5 million from Farmers' officers and board members of Texans for Lawsuit Reform and from the Texas Civil Justice League. Between 1996 and 1998, Texas insurances companies' profits reached a staggering $3 billion, while car insurance premiums for drivers continued to climb. Bush also signed legislation which made it more difficult for consumers to sue real estate agents as well as making it more problematic for them to collect damages when injured by more than one party.

WELFARE REFORM. Social programs took a beating during Bush's tenure as governor. During most of Bush's governorship, the welfare allowance in Texas was close to a nation-wide low -- just $188 a month for a woman with two children. It crept up to $201 on October 1, 1999. Since Bush took office, the welfare rolls were cut in half: from 760,000 to 380,000. But poverty continued to be one of the most crucial problems in Texas. Texas paid an average of $188 a month to poor families, one of the lowest in the country. Texas also ranked near the bottom in hunger and children without health insurance.

In 1995, Bush pushed for a two-year time limit -- "one strike and you're out" -- on welfare recipients, with no opportunity to reapply. That would have required anyone committing a felony or getting caught with drugs to be kicked off welfare permanently. The second, "full-family sanctions," would have seen to it that if a mother receiving welfare benefits failed to cooperate with authorities, her entire family would be cut off. In 1995 and 1997, Bush pushed for family caps, whereby families with two or more children would not receive additional assistance if they had another child.

The Texas legislature eventually passed a strict welfare-reform measure. It provided for three-year time limits and provisions that the able-bodied must work. It also extended the child-health-insurance program to 200,000 more children. Elliott Naishtat, a Democrat who chaired Texas' House committee on human services, said, "Bush invariably takes the non-compassionate path." Naishtat and other Democrats believed that the harshness of Bush's positions sprang from his concern for winning Republican presidential primaries.

In an interview with Time (February 22, 2000), Bush was asked why he supported the sternest welfare measures. The governor responded, "I don't buy the argument that old-style welfare programs are compassionate. Creating a sense of dependency is not compassionate"

In 1995, Bush vetoed a bill that would have established, at minimal cost to the state, a Food Security Council to gather information on hunger. Later in February 2000, he told Time, "I'm sure there was a valid reason why I did that. There's a lot of nice-sounding bills I have vetoed. I appreciate the kindness of the food-bank operators. I understand that the food banks are in some cases full. Seems like they're doing their jobs." Then he laughed.

In December 1999, the United States Department of Agriculture reported that Texas had the second worst hunger problem, with one million people going hungry each day. Bush showed his ignorance by dismissing that statistic by saying to a Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter, "I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry. "Where? I want to know the facts. I would like for the Department of Agriculture to show us who. Where are they?"

In 1998, state comptroller John Sharp issued a 200 page report that found the social conditions of the "colonias" -- the highly Latino Rio Grande region of Texas-- were deplorable. If that area were to become the fifty-first state, it would rank dead last among the states in poverty with a level of 29.5 percent; last in unemployment at 8 percent; last in adults with no high school diploma -- 37 percent; forty-fifth in college educated adults at 10.3 percent; forty sixth in average pay -- $22,541; forty-ninth in households with no telephone -- 87 percent; last in per capita income -- $15,570; third in single woman households -- 14.2 percent; third in percentage of foreign born -- 14 percent; and first in birth rate -- 21 births per 1,000.

HEALTH CARE. Bush boasted that he was responsible for implementing health care laws which benefitted everyone across the state. But a survey indicated that health insurance in Texas lagged behind almost every state in every category. According to a September 1999 Census Bureau study, 25 percent of Texans had no health insurance, the highest rate in the nation. And 1.4 million children in the state were not qualified. A study by Families USA in October 1999 revealed that the number of Texas children enrolled in Medicaid between 1996 and 1999 declined by 14 percent, one of the largest declines across the country.

In 1999, Bush proposed legislation to limit Texas' 600,000 children from low income families from qualifying for Medicaid. The governor declared that families below 150 percent of the federal poverty level would qualify for low cost health care through the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). CHIP received $2.84 in federal dollars for each dollar that the state of Texas spent. But the legislature wanted the eligibility set at 200 percent of the federal poverty level, allowing more of the state's poor children to qualify. The number of eligible children who would be given health insurance, using the 200 percent factor, was 500,000. But only 300,000 would qualify using Bush's 150 percent factor.

When Bush realized that the legislature would not deny the additional 200,000 children health insurance, the governor's office made it difficult for the families of the poor children to qualify. Bush tried to discourage children of low income families from health care by putting them through the difficult and complicated task of making appointments and filling out applications at Medicaid offices.

Towards the end of Bush's first term, the legislature with bipartisan support overwhelmingly passed the Patient Protection Act. The bill gave Texans a large array of rights against corporate medicine. It mandated that HMOs cover treatment at Houston's M.D. Anderson Cancer Hospital -- the only facility certified by the National Cancer Institute -- for treatment if coverage was not available elsewhere. In essence, the bill covered every citizen of the state who needed cancer care. It required annual HMO report cards, ordered HMOs to pay for needed emergency services, and barred "gag clauses" that prevent doctors from freely discussing treatment options with their patients. Eighty-four percent of the voters favored the bill.

However, Bush vetoed the bill. He said that it was "flawed," since it treated one group of HMOs one way and others another way. In his veto message, Bush said the measure imposed too many new regulations on managed-care organizations and could be too costly for employers. After vetoing the legislation, Bush instructed his insurance commissioner to issue regulations enacting some of the chief provisions. One of the bill's sponsors, Democratic State Senator Jim Turner, called Bush's veto "a big win for large insurance companies and a big loss for patients."

In 1997, the legislature passed another health care bill, a patients' bill of rights bill. The series of new bills including a new measure giving patients the right to sue HMOs for denying or delaying needed care, if that caused harm to patients. Although the liability bill included provisions protecting employers from being sued, it was "extremely anti-business," according to Texas Democratic representative Hugo Berlanga, chairman of the House Public Health Committee. Berlanga said he warned Bush not to be the second Republican governor in modern Texas history to have a veto overridden. Berlanga told Bush, "You cannot afford to veto this legislation." Berlanga said that "I pointed out the enormous coalition we had behind it, every medical provider group, every consumer group, the trial lawyers, organized labor. I laid out to him what it meant to him politically. He said, ‘Well, I kind of want to look at it.' "

The governor strongly considered vetoing it since it subjected HMOs to malpractice suits. Facing a veto that would not survive, he allowed the measure to become law without his signature. Bush said he was concerned "about opening the door to new tort actions." Given the choice between doing nothing and doing something to address a significant problem that impacts the health of thousands of Texans, I have concluded the potential for good outweighs the potential for harm." (Washington Post, February 17, 2000)

Even though Bush promised to make pharmaceutical drugs affordable throughout the 2000 campaign for the presidency, he signed legislation making it harder for Texas doctors to prescribe Warfarin, a cheaper generic version of a popular blood-thinning drug. The 1997 law was sought by DuPont Merck Pharmaceutical, the drug giant that manufactured the name-brand drug. DuPont tried to persuade states to block the new generic competition. Just three states, including Texas, adopted laws. In 1996 the Food and Drug Administration approved Warfarin. In 1999, Texas reversed course, agreed with the FDA that generic Warfarin was just as safe and effective as name-brand Coumadin whose patent expired in 1962. The drugs are taken by 2 million people -- mostly heart disease sufferers -- to prevent blood clots. Warfarin was sold for 40 percent to 50 percent less than the name brand.

Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett defended the governor in the Los Angeles Times (October 18, 2000), saying that Bush protecting patients. Bartlett said, "When we're talking about drugs that have the potential of life or death, we ought to have an extra safety measure for patients." But heart specialist Dr. Raymond Woosley, the chairman of the pharmacology department at Georgetown University School of Medicine, said, "It's pretty clear the FDA has gone to extensive lengths to verify the quality and standards necessary for generic drugs." And Gore spokeswoman Kym Spell commented, "When it comes to prescription drugs, Bush is proving he's cold-blooded."

TAXES. A major plank in Bush's campaign platform was to lower taxes. The funding of public education came from local property taxes which the new governor tried to slash. He claimed that he would save the average homeowner 40 percent by slashing property taxes $3 billion across the state. But to accomplish this, Bush had to take money from other sources. First, he asked the legislature to use the $1 billion budget surplus on education. Second, he was forced to raise sales taxes by one-half cent, making Texas' rate the second highest in the country. And third, he was compelled to levy a new tax of 1.25 percent business activity tax on partnerships which included lawyers, accountants, doctors, and other professional groups.

But the novice governor made a tactical mistake of failing to consult with the two leading Democrats in the legislature. Bush later told Time (February 21, 2000), "I was very aware what their reaction would be: ‘We need the (surplus) for other programs.' " Bullock and Laney were furious. Eventually, the Democrats in the House wrote a new bill which shifted billions in taxes from property owners to business. Bush corporate colleagues were angry that Bush supported the Democratic plan because he was concerned with preserving a tax cut based on the $1 billion surplus. Then the Senate passed its version of the tax bill.

Bush still lobbied for his plan which had the appearance of a tax cut. He called in 68 Republicans in the House, but he still was unable to garner enough votes from them to ensure its passage. Ultimately, Bush failed to reform the tax code, as he was forced to drop his proposal. He finally agreed on only one part of the legislation: to lower property taxes by $1 billion.

Months later, Bush tried once again for a tax cut. Both he and the legislature agreed on a referendum whereby $1 billion from the state budget would be used to increase exemptions for homeowners from $5,000 to $15,000. Then owners could deduct an additional $10,000 on the appraised value of their property. The ultimate savings to each landowner across the state was $140 a year. Only a handful of voters turned out for the election and passed the referendum by a 9-to-1 margin. As a result, 22 of the state's 35 largest school districts raised property taxes so funding for public schools would not drop. Yet Bush promoted himself as the governor who provided the largest single tax cut in Texas history.

As he had promised to do in his reelection campaign, Bush sought a second property tax cut of $2 billion. The Republican-dominated legislature lowered his proposal, and the two branches compromised on a $1 billion bill. Bush tried to take full credit by calling it a "substantial" tax reduction. The centerpiece of the legislation was a $3,000 a year tax raise for the state's teachers and an increase in education spending. The state cut property taxes by six cents per $100 value which resulted in a tax savings of $64 annually for a homes valued at $100,000. While wealthier Texans benefitted from the tax bill -- but only marginally -- the poorer ones who could not afford to buy homes were not affected.

Bush also called for $600 million in tax cuts for businesses and consumers. The legislature passed a bill which reduced business and sales taxes by $506 million over a period of two years, with the business community receiving 60 percent of the savings the second year.

The Texas oil industry also benefitted from Bush's tax plan. The new law authorized a seven month exemption from the 4.6 percent severance tax for marginal wells which produced under 15 barrels a day and small gas wells which produced less than 90,000 cubic feet per day in 1998. The 34 largest oil companies made up only one percent of the entire state's oil producers, but they controlled 25 percent of all the wells which were eligible for the tax savings. Chevron, Exxon, and other large oil corporations were the largest recipients of the severance tax exemption.

As a result of Bush's $1.7 billion tax cut in 1998, Texas legislators were forced to dip into the state's $1 billion surplus to balance the budget. By the summer of 2000, Texas was operating in the red as a result of miscalculations by two state agencies and an anticipated deficit in the Medicaid program. But the governor attempted to play down the problem, claiming that the deficits were due to unpredictable circumstances. The shortfall meant that as much as $610 million of the state's $1 billion surplus would be used to keep the overall $98.2 billion budget in the black. Because of the deficits, any future tax cuts in Texas were extremely unlikely.

The $360 million Medicaid deficit was largely due to rising prescription drug prices and increased enrollment that the Bush camp attributed to the Children's Health Insurance Program which provides benefits for children whose parents earn too much to receive state aid but not enough for private coverage. The rest of the shortfall was blamed on budget miscalculations by the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse and the Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation.

Lieutenant Governor Rick Perry, and Republican Senator Sen. Bill Ratliff, chairman of Senate Finance Committee, denied that the Bush-backed tax cuts were to blame. Quoted in the New York Times (July 12, 2000), Perry said, "We don't have a budget shortfall. I don't know where those words came from. We have a balanced budget."

EDUCATION. Bush bragged that his greatest achievement was in the field of education. A standard for judging educational achievement used by nearly every university has been the SAT test. Under Bush's tenure as Texas governor, the ranking of the state's students fell from forty- first to forty-second.

The Rand Corporation conducted a state by state analysis of scores from standardized tests that were given in math and reading from 1990 through 1996. According to the New York Times (August 7, 2000), the study found that the most important components in raising student achievement appeared to be smaller class sizes in early grades, a larger enrollment in prekindergarten classes, and improved classroom working conditions for teachers. The study compared scores from one state to another by students from similar socioeconomic backgrounds and found that youngsters in Texas did especially well. According to the Rnd report, "Texas was in the highest group of states and California in the lowest on scores for students from similar families."

Since this study dealt with the years 1990 to 1996, Bush could not take credit for this achievement. Furthermore, it always takes several years for students to realize the benefits from these kinds of reforms. The gains in Texas were no accident. When Mark White was governor in the 1980s, he got Ross Perot to lead an educational reform effort that led to both smaller classes and the most extensive public school pre-kindergarten program in the nation. Perot's effort also led to a the-allocation of more state funds especially for disadvantaged students. When Richards was governor in the early 1990s, she expanded this effort and offered some new initiatives.

But when Bush was elected in 1994, he had little or nothing to do with the gains reported in the Rand study. He did maintain a focus on education reform. He was responsible, for example, for a reading initiative.

In 2000, Texas ranked forty-ninth out of the 50 states in funding for students. In 1998 alone, he made 47 speeches on education, more than on any other subject. In 1998 Bush pledged that "every child in Texas is able to read by the end of third grade." Students had to pass the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test as well as a national academic skills examination to proceed to the next level, and social promotion is not permitted. The TAAS test was originally designed to measure how the state's schools compared with one another. It was not meant to be the judge as to whether students could continue on to the next grade level. But the problem was that all children did not test well. Some students were detained despite the fact that they did have the skills to be promoted, while others moved on merely because they passed the tests.

CHARTER SCHOOLS. Bush led the charge for the expansion of charter schools, calling in his 1997 State of the State address for the legislature to completely lift limits in the 1995 law that authorized the Texas' first charter schools. The governor often cited the charter schools opened during his tenure as models for the nation.

A pilot program of 25 charter schools was developed in 1995. They were free from state regulation and did not require teacher credentials. The next year, 17 charter schools were opened. Since the program appeared to be successful at the beginning, Bush pushed to expand the program two years later. After the state Board of Education approved more charter schools, 151 new ones opened within six months. By 2000, 163 charter schools were operating in Texas.

However, charter schools in Texas had not performed well according to two studies. According to the Washington Post (October 15, 2000), their students score, on average, nearly 20 points lower on state achievement tests than students in regular public schools. In addition, Texas charter schools shut down about twice as often as their counterparts across the country. The major problem with Texas' publicly funded, privately managed schools was their rapid expansion under Bush's tenure as governor. That led to managerial mistakes and educational shortcomings at many new schools.

Sixteen charter schools closed or gave up their charters without ever opening. Private operators hired inexperienced teachers and installed curricula poorly matched to state academic standards, according to the two studies and a charter school advocate. As a result, many students did not focus enough on mastering the material on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills. Additionally, there were no agencies overseeing the new schools. One charter school received state funds but never opened because its funds were spent on facilities and nothing was left over for students' needs. Four others never gave the state mandated TAAS test.

In 1994, just before Bush took office, 53 percent of all students passed the exam, including 31 percent of black students, 39 percent of Hispanic students, 37 percent of poor students, and 66 percent of white students. In 1997, a group of minority students sued the state, contending the assessment exam was discriminatory and that dropout rates among minority students were far higher than state officials reported. A federal judge ruled in 1999 that the test was fair. State officials claimed that less than 6 percent of Hispanic students dropped out of school in Texas, but the Intercultural Research Development Association in San Antonio said the rate is closer to 40 percent. Even if they made it to college, only 34.3 percent of Texas' Hispanics graduate with a bachelor's degree, compared with 56.5 percent of White students, according to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

CRIME. Texas has approximately 147,000 people in state prisons, the largest system of any state or country on the planet. Including those on parole, 545,000 people are in the system. For every 100,000 adults in the state, 700 of them are in jail. The national average is 452 per 100,000. Over 500 people are on Death Row in Texas. Four hundred and fifty of them are incarcerated in Texas. The state has executed over 200 people since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Texas has permitted the execution of mentally ill and retarded people.

In 1994, Bush campaigned on the issue of automatic parole with prisoners. Bush campaigned on the plank of ending automatic parole which required inmates to be released once their "good time" and actual time served equaled the number of years of their sentence. In his first year in office, Bush signed into law legislation that eliminated mandatory supervision only for those convicted of any crime after September 1, 1996 which was the day the law went into effect. Although Bush criticized Richards for being soft on crime, prison officials estimated that 70,000 felons already in prison were not covered by this "tougher" law and that soon they would be returned to society.

Bush campaigned against the state's drug treatment program in 1994. He vowed to take $25 million out of the program and use it to incarcerate more juveniles. A study in California showed that drug treatment programs have reduced addiction and even saved the state money. For every dollar spent on drug treatment, seven dollars are saved in reduced hospital fees and law enforcement costs.

Once elected, Bush did exactly what he had promised. The new law lowered the age from 15 to 14 at which a juvenile could be tried for capital murder and first degree felonies. The law also required one year minimum sentences for juveniles and increased the number of beds in correctional facilities by 2,360. It established a state-wide database of juvenile records and required that juveniles serve their time in state prisons for some repeat offenses.

In the summer of 1998, James Byrd Jr., a Black resident of Jasper, was dragged to his death. Texas' minority community -- Blacks, Latinos, and gays -- clamored for a law that made crimes against homosexuals and minorities a hate crime. A year later, the Hate Crimes bill was introduced to the Texas House. Bush voiced his opposition to it, saying simply that all crimes of violence are hate crimes. But when the House passed the bill, the governor said that he would consider it.

As soon as the bill was introduced to the Senate, Bush went to work to try to kill it at the committee level. The crime bill ended up stuck in the Criminal Justice Committee because the GOP members refused to accept gays and lesbians as special categories.

In the summer of 1999, Bush vetoed a bill which would have required each county to set up a system for appointing attorneys to represent indigent defendants. In Shrub, author Molly Ivins explained that Texas was the only state which has no system at all for meeting the constitutional requirement that indigent defendants be provided counsel. Instead, each district judge is in charge of appointing counsel for defendants in his or her court. And each judge may do whatever he or she wants in choosing attorneys.

Ivins pointed out that one attorney slept through the testimony of his client's case, and he was subsequently sentenced to be executed. Another court-appointed attorney met his client for the first time during jury selection and refused to consider the defendant's excuse. Defendants have spent numerous months in Texas jails without counsel.

The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that states had the jurisdiction in deciding if mentally retarded inmates could be executed. Subsequently, 12 of the states banned the execution of the mentally retarded. Texas retained its law of executing retarded individuals. Bush's gave a flippant response when asked about the Texas law, "I like the law the way it is now." The Texas legislature passed a bill, setting the IQ for retardation at 65, while the national average was 70. Bush promptly vetoed the bill.

Bush frequently boasted about the effective use of the death penalty in Texas. Over 100 executions were carried out under his watch. Texas has over 500 inmates on Death Row, the highest number in the nation. Public defenders are difficult to find to defend the accused, since they are paid low wages. Bush insisted that he reviewed every case carefully before an inmate was executed and that he was 100 percent positive that every person was guilty.

Texas received national attention in 1998 in the months before the execution of Karla Faye Tucker. Bush came on nation-wide television during prime time to announce that he would not issue a reprieve. This came at a time when it was already clear that Bush might seek the presidency. Tucker's emphatic apologies for her crimes and religious conversion in prison gave her celebrity status. She became the second woman executed in Texas since the Civil War and the third woman in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

In February 2000, Bush was confronted with a similar situation. Betty Lou Betts was convicted of killing her fifth husband. During her trial, her attorney did not fully review her case and failed to call some witnesses on her behalf. In addition, it has been reported that he had a severe drinking problem. Betts was the victim of incest at the age of five and encountered continuous abuse in her early years. She married her first husband at the age of 15. As in the Tucker case, it would have been politically suicide for Bush to issue a reprieve. The governor was in the middle of his campaign and trailing McCain in the bid for the GOP nomination. While campaigning just before Betts' execution date, Bush asserted that he reviewed every capital case thoroughly and was certain that "everyone executed has been guilty." He has said repeatedly that the only factors he considers are whether there is any doubt about the inmate's guilt and whether the inmate has had access to the courts.

Gore used the topic of crime at a May press conference to criticize Bush's record in Texas. The Los Angeles Times (May 3, 2000) reported the vice president's comments. The vice president charged, "George W. Bush slashed drug treatment programs and alcohol treatment programs for Texas prisoners. He even argued that, in his words, ‘Incarceration is rehabilitation.' That may be why recidivism has jumped ... in Texas since he took office to a level far above the national average." The Gore campaign pointed out that a report of the Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council said that the national recidivism rate was 33 percent. When Bush took office, it was 40 percent in his home state, and by 2000 it had increased to 50 percent. Bush's predecessor, Democrat Ann Richards, sought $380 million for the drug treatment of 14,000 Texan state prisoners, and Bush cut that figure to $188 million.

The Bush campaign disputed Gore's portrayal of the Texas record. Aides claimed that funding for drug prevention and treatment programs in prisons actually increased by nearly 50 percent. The Bush camp also pointed out that violent juvenile crime decreased 38 percent in Texas during Bush's tenure. Bush aides also contended that drug treatment in federal prisons dropped by one-third from 1991 to 1997, covering much of the Clinton administration.

When campaigning against Governor Ann Richards in 1994, Bush hammered her for vetoing a bill allowing Texans to carry concealed handguns. But then he made that very issue a centerpiece of his campaign which helped get him elected. After less than a year in the governor's mansion, Bush signed the concealed weapon bill, vowing to "make Texas a safer place." He also backed the NRA by passing legislation that made it difficult for cities to sue gunmakers.

In 1997, Bush signed a bill broadening the law, allowing concealed weapons in churches, hospitals, and amusement parks. Since that time, over 200,000 Texans received licenses to carry concealed handguns. State officials say extensive background checks on all applicants have kept nearly 3,000 felons, mentally ill applicants, and other ineligibles from getting the permits. However, since enacted into law, over 2,700 concealed-weapon holders have been arrested, including 27 for murder, 49 for sexual assault, and 8 for kidnapping. In one case, an Austin man with a permit chased a car burglar down the street for two blocks and then pulled out his gun and fatally shot him in the back.

Texas ranked second to last in the nation for per capita spending on indigent representation, higher only than that of North Dakota. Texas was one of only three states in the nation that provided no state funding for indigent defense. All such funding came from each of the state's 254 counties, contributing to a system with a range of laws that widely varied. Only a few Texas counties had a tax-supported public defender office. In addition, Texas was the only large state where populous cities such as Houston, in Harris County, had no public defender system. In most counties, including Harris -- which has sent more people to death row than most states -- lawyers were picked by individual judges to represent indigents on a case-by-case basis. Texas had no state-wide standards for qualifications.

BUSH'S LEGACY CONTINUES. After Bush left the governor's mansion, the Texas State Legislature began taking steps to upgrade the state's system of representing indigent criminal defendants. The reforms were much stronger than a set that Bush vetoed in 1999. Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit group, played a key role in advocating reform. In December 2000, Appleseed issued a detailed report saying that poor Texans charged with crimes frequently remained in jail for months without a lawyer and often received poor representation when they finally got one. More than 80 percent of defendants in criminal cases in Texas involved indigents. (Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2001)

As a result of the reform measures, an arrested person must be brought before a magistrate within 48 hours of arrest. For the first time in Texas, there would be time limits on how soon attorneys must be provided to indigents charged with crimes -- within 24 hours after appearing before a magistrate in large counties and within 72 hours in counties under 250,000 population. The measure also created a 12-member task force to establish for the first time state-wide standards for appointing defense attorneys. The bill provided that there could be three types of defense representation: a public defender system whereby acceptable attorneys would be chosen in rotation -- or some other acceptable system set up by judges and commissioners in a given county. Appointments would come from a list of qualified attorneys. Finally, it would be easier for defense lawyers to be reimbursed for investigative expenses and the use of experts such as psychiatrists. (Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2001)

THE DEATH PENALTY. Since reinstating the death penalty in 1976, Texas has executed 218 men and women, far more than any other state and about a third of the country's total. Since 1994 -- under Bush's administration -- there have been 134 executions, more than that of any governor in American history.

While Bush was convinced that executions should continue in Texas, a Columbia University study found that courts overturn death sentences in more than two-thirds of all capital cases. The New York Times (June 12, 2000) reported that Columbia University law professor James Liebman and two associates investigated nearly 4,600 capital cases that went through the state and federal appellate process between 1973 and 1995. In the vast majority of cases retried, the defendants were not resentenced to death. In addition only one of every 20 condemned prisoners was actually executed and their average wait on Death Row was nine years. The study showed that state courts initially overturned 47 percent of the death sentences after having found serious legal flaws. In the other 53 percent of capital cases, federal review courts discovered "serious error" -- meaning error serious enough to undermine the reliability of a verdict. Overall, there was a 68 percent reversal rate nation- wide.

The Columbia University study began in 1995. Of the 5,760 death sentences handed out between 1973 and 1995, the scholars reviewed 4,578 cases that have gone through appeals. They include three stages of review: direct appeals to state courts based on the trial record, and post-conviction reviews by state and federal courts, which deal with issues beyond the trial record including alleged misconduct or incompetent representation by defense lawyers. The study looked at all death sentence appeals since the start of the modern death sentencing era and available information on eventual retrials.

In the late 1990s and into the early months of 2000, DNA testing freed 72 inmates from prison -- eight from Death Row -- across the United States. Yet Bush continued to express his confidence in the fairness of his state's system, saying that there was no reason to follow the lead of Illinois Governor George Ryan. In January 2000 serious flaws in Illinois' system were revealed when 13 of the state's 26 inmates on Death Row were proven innocent. Consequently, Ryan declared a moratorium on executions. The governors of Indiana and Maryland ordered studies of their own systems, and measures have been proposed in Congress to reform or suspend the federal system.

Yet Bush's agenda continued to be one of denying inmates the opportunity to conclusively prove their innocence. He said that Texas has "adequately answered innocence or guilt" in its death penalty cases. When reviewing capital cases, the governor has said that he considers two questions: Is there any doubt about guilt? And, have courts reviewed all the legal issues in the case? Bush commented repeatedly on capital punishment: "Make it swift and sure." And he expressed to the American public on numerous occasions that he was "absolutely confident" that the inmates executed on his watch were all guilty.

Bush's adamant position in support of the death penalty goes back to his first year as Texas governor. In 1995, he signed a bill that streamlined the system for legal counsel on death-penalty appeals. He later opposed a legislative proposal to ban the execution of mentally retarded defendants, saying he believes that decision should be left to juries. The measure ultimately died.

In 1999, a bill to improve legal representation for the indigent passed the Texas legislature with ease. It allowed for counties to transfer appointment power to an authority created by county commissioners. Rural counties would band together and establish regional public defenders' offices with attorneys who specialize in criminal defense. However, Bush vetoed the bill.

Almost all of the 400-plus inmates on Death Row in Texas are too poor to afford an attorney. The appointment of defense attorneys was enacted during Bush's first year in office. Most experienced defense attorneys refuse to appointments, saying that caps on payment are only $7,500. In addition only a maximum of $2,500 can be used for investigators or expert witnesses -- only a fraction of the cost of a proper appeal. So indigent Death Row inmates are stuck with inexperienced as well as often incompetent attorneys.

In the case of Fredrico Martinze-Macias, an appointed defense lawyer failed to call alibi or expert witnesses and did not seek to impeach a key prosecution witness using her contradictory statements. Upon reviewing the case, a federal appeals court said that Texas had paid the lawyer $11.84 an hour and the state "got only what it paid for," the New York Times reported (June 12, 2000). Subsequently, Martinez-Macias was released after a grand jury concluded that there was not enough evidence to justify indicting him again.

Inmates on Death Row have virtually no opportunity to have their sentences commuted to life in prison. All the elected judges of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals are adamantly pro-death penalty and presumably appoint attorneys who they hope will speed up the process. Additionally, the governor can order the Board of Pardons and Paroles to conduct additional investigation of a case. The board has 18 members, all appointed by Bush. The board's procedures came under harsh criticism. According to the Chicago Tribune (June 11, 2000), one federal judge called them "appalling." The board's members do not hold public meetings while reviewing cases; they vote by fax; and they do not provide reasons for their decisions. In 1998, Bush discouraged a legislative effort that would have required the board to hold public meetings while considering clemency requests. That proposal never passed the legislature.

Even though convicted murderer Kevin Byrd was freed by Bush after DNA evidence showed he was wrongly convicted of rape, Newsweek (May 29, 2000) reported that the county clerk's office continued to destroy rape kits from 50 other old cases, citing an overcrowded storage space. Still Bush continued to refuse to offer an opinion on the DNA debate.

Serious flaws in Texas' Death Row cases remained virtually unknown to the public until June 2000. While the Texas media stayed mute on the issue, it took outside reporters from the Chicago Tribune finally exposed the outrageous flaws which included cases which were compromised on unreliable evidence, defense attorneys who were disbarred or reprimanded, atrocious defense efforts during sentencing, and questionable psychiatric testimony. Tribune reporters Steve Mills, Ken Armstrong, and Douglas Holt published a two-part series on June 11. Their investigation was the first comprehensive examination of every execution during Bush's administration through the spring of 2000. They examined trial transcripts, legal briefs, appellate rulings, and lawyer disciplinary records. They interviewed dozens of witnesses, lawyers, and judges. Bush declined to be interviewed by the Tribune reporters.

The Tribune reporters concluded the following:

In 40 of the 131 cases when inmates were executed under Bush's watch, there was no evidence whatsoever or only one witness during the trial's sentencing phase.

In at least 29 of the 131 cases, the prosecution presented damaging testimony from a psychiatrist who, based upon a hypothetical question describing the defendant's past, predicted the defendant would commit future violence. In most of these cases, the psychiatrist offered this opinion without ever examining the defendant. The American Psychiatric Association has condemned this behavior as unethical and untrustworthy.

In at least 23 of the cases, the prosecution's evidence at the trial or sentencing included a jailhouse informant.

In at least 23 cases, the prosecution presented a visual comparison of hairs, a kind of evidence so inexact that it is restricted or barred in many jurisdictions in the country.

In many of these 131 cases, the testimony of witnesses, experts, and lawyers were questionable. They included: a forensic scientist who was temporarily released from a psychiatric ward to provide incriminating testimony in a capital case; a pathologist who has admitted faking autopsies; a psychiatrist, nicknamed "Dr. Death," who was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association; a judge on Texas' highest criminal court who was reprimanded for lying about his background; and a defense attorney infamous for sleeping during trials.

In 34 of these 43 cases, the sanctioned attorney was disbarred, suspended or given a "probated suspension" which allows the lawyer to continue practicing if certain requirements were met. Most of the sanctioned attorneys in Texas were appointed by local judges to represent defendants too poor to hire their own lawyer.

Since Bush took office, the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas granted new trials in capital cases only eight times, and new sentencings just six times. Over that same period, it affirmed 270 capital convictions.

At least six defendants executed since Bush became governor were granted new trials by the court because of fundamental violations of their rights. But the court changed its mind and reinstated the conviction.

THE TEXAS COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS. The Chicago Tribune reported on the conservative make up of the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas. It was comprised of all Democrats before 1992. Since that time, all its judges were affiliated with the GOP. Judge Stephen Mansfield was elected to the court in 1994 even though he lied during his campaign about his background. He was once fined in Florida for practicing law without a license, and he claimed that he was a Texas native with extensive experience in criminal law. Actually, Mansfield was born in Massachusetts and his experience was chiefly handling insurance litigation. His duplicity was exposed before the election, but he won anyway. Mansfield was reprimanded by the State Bar of Texas. Then in 1998, he was arrested outside a University of Texas football game for scalping tickets. A court sentenced him to six months' probation, a fine, and community service. He remains on the court.

Judge Sharon Keller was elected with no prior judicial experience was elected the same month that Bush became governor. In April 2000 she ran for presiding judge and won the Republican primary. Of the eight cases since 1995 where the court has granted a new trial to a Death Row inmate, Keller on six occasions joined a bloc of judges voting to deny retrials. Those six cases were reversed for a variety of reasons, including misconduct by police and prosecutors.

Keller's most famous case involved Death Row inmate Roy Criner In January Keller told "Frontline" that there was a "possibility" that he was innocent but that it was not enough. She added, "At best, he made some people think that he might be innocent, but he didn't prove it." Keller voted with the majority of the Court of Criminal Appeals judges to refuse to grant a retrial to convicted rapist Roy Criner, even though DNA testing conducted after the trial showed the semen found in the victim was not his. In another case, Keller voted with the majority to overturn a judge's decision to grant new DNA testing to Ricky McGinn. Subsequently, Bush found it politically expedient to grant McGinn a 30 day reprieve so the tests could be done.

The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas also refused to grant new trials to Death Row inmates who were represented by an attorney who slept at trial. It refused relief to a defendant who, a psychologist testified, was more likely to commit future acts of violence because he is Hispanic. Even the state attorney general's office found that testimony objectionable.

In some cases where the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas ruled that trial errors were harmless and a conviction should stand, the evidence of the defendant's guilt was overwhelming. The court refused to grant new trials to Death Row inmates whose trials had been tainted with tainted testimony. After Cesar Fierro was confessed to killing an El Paso taxi driver after police across the border in Juarez, Mexico, raided his parents' house, held them captive, and threatened to torture his stepfather with electrical current from a generator attached to his genitals. At Fierro's trial, Juarez and El Paso police denied wrongdoing. But a police report found by Fierro's appellate attorneys showed El Paso police had lied when they claimed to know nothing about Fierro's parents being held.

Fierro's attorney appealed to the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas in 1996, stating that his confession had been obtained under disturbing circumstances. Both the prosecutor who put Fierro on Death Row and the district court judge who reviewed how the confession was obtained recommended a new trial. The assistant district attorney who prosecuted Fierro said in a sworn affidavit that he had come to believe that El Paso and Juarez detectives "colluded to coerce Fierro's confession."

At a hearing more than a decade after Fierro was convicted, District Court Judge Herbert Marsh determined that police had not told the truth and that there was a "strong likelihood" Fierro's confession was coerced. Yet Marsh ruled that Fierro should get a new trial.

The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas denied Fierro a new trial on a 5-4 vote. Judge Keller wrote the majority opinion, saying the court believed Fierro would have been convicted even without a confession, based upon on the testimony of one police officer.

While Texas' court system maintained its pro-death penalty stance, the United States Supreme Court prevented the execution of one of the state's Death Row inmates. In June 2000 the United States Supreme Court voted unanimously to keep the life of a Texas inmate Victor Saldano because of racially biased testimony in his case.

FLIMSY EVIDENCE IN CONVICTIONS. According to the Chicago Tribune, testimony from jailhouse informants played a role during the guilt or sentencing phase of at least 23 cases in which a defendant was executed under Bush. Seven jailhouse informants testified against David Wayne Spence at his 1984 trial for his alleged role in a triple slaying in Waco. The credibility of all seven informants, or jailhouse snitches, was suspect. One testified Spence admitted the murders during a jailhouse conversation, though Spence was not locked up at the time he allegedly confessed. Several later contended that investigators fed them details of the crime, showed them crime scene and autopsy photos, and the statements of other witnesses. Physical evidence found at the crime scene failed to implicate Spence. Even top police officials on the case said they doubted Spence was guilty. The trial the Waco chief of police and his lieutenant, who investigated the murders, testified that they did not believe that Spence was guilty.

Spence's two co-defendants claimed that they had helped him transport the dead bodies and dump them in a park. And seven jail house informants testified that Spence had admitted the murders while in jail. But they later swore that they had lied after being bribed and coached by police officer Truman Simons. One of them said, according to Rolling Stone (August 3, 2000), that Simons "would leave my wife and me alone so that we could have sex in the district attorney's) office. The only people who got privileges like this were the people who were going to testify against Spence at the trial."

The autopsy performed on one of those murdered did not show any bite marks. A new prosecutor discovered them almost a year alter. Spence's appellate lawyers commissioned an independent study of the bite marks by five experts. All expressed doubts that the marks were caused by a human.

Four people went separately to the police to say that they had heard a man taking credit for the murders. One mentioned details which no one else would have known, since they were not public record. This suspect had an eight year record of assaulting teenagers, and he was in the same park where the bodies were found. Additionally, hairs on two of the dead bodies were found all over the cloth which bound them. The jury was told that none of the hairs belonged to Spence. Yet he still was convicted and executed in April 1996.

David Wayne Stoker was convicted for the 1986 murder of a store clerk in Hale Center and executed on June 16, 1997. The gunman shot the clerk three times and stole $96. Five months after the murder, Carey Todd, a "witness" with a record of drug charges, went to police and identified Stoker as the killer. He also gave police the murder weapon. One month later, authorities arrested Stoker. The witness was paid $1,000 by a crime-stopper program and had drug charges against him dropped. The district attorney's investigator and the police gave false testimony.

A district court judge appointed Ronald Felty and Gary Taylor to defend Stoker. Records showed that Felty forged the signatures of two clients on a settlement check and then kept the money, He also pled guilty to felony charges for forging a judge's signature on a court order and falsifying a government document. He was sentenced to 5 years of community service. Felty later gave up his law license in the face of disciplinary action. Taylor had been a lawyer only 11 months when Stoker stood trial in October 1987.

During the trial, Todd testified that he received nothing for his testimony. Stoker's attorneys found documents that indicated the charges were dropped against Todd in exchange for his testimony. Those documents included a telephone message showing that Hale County district attorney called a Potter County prosecutor regarding Todd's case. The other prosecutor noted in his court file, "Dismissed: this defendant helped Terry McEachern D.A. solve a murder case." Riley Rogers, an investigator for the district attorney's office, took the stand and denied any knowledge of the $1,000 payment. The appeals team later uncovered bank records that linked the $1,000 payment to him.

There was more questionable evidence during the trial:

Todd also testified that Stoker had given him the murder weapon following the shooting. Stoker never disputed he had the gun at one point. He said he got it from Todd who asked him to repair it. Stoker said he then returned the gun.

Two other prosecution witnesses, Ronnie Thompson and his wife, Debra, testified that Stoker bragged about the murder. But later Ronnie Thompson said that his statement to police and his testimony were false.

Prosecutors claimed that a shell casing found in Stoker's car also linked him to the murder, but Stoker did not own the car when the crime occurred. Records showed that he bought it months later.

During sentencing, McEachern called Dr. James P. Grigson, the psychiatrist nicknamed "Dr. Death." Although Grigson never examined Stoker, he testified Stoker was a sociopath who would "absolutely" be violent again.

New evidence that would likely vindicate defendants has had no impact in court. In Stoker's case, his attorney presented Bush a lengthy and detailed petition for clemency, carefully outlining newly discovered evidence that showed Stoker might well be innocent. After James Beathard was convicted for his role in a 1984 triple murder, the prosecution's key witness recanted his testimony after trial, casting additional doubt on the case against him. Three members of the parole board recommended clemency for Beathard. Yet Beathard was executed in 1999. In the case of Jerry Hogue, a law enforcement officer urged Bush's office to order DNA testing before Hogue's 1998 execution, saying that it might help resolve lingering questions about Hogue's conviction for a 1979 murder.

In the cases of Beathard, Hogue, and Stoker, Bush denied their requests for a reprieve. He did not order additional investigation or request new tests, as he did in halting McGinn's execution. All three declared their innocence to the end.

Gary Graham was another Texas inmate who was convicted on questionable evidence. He was convicted in 1981 of killing a man during a supermarket robbery and executed on June 22, 2000. According to Time, (June 12, 2000), the only eyewitness, Bernadine Skillern, claimed that she saw him from a distance of 30 to 40 feet away in a dark parking lot. Three other witnesses were unable to make a positive identification of Graham. A store employee maintained that he saw the killer fleeing from the scene and said that it was not Graham, but he was not called to testify in court. Furthermore, none of Graham's fingerprints or DNA was found at the scene.

No physical evidence tied Graham to the killing, and ballistics tests showed that the gun he had when he was arrested was not the murder weapon. Graham argued that his lawyer during the trial, Ron Mock, should have introduced other witnesses who would say he was not the killer. But those witnesses initially told police they could not identify the killer, and prosecutors said they were not actual eyewitnesses. Mock has said Graham gave him no names of alibi witnesses before the trial. The lawyer said Graham told him only that he had spent the evening with a girlfriend whose description and address he could not remember.

Because of the flimsy evidence against Graham, Governor Ann Richards issued a 30 day reprieve. Eventually, Graham was sentenced to die in June 2000. Bush, Richards' successor, claimed that Graham's case had been reviewed by 33 judges in 19 years. Bush's office said that Texas law prohibits granting two 30 day reprieves, but nothing was said about two different governors granting a reprieve. Preceding the 11th-hour legal maneuvers, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected by a 17-3 vote Graham's request for a 120 day reprieve. The 18 member, Bush-appointed panel, with one member absent from the vote, also voted 12-5 against a commuted sentence and 17-0 against a pardon. A few hours later, the United States Supreme Court rejected Graham's appeal on a 5-4 vote. Soon after Graham's execution, Bush asserted, "Mr. Graham has had full and fair access to state and federal courts. After considering all the facts, I'm confident justice is being done."

The Chicago Tribune also cited cases where questionable testimony of "hair analysis" experts was used to send inmates to Death Row. Despite its unreliable history, visual hair comparisons were used in Texas courts as the main evidence by prosecutors in at least 23 cases where a defendant was later executed under Bush. A study examined 62 convictions nationally where a convicted defendant was cleared by DNA and found that in 18 prosecutors had used hair analysis to help win the original conviction.

THE CONVICTION AND EXONERATION OF ROY CRINER. Roy Criner was another defendant who was convicted on the basis of no physical evidence. He was convicted in 1990 of raping and killing a 16-year old Texas girl. The victim, Deanna Ogg, had last been seen at a convenience store where she said she was on her way to a party. Her body was found along a country road. At his trial, no evidence was introduced linking Criner to the crime. Even a guard testified that Criner had never left the logging camp.

Criner's prosecution was based largely on statements to police by several of his co-workers who said that, about the time Ogg's body was found, Criner had boasted of having had sex with a drunken girl he had picked up. The police also theorized that a screwdriver found in Criner's pickup was the murder weapon. But no blood, fingerprints, hair samples, or other physical evidence was found placing Criner at the crime scene or suggesting that the victim had been in his truck. And no one saw Criner leave the area where he had been piling logs. Furthermore, some evidence even pointed away from Criner's involvement in the crime. The tire tracks at the crime scene, for instance, showed a vehicle with single-wide tires. Criner's truck had double-wide wheels.

At his trial, Criner's lawyer put on no defense, believing that the jury would acquit his client because of the lack of evidence. In his closing argument, the prosecutor focused on a series of comparisons. Criner said he had picked up a hitchhiker. Deanna Ogg was a hitchhiker. She was killed with a sharp object. Criner was carrying a sharp object. The jury found Criner guilty in 1990 and he was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Two years later, in a rare move, a judicial panel in Beaumont overturned Criner's conviction on grounds that there was literally no evidence of his guilt. Prosecutors appealed, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the ruling and upheld the conviction. Criner's family hired Charlton, a Houston defense lawyer, to review the case. In 1997, he persuaded investigators to run a DNA test on a semen sample found on the victim. The test cleared Criner.

In response, a judge ruled that Criner was entitled to a new trial. But prosecutors appealed again and, in a remarkable ruling, the state's highest court, in a 6-3 decision, upheld the conviction again. According to the Los Angeles Times (July 29, 2000), Judge Sharon Keller, writing for the majority, said that the DNA results did not "mean he didn't have sex with her." She suggested Criner could have used a condom and that the girl had sex with another person about the same time. The dissenters ridiculed the notion as preposterous, but the 1998 ruling kept Criner in prison.

But Bob Burtman, a reporter for the Houston Press, and the PBS program "Frontline" focused renewed attention on the case. The reporter and a new investigator hired by the Criner family noted that a cigarette butt was found at the scene and a test conducted on the cigarette found DNA from the same person who raped Deanna Ogg. This latest evidence convinced the prosecutor and the police that Criner should be released.

Finally, on July 28, 2000, Texas prosecutors agreed that Criner should be released from prison -- eight years after a judge ruled that he had been wrongly convicted of rape and murder and three years after a DNA test showed he was innocent. Michael Charlton, Criner's attorney, said, "Some people are saying this shows the system works, but I fail to see it. The system failed in this case."

On August 14, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 18-0 in favor of pardoning Criner. A day later, State District Judge Mike Mayes granted him a personal recognizance bond, and he was finally released on August 15, 2000 after serving over a decade in prison. Subsequently, Bush issued a pardon to Criner as well as to Ronnie Mark Gariepy who was convicted in Hutchinson County of sexual assault. This brought to 18 the number of pardons that Bush had issued during his first six years in office. Five of those pardons, including these last two, were "pardons for innocence." Criner was subsequently executed in October.

INEXPERIENCED AND INCOMPETENT DEFENSE ATTORNEYS. The Chicago Tribune(June 11, 2000) also reported on the shoddy behavior and the inexperience of defense attorneys during trials and hearings. In 1985 a Texas judge appointed Jose Luis Pena, an attorney for only 17 months, to represent Davis Losada who was charged with raping and killing a 15 year old girl. He was convicted and executed in 1997. The list of the state's 100 attorneys includes four who have been sanctioned for various forms of misconduct.

Pena later admitted that his work suffered from a conflict of interest because he had briefly represented the key witness against Losada. The testimony of the witness was crucial to the prosecution's case, but Pena asked him only one question on three occasions on cross-examination. Three years before Losada's execution, Pena was disbarred for pocketing money that belonged to clients, records showed.

In a capital case involving a sleeping defense attorney, Calvin J. Burdine was convicted and sentenced to die for a 1983 murder despite. His defense lawyer slept through significant portions of the trial. Burdine was convicted of murdering his former roommate, W.T. Wise, whose body was found in the bedroom of a trailer with two stab wounds in the back, hands tied with a cord. Burdine conceded that he and a friend went to rob Wise. But Burdine denied participating in the killing. His co- defendant, Douglas McCreight, pled guilty to a lesser charge and was paroled after eight years, even though evidence introduced at the trial pointed to him as the principal perpetrator.

In 1994, investigators interviewed jurors and the court clerk while preparing to raise a constitutional challenge to the conviction and death sentence. They were told that Cannon had slept and they raised the issue in legal briefs. In 1995, Jay Burnett, a Texas state judge, ordered a new trial for Burdine, citing Cannon's failure to stay awake during the trial. That judge agreed with the testimony of the court clerk. The Los Angeles Times (June 6, 2000) reported her testimony. She said that Cannon "fell asleep for long periods of time during the questioning of witnesses." The clerk, Rose Marie Berry, said that in one instance Cannon's head was tilted downward and he was asleep "for about 10 minutes ... at least 10 minutes" in the longest incident that she remembered. However, she said there were "lots of incidents" when Cannon dozed off for shorter periods. Nonetheless, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overruled that decision, saying only that Burdine had not met the standard set in 1984 by the United States Supreme Court for "ineffective assistance of counsel."

In September 1999, a federal district court judge in Houston overturned Burdine's conviction and death sentence. In that decision, Judge David Hittner disagreed with the earlier verdict and ruled that it was clearly prejudicial if an attorney was sleeping through substantial portions of a trial.

During a presidential debate in Los Angeles on March 2, 2000, a day after Hittner released Burdine because state lawyers missed a deadline in the case, Bush was asked about Burdine's trial. While smirking before a television camera, Bush responded that Hittner's decision showed that "the system worked."

The Burdine case reached the United States 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. Attorneys for the Texas attorney general's office conceded that Cannon repeatedly slept through parts of his trial. But they claimed that the conviction should stand anyway because an attorney's work should be considered adequate unless it can be proved that a defendant was specifically harmed by his lawyer's failure to stay awake. The state acknowledged that the defense lawyer slept for 10 or 20 or 50 minutes at a time. In October, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in a 2-to-1 vote ruled that Burdine received a fair trial despite charges that Cannon fell asleep at least 10 times during the proceedings. The majority ruled, according to the Los Angeles Times (October 28, 2000), that from the trial record, "it is impossible to determine -- instead, only to speculate -- that counsel's sleeping" actually hurt Burdine's case. In a stinging dissent, appellate Judge Fortunato Benavides, an appointee of President Clinton, said, "It shocks the conscience that a defendant could be sentenced to death under the circumstances surrounding counsel's representation of Burdine."

In a similar death penalty case, George McFarland was accused of a $27,000 robbery and murder of a neighborhood grocery owner in 1991. A friend advised him to hire long-time criminal lawyer John E. Benn. Since Texas has a reputation for appointing lawyers who move cases along rapidly and often had greater loyalty to the jurists than to their clients, McFarland decided to hire a lawyer on his own. Benn was 72 years old and had not handled a capital murder trial for at least 19 years. After accepting the case, he did not examine the crime scene, interviewed no witnesses, prepared no motions, did not request that any subpoenas be issued, relied solely on what was in the prosecutor's file, and visited his client only twice. During the 17 day trial, Benn fell asleep on several occasions. Benn was convicted and sentenced to die.

Kenneth and Shirley Kwan were the owners of the C&Y Food Center. He and the security guard went to the bank in Kwan's van and picked up $27,000 in cash. When they returned to the grocery store, Kwan, carrying the money, got out on the driver's side. A man carrying a large plastic bag walked out of a laundermat next door to the market. He walked past Kwan and headed towards the security guard. The man pulled out a handgun, put it to the security guard's head, demanded the money, and then shot Kwan. Nine months later at the trial, Powell could not identify the defendant as the killer.

Carolyn Bartie, an employee for the police department, turned out to be the key trial witness. She was sitting in her car outside the market when Kwan and Powell pulled up. Bartie said that the man who had been carrying the plastic bag fired at Kwan and then directed another man, wearing a ski mask, to enter the store and get the moneybag Kwan was holding. As Kwan lay dying inside the store, the two perpetrators ran toward a waiting car with the money and sped off. Soon thereafter, the police recovered a stolen vehicle several blocks away that they believed had been used in the robbery. No fingerprints were recovered from the vehicle, and the gun was not found in it. That day, Bartie told detectives that everything happened so fast she did not think that she could identify the man with the plastic bag and the handgun, according to police reports. But a month later, Bartie tentatively identified McFarland as that man from a police department photo spread of six individuals. She subsequently picked him out at a lineup and identified him at trial. During his brief cross- examination, Benn asked Bartie how she had been able to identify McFarland more than a month after she told police she could not. She responded that she simply had been "scared" at the time. But Benn neglected to ask Bartie anything about the major discrepancies between McFarland's appearance and her initial description of the gunman. Nor did the defense attorneys point out the discrepancies in size and skin shade during their closing arguments.

The other key witness at the trial was McFarland's 20 year old nephew, Craig Burks. Three days after the murder, Burks called the Houston "Crime Stoppers" line and told police he had information on the case. He also testified at a grand jury several months before the trial. The night of the murder, Burks testified at trial, McFarland, driving a new car and carrying a wad of bills, told him and Burks' uncle, Walter Burks, that he had participated in a robbery at the store. At one point in the testimony, Craig Burks said McFarland told him that he "shot the dude, the Chinese guy." But when the prosecutor asked if McFarland told him why he fired, Burks contradicted himself, saying McFarland told him that it was another man, Albert Harris, who shot Kwan. Melamed attempted to shake Burks on cross-examination by repeatedly asking him about the fact that "Crime Stoppers" had paid him $900 for the tip. He also pressed Burks about the fact that he was offered a reduced sentence on an aggravated robbery in return for his testimony. Burks insisted that he was telling the truth. Melamed did not question Burks on his contradictory statements about who fired the gun -- which repeated the same contradiction he had made in his grand jury testimony. Moreover, Melamed did not ask Craig Burks about something that McFarland's new lawyers say may be even more important: Walter Burks had told the grand jury that McFarland had not said he participated in the robbery-murder.

Police never charged Harris, or another man, Michael Clark, who Craig Burks testified was the chief planner of the robbery. Clark was the acquaintance who recommended Benn to McFarland, according to several attorneys in Houston. The defense called no witnesses and the jury deliberated only 80 minutes before convicting McFarland.

In the punishment phase, prosecutors called 20 witnesses over a 3 ½ hour period in an effort to show that McFarland, if allowed to live, posed a continuing threat to society. Only three witnesses were called by McFarland's attorneys, and they were on the stand for only 15 minutes. Subsequently, McFarland hired new lawyers who eventually sought a new trial through a writ of habeas corpus in 1997.

Months after the trial ended in 1991, Benn was asked at a court hearing about his sleeping episodes. He responded, "I'm 72 years old. I customarily take a short nap in the afternoon." Five years later, juror Mary Louisa Jensen said in an affidavit, "Benn slept during great portions of the witness testimony. It was so blatant and disgusting that it was the subject of conversation within the jury panel a couple of times."

According to Doug Shaver, who prosecuted 18 murder cases as an attorney and presided over dozens while on the bench, was interviewed in June 2000. He was quoted in the Los Angeles Times (July 15, 2000) as saying, "I knew John Benn. I knew he wasn't competent. He added that Benn had the appearance of "a heavy drinker. His clothes looked like he slept in them. He was very red-faced; he had protruding veins in his nose and watery red eyes. I can't imagine anyone hiring him for a serious case." So Shaver appointed a second lawyer, Sandy Melamed, to assist Benn.

But Melamed never visited the crime scene and he interviewed no witnesses. Moreover, the two never worked as a team. They did not hold strategy sessions and, except in one instance, did not decide in advance who would cross-examine each prosecution witness. Melamed said that since Benn slept while a number of those witnesses were on the stand, he wound up doing much of the cross- examination himself. According to their own testimony, the two attorneys spent a total of 10 hours preparing for the capital case.

The trial transcript showed that in Benn's brief cross-examination of the key witness, he did not ask her about a sharp difference between McFarland's appearance and her initial description of the murderer. The day of the shooting, she told police the suspect was 5 feet 7 to 5 feet 8, weighed 140 to 150 pounds, and had medium-brown skin. McFarland is 6 feet 1, weighs about 200 pounds, and is very dark-skinned. Moreover, Benn never arranged for any of McFarland's relatives to testify on his behalf. Additionally, Benn failed to take up the offer of a lawyer who had previously represented McFarland, and served as best man at his wedding, to testify as a character witness.

Another prime example of poor legal counsel occurred during the trial of Ricky McGinn, convicted of raping and killing his stepdaughter. Asserting that he was framed, McGinn said that the bloody hammer was not found during repeated searches of his truck by sheriff's deputies. In addition a trial witness testified that the murder victim's body was not in a culvert when authorities claimed that it should have been there. Furthermore, testimony about the time of the death should have eliminated him as a suspect because he already was in custody.

Just two weeks before McGinn's date with death, his attorney, Richard Alley, filed a request that a pubic hair found inside the victim and a possible semen stain be tested. McGinn did not have the benefit of the latest genomic and mitochondrial DNA tests at a price tag of only a few thousand dollars. That would have proven his guilt or pointed to another assailant with one billion to one certainty. Alley was unfamiliar with key details of his own client's case. Newsweek examined documents from the State Bar of Texas and found that on two occasions Alley had been publicly reprimanded. In 1985, the state bar said he "knowingly used false evidence" and "knowingly made false statements of fact." In 1992, he was cited by the bar for "failing to properly safeguard the property of a client." For his part, Alley denied inadequate representation and said that clients were often unhappy with their lawyers. It finally took an unpaid independent investigator from Indiana, Tina Church, to notice months earlier in January that McGinn's 1994 DNA tests had been "inconclusive" and that new DNA analysis could yield new evidence. Acting in a politically expedient manner, Bush offered his first reprieve as governor, giving McGinn's defense 30 days to prove his innocence. Naturally, Bush denied that politics influenced him in his decision, although according to Newsweek (June 12, 2000), 59 percent of those polled thought so.

Two weeks after Bush issued the reprieve, the tests by the FBI concluded that McGinn or a maternal relative was the source of a pubic hair found inside the body. The report also noted that no member of McGinn's family was linked to the case.

The Chicago Tribune investigators also unearthed evidence which showed more unconscionable behavior by defense attorneys. Ronald Mock, who was disciplined five times, represented three defendants who were executed under Bush. Mock and another attorney, Walter Prentice, each served jail time after being held in contempt for mishandling criminal cases. Like Mock, Prentice represented three defendants executed under Bush. In each case, Prentice was appointed to handle the defendant's direct appeal.

Joe F. Cannon, a Houston attorney who died in 1998, was infamous for sleeping during trials and speeding through cases to please judges with heavy backlogs, according to affidavits filed by other attorneys. Cannon was never sanctioned.

He was the court-appointed attorney for three men executed under Bush. In Willie Williams' case, Cannon's appointed co-counsel at trial was Mock. Cannon and Mock never checked the full written statement of an eyewitness whose testimony could have been helpful to the defense. After Williams was sentenced to death, Cannon and a second attorney -- who would later be diagnosed as mentally ill and suspended in Virginia -- were appointed to handle William's direct appeal. They filed a three- page brief in which they said they had reviewed the trial and concluded there were no issues worth arguing.

After a United States Supreme Court decision in 1991, Texas changed its sentencing rules to allow jurors to take into account any evidence that might reduce "the defendant's moral blameworthiness." Records showed that of the 134 inmates executed under Bush, 115 were sentenced before the new law took effect, meaning they were condemned at trials where jurors were restricted in considering a defendant's background as cause for mercy. Terry Washington was executed in 1997. His attorneys never presented evidence to the jury showing Washington had been born with fetal alcohol syndrome and was brain-damaged and mentally retarded. He could not count or tell time and was described as having the mental capacity of a seven year old.

In March 1997, the court appointed attorney David K. Chapman to represent Death Row inmate Leonard Rojas, even though the state bar had twice given Chapman probated suspensions. A year earlier, Chapman received a probated suspension for four years because he failed to withdraw from a case even after his "mental or psychological condition materially impaired his fitness to represent his client," according to disciplinary records obtained by the Chicago Tribune. In 1995, Chapman received a probated suspension for neglecting legal matters entrusted to him by three clients. And he received a third probated suspension just nine days after being appointed to handle Rojas' final appeals.

A lawyer for only three years, Robert McGlohon was appointed in April 1996 to handle Ricky Kerr's state habeas corpus petition. However, McGlohon filed only one claim -- a perfunctory challenge to the law itself -- rather than raise substantive issues that might have entitled Kerr to a new trial. According to Texas law, that meant Kerr forfeited the right to raise other issues later. The court denied Kerr's appeal as well as rejecting a request for another lawyer and a new appeal. According to a sworn affidavit obtained by the Chicago Tribune, McGlohon admitted, "It may be that I was not competent to represent Mr. Kerr." Two days from his scheduled execution, Kerr was granted a stay of execution by a federal judge. He remains on Death Row and is continuing to appeal his case.

RACIAL BIAS. Allegations of racial bias surfaced in the case of Jessy San Miguel who admitted to the slaying of four people in a Taco Bell restaurant in 1991 when he was 19. In early 2000, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected a clemency request, 18 to 0. Several months later, the New York Times (June 29, 2000) reported the claim by Texas attorney general's office that race may have played an improper role in as many as half a dozen Texas death penalty cases.

A spokesman for the Texas attorney general’s office said San Miguel’s case was far different from the ones that they agreed to review. It was determined that an expert witness for the state had erred in telling jurors in several trials that Latinos and Blacks were more likely to be dangerous in the future than whites. San Miguel’s defense attorney, not a state witness, made most of the allegedly biased statements. San Miguel’s case was not made by an expert witness who would carry more credibility with jurors.

Consequently, San Miguel's lawyers scrambled to take advantage of the admission to prove that their client also suffered from references to his Latino heritage during trial. San Miguel's attorneys argued that the prosecutor during the 1991 trial made a reference to San Miguel's Latino heritage by criticizing "those that cross the border and commit crimes." The Dallas County district attorney's office disputes that, saying the reference was to Taco Bell commercials at the time that urged patrons to "run for the border."

In late June, the United States Supreme Court rejected San Miguel's appeal, thus leaving his fate in the hands of the Texas governor. Danalynn Recer, one of San Miguel's lawyers, appealed to Bush for a 30 day reprieve to allow the courts to consider the role that San Miguel's race may have played in convincing jurors to sentence him to death. Recer said, "He (Governor Bush) has to realize he has to be consistent. You can just take an occasional case and make a statement about race. Everything in the death penalty is about race."

Charles Kamasaki, senior vice president for the National Council of La Raza, was quoted in the New York Times (June 29, 2000): "The level of disparity in the system is getting to the point where you're beginning to see a groundswell of protest and concern."

On August 9, Texas Oliver Cruz, a Latino, became the 139th Death Row inmates executed under Bush's watch. Cruz was convicted of raping and killing a 24 year-old Air Force linguist, He claimed that alcohol and LSD abuse, not retardation, for the attack. But Cruz's IQ was tested as low as 63 -- under 70 which is considered at least mildly retarded. But prosecutors note Cruz has scored above 70 before. Cruz's appeal to the United States Supreme Court centered around the complaint that the jury was not given enough information about his life-long mental impairment.

PSYCHIATRISTS AND CORONERS SIDE WITH THE PROSECUTION. The June 2000, a Chicago Tribune series (June 11, 2000) on capital punishment also cited several cases where questionable behavior of psychiatrists helped send inmates to Death Row. Perhaps the most controversial figure was James Grigson, a Dallas psychiatrist known as "Dr. Death." Grigson was reprimanded twice in the early 1980s by the American Psychiatric Association. He was expelled from the group in 1995 because it found his testimony unethical and untrustworthy. In the mid-1970s through the late 1980s, Grigson helped send scores of people to Texas' Death Row. Grigson repeatedly claimed that he could predict that defendants would be violent again -- even though in many of those cases Grigson never even examined the defendants. Instead, he responded to hypotheticals posed by prosecutors in which they described a defendant's criminal history. Grigson charges $150 an hour, and in the 1980s he was in such demand from prosecutors that he usually earned more than $150,000 a year. Throughout his career, he testified in a total of 166 capital cases of which 16 were under Bush's administration.

Another psychiatrist, E. Clay Griffith, often testified along the same lines as Grigson -- making predictions without examinations. Danny Lee Barber was rated a "10 plus" -- on a scale of 1 to 10 -- with 10 representing the worst kind of sociopath.

Prosecutors used "hair analysis" expert Charles Linch in two cases to send a defendant to Death Row. Earlier in 1994, he was committed to a psychiatric ward for bouts with depression and drinking. Even though he was considered a danger to himself and others, he was temporarily released to provide incriminating hair analysis testimony against Kenneth McDuff who subsequently was convicted and executed in 1998. The prosecution did not disclose Linch's mental status to the defense who easily could have challenged his credibility.

In another blow to death penalty advocates, the Texas State Attorney General conducted a two month investigation of Walter Quijano, a clinical psychologist served as an expert witness for prosecutors across Texas in sentencing hearings. Cornyn's office concluded that Quijano had provided similar, racially charged expert testimony in six other cases of inmates on Death Row. Cornyn said that his staff had reviewed the files of the 218 inmates executed in Texas since 1982 and found that none of those executions were based on "this kind of testimony by Dr. Quijano," according to the New York Times (June 10, 2000). However, the district attorney announced that six other convicted killers -- John Alba, Carl Henry Blue, Eugene Alvin Broxton, Duane Buck, Gustavo Julian Garcia, and Michael Dean Gonzales -- would likely have their death sentences overturned for the same reason.

Coroner Dr. Ralph Erdmann, a felon himself, testified for the prosecution in six cases, resulting in the their execution while Bush was governor. In 1994 he pled no contest to seven felonies revolving around falsified evidence and botched autopsies. As a result, Erdmann lost his medical license. He once claimed to have examined organs that had been removed in surgery years before the victim's death. He also claimed to have examined a woman's brain, but there was no incision in her head.

ENVIRONMENTALISM. Texas has led the nation in over 10 categories of dangerous air pollutants, including toxic releases and carcinogens in the air. It ranks first in the nation in major discharge facilities -- 575 major ones -- with Pennsylvania coming in second with 390 plants. Texas ranks second in total number of Nipdes facilities -- 5,700. Even though Texas is the second largest state, it has limited water resources. Texas has 190,000 miles of rivers, but only 40,000 of them flow 365 days a year. 7.5 percent of the areas -- classified segments -- are designated for specific purposes such as water supply and recreation. Beginning in Bush's first year as governor, the state's monitoring stations decreased by 24 percent. Before Bush was elected, 72.2 percent of the water areas met the qualifications for designated use. Two years after he was elected, that figure dropped to 67.9 percent. During the 1994 election, 87 percent of the designated reservoirs were functioning for that purpose, but two years later only 78 percent were being maintained for water consumption.

The April 1999 Observer reported that Texas environmental groups moved into the number one slot as the nation's most polluted city. The Environmental Protection Agency concluded that Texas led the nation in most categories of dangerous air pollutants, and its problems are worsening. This charge was refuted by the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (TNRCC) which operates with 2,800 employees on a $395 million annual budget. The TNRCC acknowledged that after 27 years, it could not even reach a conclusion of actual amount of unregulated pollution. Bush sided with the TNRC and the Texas industries, and he flippantly explained that any problems could be rectified by asking the corporations accused of excessive polluting to volunteer to reduce their toxic emissions.

Texas' laissez-faire attitude toward industrial pollution dated back long before Bush became governor in 1994. As governor, Bush not only did little to change Texas' policies, but he protected the state's industries from spending money to clean up their plants. According to Neil Carmen, who authored Grandfathered Air Pollution: The Dirty Secret of Texas Industries in April 1998, the state of Texas virtually ignored its major problem of industrial pollution.

Bush tried to downplay his state's dreadful record. In an October 1999 speech, the governor noted that industrial emissions in Texas declined 10 percent since he took office. According to the Los Angeles Times (February 25, 2000), Bush said that he was "proud of this record but not content." His aides boasted that if the new proposals are enacted, his administration would do more to control smog than any of his predecessors in Texas. One Bush adviser said, "Environmentalists should be praising Governor Bush for his efforts to significantly reduce industrial emissions instead of polluting his record." The same year that the 1972 Clean Air Act was passed, the Texas legislature "grandfathered" large industrial plants, granting them permission to continue emitting their 1972 levels of pollution.

The 1971 Texas Clean Air Act included an number of exemptions which allowed major corporations to continue their policy of continuing to emit toxic materials. When the state legislature passed the law, industrial plants in operation or under construction as of September 1971 were exempted from formal permitting requirements. Under the Clean Air Act, the industries were compelled to upgrade or replace their facilities over an unspecified period of time, and then they would become subject to the permitting process. But since profit is the underlying motivation, the industrial plants refused to comply to the regulations.

In early 1997, Bush held a series of secret meetings with the leading polluters in the gas, oil, and chemistry industries. The meetings were made public in mid-1999 only after activist Peter Altman filed an open-records request. On March 31, 1998, Bush appeared at a news conference with executives from Exxon, Amoco, and Texas Utilities, and he announced that 26 companies representing 831 pollution-producing plants across the state pledged to reduce emissions by 15,000 tons a year.

At a April 2, 1998 hearing in the Texas legislature, the commissioner of the TNRCC, Robert Marquez, was asked to estimate the annual tonnage of federally defined pollutants which was not regulated by the state of Texas since the ratification of the Clean Air Act. Marquez said that it was impossible to give an estimate until another survey was made in late 1998.

However, Carman contended that grandfathered industrial pollution was much greater than the state estimated and that it was the major contributor to Texas' increasing air pollution problem. Carmen was an inspector for the TNRCC from 1980 to 1992 until he left because of its failure to enforce Texas law. He maintained that the state's corporations used exemptions to avoid complying to the Clean Air Act.

The Clean Air Act allowed more than 1,000 of Texas 2,500 industrial plants to avoid compliance under its grandfather clause. The major beneficiaries of this provision were electric power utilities and oil and gas refineries. The top 12 polluting companies accounted for 34 percent of the state's outlawed air pollution under the Clean Air Act. All of Texas' top 30 companies -- including Texas Utilities, Exxon, Alcoa, Phillips/GPM, Shell, Mobil, Amoco, and Dow Chemical -- were protected under the grandfathering section. In all, 916 of the state's 1,070 industrial plants which were examined, were protected under the grandfathering section. These 1,070 plants emitted as much nitrogen oxide, a principle contributor to smog, as approximately 20 million automobiles. Time(February 21, 2000) reported that by 1996, Texas' environmental officials concluded that 36 percent of all industrial pollution in the state came from 830 plants which had been grandfathered.

According to data from the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, the Shell/Deer Park refinery near Houston was one of the state's largest polluters. The plant emitted 17,520 tons of sulfur, nitrogen, and organic gases in 1998. That was about five times more than a similar refinery spews into the air. In 1998, for each barrel of crude oil processed, Texas refineries emitted three times more pollution-forming gases than Southern California refineries, which used to lead the nation in sending chemicals into the atmosphere.

Carmen researched the TNRCC's records of major non-permitted emissions sources and then studied the various companies' permit files. He found that numerous industrial plants which had neither permits nor standard exemptions. Half of the first 1,000 companies operated without permits and with no standard exemptions.

According to the Environmental Defense Fund, fewer than five percent of industrial plants were fined since Bush's voluntary plan went into effect in November 1997. Only 33 of the state's 160 largest industrial plants agreed to voluntarily participate in the program. And only three of those 33 took steps to cut their emissions.

Bush raised $566,000 from the grandfathered polluters for his two gubernatorial campaigns. In March 1999 alone, Bush raised $316,300 for his presidential campaign from PACs, employees, lobbyists, and lawyers of grandfathered companies. These included Enron, Vinson & Elkins, Sterling Chemicals, and companies owned by the Bass brothers. These companies alone contributed over $1.4 million to Bush over the years.

BUILDING A NUCLEAR DUMP SITE. The issue of building a low-level radioactive waste dump site was approved by the state legislature in the early 1990s. After Bush was elected governor, he likewise supported the proposal. He claimed that the $40 million project was imperative to protect Texas from becoming a dumping ground for other states. Bush said that federal law required states to form compacts, with one of the states providing a dump site for the other compact members. He cited federal law as his justification for entering into a compact with Maine and Vermont, two states interested in disposing their nuclear waste.

The proposed dump contradicted Clinton's Executive Order requiring that the federal government ensure that people of color and low income populations are not disproportionately burdened by environmental hazards. It also violates the 1983 La Paz Agreement between the United States and Mexico to "prevent, reduce and eliminate sources of pollution" in the "border area."

The dump site was located in western Texas just five miles outside the town of Sierra Blanca, inhabited by 3,600, 70 percent of whom were poor Latinos and only 1,600 were registered voters. The proposal to choose Sierra Blanca brought allegations of environmental racism. The per capita annual income of the community was under $8000, and 40 percent of the Latinos lived below the poverty level. Sierra Blanca already was receiving daily shipments of sewage sludge from New York. Moreover, the dump site was close to the Mexican border and was actively opposed by the Mexican government.

To compound the problem, Texas Low-Level Authority director Rick Jacobi testified before the Senate Finance Committee that the hazardous life of "low-level" waste varies from "as little as five years" up to "decades" for some substances. He pointed out that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, "low-level" waste includes everything from short-lived radio-isotopes used in research to extremely deadly and long lived substances commonly found in reactor waste. "Low level" substances includes plutonium, strontium-99, and cesium-137 which remain hazardous for millions of years.

The selection to build at Sierra Blanca posed other serious environmental questions. Bush himself neglected to mention that radioactive waste would have to travel in trucks on roads and rails thousands of miles for trench burial near the Rio Grande River which is a major water source intended for future use. Bush never said that the state of Maine hoped to dump more potent types of nuclear waste at Sierra Blanca. They hoped to ship oversize reactor compounds, too large to place in cannisters, from Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant which was just decommissioned. Bush also refused to address the geological instability of the area. It was the most earthquake-prone part of Texas, located 18 miles from the Rio Grande, and surrounded by mountains. Scientists were concerned on how water might be affected downstream in both Texas and Mexico.

The Sierra Blanca site was opposed by West Texans, the Sierra Blanca Legal Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, and other environmental groups. But they were no match for the power wielded by Bush and other state politicians as well as the influence of the utility industry. The underlying factor was that the Sierra Blanca dump site meant a tremendous windfall for the Texas economy. It allowed 100,000 cubic feet per year of low-level radioactive waste to be stored at a cost of $160 per cubic foot. The Houston Business Journal reported that the price was closer to $250 per cubic foot. Additionally, the more states which are allowed to dump in Texas, the cheaper the rate of disposal will be for the Texas utilities since they can share the costs with the states of Maine and Vermont.

In October 1998, the House of Representatives approved the three-state Compact bill by a 309-106 vote. All but two of Texas' delegation in the House voted in favor of the legislation. A modified version of the bill was also passed the Senate in February 1999 by a 78-to-15 vote. A conference committee approved the bill after stripping two protective amendments off earlier versions. One amendment was to assure that a radioactive waste dump would not wind up taking wastes generated in states other than Texas, Maine, and Vermont. Some congressional members felt that the Sierra Blanca dumpsite should be opened to wastes generated outside the three states, especially since an existing dump for low-level wastes in Barnwell, South Carolina was in financial trouble and in danger of closing.

The next step was to obtain an operating license from the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (TNRCC), a three member panel, all of whom were Bush appointees. But Bush received a blow when the TNRCC determined that the license applicant, the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority, failed to adequately address the potential impacts of the earthquake fault directly beneath the site as well as the potential negative socioeconomic effects. Consequently, the commission forced Bush to abandon his plan at Sierra Blanca.

A few weeks later, a Bush-sponsored bill was introduced to the legislature. It revised the previous law and allowed the private sector to become involved in the storage of nuclear waste. The logical beneficiary was Waste Control Specialists (WCS), a Houston-based toxic waste plant, which was run by Howard Simmons He had bought controlling interest in the company in 1995. Simmons was a long time Bush supporter who had given $35,000 to his campaign and $465,000 to the national Republican Party in the 1996 and 1998 elections. In early 1999 Simmons hired two dozen lobbyists to assist him in securing the contract. Several of the lobbyists were former environmental aides of Bush.

THE FLORIDA EVERGLADES. During his campaign swing through Florida in March, Bush made clear that he believed the state should involve the private sector in an effort to save the imperiled ecosystem. Experts concurred that the Everglades were on the verge of collapse with more than half of the original wetlands gone. The population of wading birds had dropped 10 percent. Pollution was also killing fish, and tree islands were rotting away.

In 1999, state and federal officials agreed to split the tab of $7.8 billion in an attempt to clean up the environmental mess and to ensure the use of water supplies for at least 50 years. Azurix was a Houston-based corporation, two-thirds of which was owned by Enron, and pumped millions of dollars into building reservoirs and storage wells that were designed to save the Everglades. Azurix officials met with Governor Jeb Bush in November 1999 in an effort to land a contract. As reported in Mother Jones (July/August 2000), Azurix offered to help the state pay its annual $200 million share of the restoration project in exchange for the right to sell the water to third parties over 30 years. In return, Azurix asked for permission to sell the water which supplied 6 million residents in southern Florida. The plan was to capture water flowing out of the Everglades and to channel it back into the system in an effort to preserve the wetlands.

Additionally, the corporation pumped $555,275 into the Bush campaign by January 2000. John Wodraska, managing director of Azurix, gave the maximum contribution of $1,000 to the Bush campaign and $2,000 to Enron's political action committee.

On the other side of the issue, environmentalists claimed that the private sector -- companies such as Azurix -- would further damage the Everglades and not clean up the environmental disaster. If a private company controlled the flow of water in the Everglades, critics contended, it would have a financial incentive to route water to paying customers rather than to replenish the needy wetlands.

MORAL ISSUES. Bush continued to support more government intervention in regard to moral issues. He skirted the issue of Roe v. Wade, presumably because a majority of Texans were pro-choice, but he favored banning later term abortions and requiring parental consent for abortions for minors. Bush favored the gay-adoption-ban bill in 1999, and he supported a ban on gay marriage. The governor announced that he was against including sexual orientation in a bill to clarify hate crimes in his state. Bush favored a constitutional amendment for school prayer and advocated voluntary prayer before public school athletic events. The governor also supported the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which prohibited a government agency from restricting a person's free exercise of religion except when there was a compelling government interest.

In mid-2000, Bush signed a proclamation declaring June 10 to be Jesus Day and urging all Texans to "follow Christ's example by performing good works in their communities and neighborhoods." The governor came under criticism for insensitivity to people of non-Christian faiths and a disregard for the First Amendment. Phil Baum, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, said in the New York Times (August 6, 2000), "The assumption is that Christianity is the norm for America, and that Jews and other minorities are here essentially as guests at the sufferance of our hosts, in a secondary position, which is an uncomfortable situation to be in." Baum added that the proclamation was "an egregious and blatant violation of the spirit of the First Amendment. Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, members of other faith groups, and nonbelievers would have a hard time responding to the governor's call to practice civic responsibility by following Christ's message on June 10."

The proclamation was sought by the "March for Jesus," an Atlanta group that has organized marches and assistance for the poor in about 500 cities on the same day each year. The group, which was formed in 1991, had previously sought proclamations commemorating "March for Jesus Day." Tom Pelton, founder and organizer of the March for Jesus, said in the Times, "To me it would be a stretch to see that proclamation as being demeaning toward other religions. It's meant to point out that the things that Jesus taught are consistent with what many religions teach. Instead of Jesus being a divisive name in the community, we are hoping to establish his name as a point of unity among people."

FUNERALGATE. Funeralgate surfaced as a major scandal of the Bush administration in 1998. Service Corporation International (SCI), sometimes called “the world’s largest death care company,” had a controlling interest in the state’s business. It owned over 10 percent of all funeral homes in Texas, contributed substantially to Bush’s war chest. Multimillionaire CEO Robert Waltrip, a close Bush family friend, paid George H. Bush $70,000 to speak at a funeral homes’ convention in 1998. Waltrip also contributed $10,000 to Bush’s first gubernatorial campaign in 1994 and another $35,000 four years later. And he gave a total of $113,000 to the campaigns of dozens of politicians.

As George Herbert Bush grew more powerful in Texas politics, Waltrip enhanced his fortune. Waltrip began as the owner of a single funeral home in Houston. By the mid-1990s he owned 3,442 funeral homes and 433 cemeteries in 20 different countries. The Houston Chronicle (February 12, 1999) reported, “While (Texas) legislators received lots of cash from SCI, the ties between the Bush family and the world’s largest funeral company appear to be more binding.” The Houston Chronicle claimed that in March 1998 George Herbert Bush was paid $100,000 to attend a meeting of the International Cemetery and Funeral Association in Houston.

Waltrip’s goal was to interpret Texas law in a way that allowed SCI to continue making huge profits on its embalmings. The state funeral agency mandated that SCI must notify consumers of costs when it used third party contractors to do embalmings.

On April 10, 1998, the Texas Funeral Service Commission (TFSC) employees made a surprise inspection at two of the SCI’s funeral homes. As a result, Waltrip and Bush talked five days later on April 15. The conversation revolved around a six-page letter that Waltrip wrote in protest of the inspections. On June 16, this version of the conversation changed. The second version had Waltrip in Bush’s office waiting for Joe Albaugh, the governor’s chief of staff. Then Bush happened to “pass by,” and they only “exchanged pleasantries,” discussing nothing of the investigation. According to a TFSC document, Waltrip “has never discussed” with Bush his complaints about the funeral commission.

Bush’s office denied that anything improper occurred, and Bush himself refused to comment on the scandal. Dick McNeil, chairman of the nine-member TFSC, said that Bush never tried to interfere in the agency’s investigation of SCI’s embalming practices. McNeil said neither Bush nor his aides ever asked him to terminate the SCI investigation. McNeil said his only conversation about the controversy came at a Bush campaign stop in Fort Worth letter in 1998. McNeil claimed that he told Bush, “I sure hope we haven't embarrassed you,” and Bush responded by saying, “I will be embarrassed if you have not done your job.”

McNeil was soon removed from his job by the Texas State Legislature. Then Eliza May, the director of TFSC, issued a subpoena to seek a deposition from Bush on August 26, 1999. Bush refused to answer a subpoena about the case. Subsequently, May was fired over an undisclosed grievance filed by the employee after she was assigned to investigate connections between Bush, SCI, and campaign contributions. However, May’s attorney claimed that she was fired because she was trying to uncover conflicts of interests between having funeral home directors run the commission while investigating their own industry.

Bush filed an affidavit in May’s original lawsuit, claiming “I have had no conversations with SCI officials, agents, or representatives concerning the investigation or any dispute arising from it.” But by his own admission, Bush did drop in on a meeting between Waltrip and Allbaugh, the latter of whom became the governor’s campaign manager for the 2000 presidential campaign. Bush said, “I can’t remember what I said, all I know is that it lasted no time, and that hardly constitutes a serious discussion.” (Washington Post, August 31, 1999)

State Judge John K. Dietz then ruled that Bush could not be forced to testify in the lawsuit. Dietz said that May had not produced enough evidence to show that Bush had “unique and superior personal knowledge” that would aid her case. So Dietz threw out a subpoena issued by May's lawyers for Bush to give a deposition in the lawsuit. (Washington Post, August 31, 1999)

In August, the Funeral Home Commission recommended fines of $450,000 on SCI. Waltrip’s corporation refused to pay, contending the commission misinterpreted state embalming laws. Subsequently, state Attorney General John Cornyn, a close friend of Bush, ruled that SCI was not compelled to pay the fine.

MINORITIES. Bush made it a point to be a bilingual governor and to reach out to the Latino community. His shrewdest maneuver was to gain the support of half of Texas' Latino voters. With a fast growing minority population, Texas was on the verge of becoming a majority minority state.

The governor promised to minorities in his campaigns that he would make appointments which would reflect the state's demography. Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock outlined a plan at getting minorities appointed to state judgeships, Bush offered an alternative. The governor made a flippant and cavalier statement, saying that Latinos and Blacks would have better chances of becoming judges if they dropped their affiliation with the Democratic Party and joined the GOP. It was difficult for Democrats to win in the predominantly conservative Republican state. Voters in Harris county, -- home to Houston -- elected a slate of all Anglo judges in 1998.

When Bush and his partners built a new baseball stadium for the Texas Rangers in Arlington, the local NAACP chapter accused them of awarding a sufficient number of contracts to minority firms. NAACP leaders demanded that Bush and his colleagues provide 30 percent of the jobs to minorities and women. Bush responded by saying that he hired the first Black, Comer Cottrell, as a co-owner of the Texas Rangers. Cottrell later chastised Bush and the other owners for failing to fire three Anglo-owned companies awarded contracts, because they fraudulently misrepresented their minority status. Once the ball park opened, Bush and his owners failed to hire any minority businesses to run the concessions. In 1994 Deborah Burstion-Wade, the governor's press secretary and only Black on hid staff, resigned. Later Bush himself resigned as a member of the board of directors of Quinn College, a Black institution in Houston.

Bush's selections for state boards and commissions -- his only real appointment power because the Texas governor has no cabinet -- ran far short of the state's population percentages for Latinos and Blacks. Minorities were over-represented in the state's poverty ranks and among children who lacked health insurance. And state figures showed Latino school dropout rates declining are simply untrue. Seventy-seven percent of Bush's state appointees were White, 13 percent Latino, 9 percent Black, and 1 percent from other ethnic or racial groups. Sixty-three percent of his appointees were men and 37 percent women. That was a lower proportion of minorities and women than his Democratic predecessor.

"You know, I say I'm not a divider; I'm a uniter." Since he was governor of Texas, 60 percent of Bush's appointments were white and male and over the age of 50.