Henry Lee Lucas, condemned to die on June 30, is not a man who elicits pity or sympathy. However, he has come to symbolize an issue of vital importance -- whether or not the state can, by following correct procedures, execute someone for a crime he did not commit. Michael Kroll, an associate editor of Pacific News Service, specializes in criminal justice and death penalty issues.

Nobody cares much about Henry Lee Lucas. He is, after all, a child molester, a thief, and a murderer.

And on June 30, unless the U.S. Supreme Court or Texas Governor George Bush stops it, Lucas will be the 155th person executed in Texas since the mid 1970s.

There is a problem. Lucas is almost certainly innocent of the murder for which he was convicted and sentenced.

No physical evidence connects Lucas to the murder of the still unidentified woman who was wearing only orange socks when her body was discovered more than twenty years ago. Prosecutors relied entirely on Lucas' confession to the crime -- which he rescinded before trial.

Henry Lee Lucas is a legend of sorts. He confessed to over 600 killings--including the murders of Jimmy Hoffa and of fictitious characters invented by his interrogators. At that point, the state's attorney general from 1983 to 1991, Jim Mattox, put a stop to it. Mattox, who is again running for that office, says "Lucas is not the greatest serial killer of all time. He's the greatest liar of all time."

In 1986, Mattox issued the "Lucas Report," covering Lucas's actual whereabouts during each of the murders he confessed to. With respect to the murder of "orange socks" the report concluded, "in all probability, Henry Lee Lucas did not commit this crime." Mattox, who favors the death penalty, later asserted that "no rational juror could have found Lucas guilty."

Mattox's successor, Attorney General Dan Morales set out to debunk the Lucas Report. Instead, he found evidence to reinforce it, concluding that it was "highly unlikely" that Lucas had committed the murder for which he is scheduled to be executed.

However, Morales' office is now arguing that it has no further role to play -- whether or not Lucas is guilty as charged. They cite a Texas case, Herrera v. Collins, in which the Supreme Court found that executing the innocent is not prohibited as long as the judicial process followed the rules.

"The courts have uniformly determined that Lucas was convicted in a constitutionally valid proceeding," Morales has written. "Any decision to second-guess the verdict must be undertaken as part of the clemency process."

In the Herrera case, the Court said that miscarriages of justice could be remedied because the governor had the power to grant executive clemency. In Texas, that power can be exercised with a recommendation from the state's Board of Pardons and Parole -- but that board has never recommended clemency.

Some believe the Lucas case will be a first. Governor Bush has taken the unprecedented step of asking the board to scrutinize the case carefully.

Moreover, when Bush refused to grant clemency earlier this year in the celebrated case of Karla Faye Tucker, he said that actual innocence is the only grounds on which he would consider clemency.

Others think Bush will allow Lucas to be executed rather than be branded as "soft on crime" by political opponents -- an attitude which virtually assures an end to executive clemency in capital cases.

The execution of Karla Faye Tucker, who pick-axed her victim to death, drew protests from around the world, an unusual alliance ranging from Amnesty International to the Reverend Jerry Falwell and presidential candidate Pat Robertson.

The difference is that Tucker was attractive, female, and born again. Lucas, though not guilty, is a wretchedly unattractive man who simply cannot command the sympathy heaped on Tucker.

"We didn't create Karla Faye Tucker," says Sam Jordan, who directs Amnesty International's U.S. program to abolish the death penalty, "the media did. We used that creation to focus attention on the inequities of the death penalty--and support for the death penalty in Texas fell substantially." Amnesty International has sent "Urgent Action" requests to its members to contact Governor Bush and the Board of Pardons and Parole seeking to stop the Lucas' execution, "but the media are not involved as they were in the Tucker case."

No matter what the governor does, Henry Lee Lucas will never go free, as he is also serving multiple life sentences including one without the possibility of parole.

If the courts do not prevent Lucas' lethal injection, and clemency is denied, then we have reached a new plateau, or perhaps, a new valley, in the annals of American justice -- the execution of a man for a crime that even the state's prosecutors agree he did not commit.