The picture of states' rights champion George W. Bush asking the federal courts to interfere with a state following its own laws is ironic, even amusing. But his argument involves a serious contradiction with the position he has taken as governor with respect to judges' actions in the continuing stream of executions in his state. PNS associate editor Michael Kroll is a veteran death penalty abolitionist and founder of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C.

That George W. Bush, champion of state's rights, is going into federal court to prevent the state of Florida from hand-counting certain ballots, presents a situation rich with irony.

But one aspect of that irony has gone totally unnoticed, despite the fact that it is truly a matter of life and death.

Presidential candidate Bush, according to those who speak for him, is acting on the understanding that state judges, who must run for office periodically, are more subject to political pressure and therefore less reliable than federal judges, who hold their seats for life and need not worry about the next election.

As the former director of Florida's Division of Elections, David E. Cardwell, put it, "Elected judges...are subject to being concerned about outside events."

Yet recent history in the governor's own state of Texas suggest reasons to fear that politics might taint judicial decisions.

In 1992, Judge Norman Lanford set aside a death sentence obtained through prosecutorial misconduct. He was voted out of office in the nextelection, defeated by Caprice Cosper, a prosecutor who kept a hangman's noose over her office door.

In 1994, Judge Charles Campbell of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, known as a conservative, voted to reverse a death penalty sentence in a highly publicized case. He was succeeded by Stephen Mansfield, who had virtually no criminal law experience and misrepresented his qualifications for office, but who promised to uphold death sentences.

Judge Mansfield still sits in judgment of every death case that comes before the appellate court.

None of this escaped the notice of George W. Bush, who was elected governor the same year. Since then, he has presided over nearly 150 executions, including 34, or about one every ten days, this year.

Bush has told the country that the judges presiding in these cases have acted without concern for "outside events" that may determine their electoral futures.

How is it, one might ask, that elected judges cannot be trusted when the issue is voting, but can be trusted absolutely when the issue is state-sanctioned homicide? (After every execution, a coroner confirms the cause of death as "homicide.")

The irony goes further. While George W. Bush presides over the state with the most prolific judicial killing machine in the country, indeed, in the entire free world. His younger brother Jeb is governor of Florida, one of only four states in the country that allows state judges to overrule a jury's verdict in favor of life and impose, instead, a sentence of death. (The other three states are Alabama, Indiana, and Delaware.)

This is no insignificant technicality. Fully one of every three death sentences in Florida--which has put 50 people to death since 1979 and has more than 390 awaiting execution--has been imposed by elected judges overriding the jury's life sentence.

As U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens said in 1995, in a case involving a similar law in Alabama, "Not surprisingly, given the political pressures they face, judges are far more likely than juries to impose the death penalty. This has long been the case and the recent experience of judicial overrides confirms it."

The last irony is that this time, when the presidency of the United States rests on the outcome in Florida, the Bushes have it right (and the Supreme Court had it wrong): Elected state judges, like all elected officials, are concerned about--and swayed by--"outside events" which make them too often willing to sniff the political air, strip the mask from the eyes of "blind justice" and avoid acting in ways that will jeopardize their own ambitions for higher office.