Nearly two decades later, Lambert's murder is roiling the presidential race, and serving as an accelerant to the well-beyond-smoldering national debate over capital punishment. On Thursday, the man convicted of that killing is scheduled for execution in Texas -- even as a national, celebrity-studded campaign raises questions about Gary Graham's guilt and as Texas Senate President Rodney Ellis -- who serves as chief executive while Gov. George W. Bush is off campaigning -- has asked for a rare full meeting of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to consider the case.

Presidential politics has a way of distorting even the most vivid of issues, becoming the filter through which every event gets viewed. To understand the stakes in the Graham case, the first thing to do is forget about George W. Bush and Al Gore. Forget, too, what you think about Texas and its death row, forget about DNA evidence and "The Thin Blue Line" and Mumia Abu-Jamal and all of those innocent death-row inmates in Illinois.

Instead, start by meditating on the facts of Lambert's murder and the trial of Graham that followed. And ask yourself a very simple and naked question: Do those facts give you confidence in Graham's likely execution Thursday?

Gary Graham, by any measure, was a frightening and violent teenager 20 years ago. By the time he was 17, he had, by his own admission, committed 10 armed robberies. In any state in the nation, he would have been incarcerated for a long time. That is one fact. Here is another: The night of Grant's random, brutal killing, Graham was wearing black pants and a white jacket. So, by all accounts, was Grant's killer.

But there are other facts as well. There was no physical evidence linking Graham to Lambert's murder; in fact, the gun found on Graham when he was arrested was ruled out as the murder weapon. Graham was convicted on the basis of identification by a single eyewitness, a woman who saw Lambert's shooting from her car, 40 feet away. That much the jury learned. But here's a fact Graham's jury never learned: Before sending that witness to pick the killer out of a lineup, Houston police had showed her one photo, and one photo only: that of 17-year-old Graham.

This isn't just a procedural technicality. Traumatic memory is among the least understood branches of psychology; under stress, the mind has its own purposes, and absolute factual accuracy is not one of them. I've experienced this myself: A few years ago I published an essay describing a violent incident in which I was injured, and told with absolute conviction of how one witness turned away from the scene without helping. Months later, I learned from a mutual acquaintance that I had the facts entirely wrong; in the terror of the moment, my mind was making order from chaos, but didn't get it right.

Here is another fact. There were six other witnesses to Lambert's murder. Not one could describe Graham -- and several even described someone else. The jury never learned about those witnesses, either, because Graham's goldbricking trial lawyer didn't bother to interview them.

And one final fact: Of the 12 jurors who in 1981 found Gary Graham guilty of Bobby Grant Lambert's murder, three say they would never have voted to convict had they known all those facts.

"I always had a bad feeling about it," Bobby Pryor, one of those jurors, said recently. "My gut feeling was he wasn't guilty. I just believe he might be innocent."

Pryor, in other words, has looked at those facts, and stripped the case down to that very simple question: Was justice done in this case –- justice for either Bobby Grant Lambert or Gary Graham?

And if Pryor's hard meditation on the facts of the case provokes moral unease about the particular events unfolding over the next 24 hours, it is equally revealing of the layers of political meaning that the case has taken on.

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