Abstract

Editorials

This article comments on political and social developments in the U.S. Just how remote the capital-punishment rhetoric of 2000's presidential campaign is from reality is suggested by a ruling from the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in the case of Calvin Burdine, who sits on death row in Huntsville, Texas. Against the record of his own faux campaign of 1996, against the expectations even of friends who said he lacked the candidate gene and against the calculations of Democratic strategists who were forced to go from dismissing him to clumsily attacking the Green monster, presidential candidate Ralph Nader mounted a presidential campaign that in the closing days of the election defied the pundits' tendency to consign most third party candidacies to endgame obscurity.