The July 14 issue of Time Magazine has an excellent report on the death penalty titled Guarding Death's Door . We don't express our praise for prosecutors too often, but when we do, we want you to know about it:

The death penalty is under attack. Scores have been wrongly convicted of capital crimes, and most Americans believe at least one innocent has been executed. Who can fix the system? Meet Ronnie Earle, veteran Texas prosecutor, death-penalty supporter — and a D.A. who has learned from his own terrible mistakes.

....[Earle] is trying to do in his corner of Texas what death-penalty opponents say is impossible: enforce capital punishment flawlessly, ensuring that the innocent never spend a day on death row and the guilty are sent there only after trials free of bias and vengeance. Earle hopes that by raising every conceivable doubt about defendants before he decides to seek the death penalty for them, he can slay the "demon of error" invoked by Governor Ryan and achieve total certainty in the capital system.

....Earle often sees himself as an advocate — for his constituents, for the state, for crime victims. Because of their role, prosecutors tend to be portrayed in popular culture as modern-day knights. But Earle has come to prefer another metaphor. "I'm the gatekeeper," he says. "I don't dare ask my boss, the public, to sit in judgment of somebody that I don't think deserves to die. That's why they elect me, to exercise that judgment and not bother them."

Buried in that philosophy is something radical — the notion that the jury system, as it's currently constructed, can't be trusted to send only the guilty to death row. Most prosecutors wouldn't embrace that philosophy, which is why it may take an Earle, not a knight, to slay the demon of error.