By BOB HERBERT

By the end of the year Texas will like­ly have set a record for exe­cut­ing peo­ple. The num­ber of inmates marched into the death cham­ber in Texas this year is expect­ed to reach 40 by New Year’s Eve. That would be the high­est num­ber of pris­on­ers put to death by one state since offi­cials began com­pil­ing death penal­ty sta­tis­tics from across the coun­try some 70 years ago.

The cur­rent record is also held by Texas, which exe­cut­ed 37 peo­ple in 1997. Since the Supreme Court lift­ed the ban on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in 1982, Texas has exe­cut­ed 231 inmates. No oth­er state has come close to that figure.

And few, if any, states could match the con­sis­tent­ly unjust and unques­tion­ably inhu­mane man­ner in which Texas sends its pris­on­ers to their doom. Peruse the death penal­ty cas­es in Texas and you will find repeat­ed instances of hap­less pris­on­ers con­demned to death at the hands of overzeal­ous pros­e­cu­tors, biased and incom­pe­tent judges, and defense lawyers who slept through the tri­als, who were addict­ed to alco­hol or drugs, who knew noth­ing about try­ing cap­i­tal cas­es and who did vir­tu­al­ly noth­ing on behalf of their clients.

The death penal­ty, as applied in Texas, is often lit­tle more than a legal lynching.

Robert McGlasson is a com­pe­tent attor­ney who is han­dling the appeal of a con­demned pris­on­er named Calvin Burdine. The court-appoint­ed lawyer who rep­re­sent­ed Mr. Burdine at his tri­al was Joe Frank Cannon. Mr. Cannon, who is now deceased, slept through sig­nif­i­cant por­tions of the trial.

That might have been a prob­lem else­where but not in Texas. Despite the sleep­ing attor­ney, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the con­vic­tion and the death sen­tence. A san­er per­spec­tive came from a fed­er­al judge who reviewed the case and con­clud­ed that ​“sleep­ing coun­sel is equiv­a­lent to no coun­sel at all.”

This did not sit well with Texas offi­cials and they are appeal­ing the federal ruling.

Mr. McGlasson told me last week that when he asked Mr. Cannon, the sleepy tri­al lawyer, for his file on the case, Mr. Cannon turned over a mere five pages of hand­writ­ten notes. The notes con­tained a total of 269 words. That mea­ger col­lec­tion of words ¯ about one-third the length of this col­umn ¯ con­sti­tut­ed the entire tri­al file for a death penalty case.

The defen­dant in this case, Mr. Burdine, is gay. Perhaps Mr. Cannon was asleep when the pros­e­cu­tor, urg­ing the jury to con­demn Mr. Burdine to death, argued that ​“send­ing a homo­sex­u­al to the pen­i­ten­tiary cer­tain­ly isn’t a very bad pun­ish­ment for a homo­sex­u­al.” In any event, Mr. Cannon did­n’t object to that line of reasoning.

But he was most cer­tain­ly awake when, at a post-tri­al evi­den­tiary hear­ing, he used deroga­to­ry terms to refer to his client and oth­er homo­sex­u­al men, the mildest of which were ​“queers” and ​“fairies.”

This is what pass­es for jus­tice in Texas.

In an arti­cle in the Texas Law Review, Stephen Bright, direc­tor of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, said, ​“The Texas judi­cia­ry has respond­ed to the clam­or for exe­cu­tions by pro­cess­ing cap­i­tal cas­es in assem­bly-line fash­ion with lit­tle or no regard for the fair­ness or integri­ty of the process.”

But Gov. George W. Bush, on whose watch 144 pris­on­ers have been exe­cut­ed, has insist­ed that every per­son put to death in Texas had ​“full access to the courts” and ​“full access to a fair trial.”

Not only is that not true, it is often impos­si­ble to tell from the hideous­ly unfair ways in which accused pris­on­ers in Texas are pros­e­cut­ed, con­vict­ed and exe­cut­ed whether they were in fact guilty or innocent.

Governor Bush may well believe that every­body exe­cut­ed in Texas was guilty, but he has only faith ¯ not the facts ¯ to guide him.

Much of the process is a crap­shoot. Mr. Bright cit­ed a case in which ​“a Texas lawyer, lat­er sus­pend­ed from prac­tice, pre­sent­ed no evi­dence about his client at the penal­ty phase of the tri­al and then made no clos­ing argu­ment, instead say­ing: ​“You are an extreme­ly intel­li­gent jury. You’ve got that man’s life in your hands. You can take it or not. That’s all I have to say.”

As the body count con­tin­ues to mount, the death penal­ty sys­tem in Texas reveals itself ever more clear­ly as a cru­el car­i­ca­ture, a mock­ery of the very idea of fair­ness and due process. It’s not a quest for jus­tice. It’s an exer­cise in evil.