an extraordinary amount of proof was required to stop his execution. Governors, the court noted, can still grant clemency in such cases" (Shapiro 23). One does not have to oppose the death penalty to be troubled by the Supreme Court's willful refusal to direct the courts below to reconsider the confession and by implication the law enforcement agencies to reinvestigate the solidity of the original case. Instead the Court appears to have assumed that exhausting court appeals makes the American judicial apparatus constitutionally incorrigible to administrative and bureaucratic exceptions. But in a skewed logical progression, the court had no trouble making judicial apparatus expediently vulnerable to governor clemency--in the process programmatically politicizing a capital case that could be reversed without considering and litigating new evidence. To put it another way, the Court refused to consider the possibility of reviewing the case in a way that might litigate Herrera's innocence, even as i
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