Guarding Death's Door

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Hence Earle has created virtually a second Travis County justice system for murder cases: well before any trial begins, he and his top lieutenants decide for themselves whether someone is guilty and deserves to die. If there's even a hint of doubt, they deny jurors the option of a death sentence. That approach has isolated Earle. Other D.A.s say he worries extravagantly over minor problems. Abolitionists have little use for him because he still sends people to die. But Earle's exertions raise an intriguing question: Does it take someone like him--someone who has more or less come to detest the death penalty--to save its credibility?

Ronnie Earle--even enemies call him Ronnie--is among the longest-serving D.A.s in the nation. He is also one of the most admired--and most controversial. Earle has been re-elected six times, and he can probably keep his job as long as he wants. His popularity doubtless owes something to the low crime rate in Austin, the county's biggest city (and state capital). In 2001, according to FBI figures, Austin had the fourth lowest per capita murder rate among U.S. cities with 500,000 to 1 million residents.

Earle's capital locale has extended his visibility beyond the county. He was one of the first prosecutors in Texas to create a victim-assistance program, in 1979; later he helped write a state law requiring every D.A. to open an office to connect crime victims with social services. He helped start Austin's Children's Advocacy Center, which works with abused kids, and a family-justice division of the D.A.'s office, which prosecutes those accused of domestic violence and helps their families get back to normal. A lot of prosecutors view such do-gooderism as a waste of time, preferring to devote themselves to cases guaranteed to go Live at 5. Earle, by contrast, rarely appears in court. He would rather attend, as he did recently, a conference in a motel ballroom off Highway 35 to talk about how to fight substance abuse. Predictably, those in the movement for community justice, which tries to combat the sources of crime as well as punish it, swoon over him. "He has a track record going back years of working toward crime prevention by working in the community," says Catherine Coles, a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who studied Earle's office in the '90s.

He wasn't always so progressive. In the early '80s, when Reagan conservatism was ascendant, Earle sounded pretty much like any other law-and-order D.A. He spent a lot of time in court, and he stood out as a Democrat willing to aggressively prosecute corruption in his own party. (The G.O.P. didn't nominate a candidate to oppose Earle during the entire 1980s.) He seemed particularly conservative on the death penalty. In 1982 he said in a Limbaughesque radio commentary not only that he backed capital punishment but that it "reaffirms our humanity" and fulfills "our moral responsibility." He called it "society's right to self-defense."