Her Court of Opinion Would Be Closed Here

They’re saying now that despite her growing fame and list of testimonials, it will take a miracle to save Karla Faye Tucker from dying Feb. 3. If she were behind bars in California, it would take a dozen miracles.

That’s because unlike Texas, where Tucker is on death row, California effectively bars inmates’ one-on-one interviews with the media at state prisons. And the 38-year-old Tucker’s slender hopes of escaping lethal injection indeed flow mainly from her sympathetic national television chats, in which she comes across as extremely likable, contrite, earnest, totally transformed and devoutly Christian, while acknowledging her guilt and offering no excuses. If she were in California, she wouldn’t be having those chats.

Sister Helen Prejean, a foe of capital punishment and author of the book that yielded the movie “Dead Man Walking,” told Fox News Channel’s Catherine Crier recently that if Tucker is put to death, “what we are saying is that the saving of a person, the changing of a person, the redemption of a person doesn’t matter.”

Television has made it possible for viewers themselves to assess Tucker’s level of redemption, for she is the first condemned murderer in memory to present her case for life on national TV. Her case is . . . herself.

She looked as demure as the girl next door last week when CNN’s Larry King faced her for an hour across a plexiglass barrier in prison, the same partition that separates her from her visiting husband, a prison minister she married in 1993.

Tucker’s attorneys are challenging the legality of the Texas clemency process. But it’s favorable TV exposure that has elevated her far above the typical cause celebre, attached a haunting human face with dark curls to every subsequent TV and newspaper story about her, and increased pressure on Texas Gov. George W. Bush to save her life in a state that leads the nation in executions.

Most court-watchers believe he won’t, given the precedent that would set in Texas, and how he would be opening himself to charges that he commuted Tucker’s sentence to life because of her gender. Moreover, he has never commuted a death sentence or delayed an execution.

Without Tucker’s TV celebrity, however, her window of opportunity would have been even narrower.

Thus in California, her execution most likely would have been a thundering slam dunk. California is one of 15 states that, encumbered by advanced myopia, have restricted or choked off media access to prisoners, and vice versa. One rationale for imposing this state’s restrictions in 1995 was that sensational coverage by tabloids and other segments of media tended to reward notorious criminals with celebrityhood. A sound bite making the rounds among state legislators then: “You shouldn’t do the crime and end up on ‘PrimeTime.’ ”

Who in the world would look forward to more of Charles Manson on TV, where, before 1995, Los Angeles newscasters and some national programs regularly granted him camera access from prison during ratings sweeps periods, and then heavily promoted his inevitable rantings to inflate their ratings? You made your macho bones in local news by boldly going “one on one with Charlie.”

Yet penalizing the many for the sleaze of the few is not only unfair but also unenlightened, thickening the barbed wire around legitimate information trickling from the state’s tax-funded prison system. As for prisoners on death row the likes of Tucker, moreover, why shouldn’t an inmate facing death, female or male, Christian, Muslim or Jew, have a shot at taking his or her case to the people via the medium that reaches the most people? Even if the overwhelming majority of these doomed cons are poseurs who will tell any lie to save their lives, a few may not be.

Rarely has TV been used as aggressively on behalf of saving a life as with Tucker, who has spent 14 years in prison after taking part in a grisly double murder that found her, accompanied by her boyfriend, wielding a lethal pickax against Daniel Ryan Garrett and Deborah Ruth Thornton in Houston, then later boasting on tape that she had an orgasm each time her weapon struck her male victim. Seldom has homicide been as gruesome.

But that was another Karla Faye Tucker, she, her lawyers and others have maintained on TV and elsewhere.

Yes, Americans appear queasier about executing women than men, which is subtext for the photo ops granted Tucker. Yes, she would be the first woman to be executed in Texas since 1863, and the first in the United States since 1984. Yes, even conservative Pat Robertson, usually a zealot for capital punishment, is urging fellow Republican Bush to commute her sentence, citing her “authentic spiritual conversion.” And yes, Robertson looms as a kingmaker of the religious right, whose support Bush would covet if he makes a run for the White House in the coming presidential season.

All of that notwithstanding, without Tucker’s TV exposure, her crusade to live beyond Feb. 3 probably would not have risen above the level of footnote.

Clearly, her lawyers have sought to exploit their client’s telegenic qualities by using TV in a way that would have been barred to them in California, where Gov. Pete Wilson last year vetoed a bill that would have revoked those state regulations that all but pinch off one-on-one media access to prisoners. Under existing rules here, reporters may question inmates only at random during prison tours, ask them to call collect or seek access to them during regular visiting hours, but without pens, notebooks, tape recorders and, of course, cameras.

In Tucker’s case, the TV lens is her only means of selling herself, in effect, directly to the public, in hopes Americans en masse will lobby the Texas Board of Pardons, whose recommendation for commutation the governor needs before he can act himself, even though he subsequently could ignore it.

In addition to King, Tucker has done interviews with “60 Minutes” on CBS and with Charles Grodin on CNBC, a portion of which also aired on NBC’s “Today” program. Although media requests are still pouring in, Tucker plans only one more interview, with Robertson’s “700 Club” program, a spokeswoman for one of her lawyers, David Botsford, said by phone from Austin on Tuesday.

Christian broadcaster Robertson discovered Tucker only after she found Christ, an earlier supportive story that the “700 Club” did on her foreshadowing the publicity that was coming. The big national TV push for Tucker began with last month’s highly favorable segment on “60 Minutes,” one of TV’s most watched programs. It didn’t hurt her cause that “60 Minutes” even seemed to exaggerate the size of her constituency.

King followed recently with his two-parter, whose sound bites resonated beyond CNN. The second half was a round-table that included Tucker’s attorneys, Thornton’s embittered widower, a Board of Pardons member and Robertson, who never adequately explained why he had embraced Tucker after ignoring countless men on death row who also claimed contrition and Christian rebirth well before being executed.

Part 1 was especially indelible, though, with King facing Tucker alone in an interview of amazing intimacy, given its physical awkwardness. It was a powerful connection that Tucker made through her plexiglass, a smiling, gentle, God-evoking advertisement for herself that surely many viewers found impossible to reconcile with the monster whose evil crime she is expected to die for.