Letters to the Editor.

I would like to voice my disappointment with Ruth Conniff's article "On the Bus with Bradley" (March issue).

I was a volunteer for the Gore campaign helping out at the event she so roundly criticized. The situation was very chaotic. The event was supposed to be for identified uncommitted voters, but a local newspaper published the time and location of the event, and the result was pandemonium. I remember the couple that Conniff describes in the article. They just barely got in at the last minute. The notion that their question and his response were staged is ludicrous.

I took more than a week of vacation from my job as a software consultant and went to Iowa and New Hampshire on my own expense to help the Gore campaign. I was joined by hundreds of others. When Gore becomes President, he's going to do right by the environment and nominate justices who will uphold Roe v. Wade.

Meanwhile, The Progressive will whine that Democrats are just like the Republicans, that you shouldn't bother to vote, unless it's for Ralph Nader or the Socialist Party. It will run article after article about some obscure protest that nobody ever heard of and which doesn't change anyone's life.

If Conniff had stopped by one of Gore's campaign headquarters in New Hampshire, she would have seen a diverse coalition of students, teachers, housewives, gays, union members, and retirees getting active and making a difference. Is it so inconceivable that Gore supporters are idealistic, too? Do you deem virtuous only those with no chance of winning?

Dan Ryan Washington, D. C.

Wanted: Death Penalty Investigations

The Comment entitled "The Case Against the Death Penalty" (February issue) was lucid and comprehensive. You correctly write, "People have been executed who very well might have been innocent."

There's an overwhelming need now for investigative journalists to look at any of the several dozen examples in the past two decades of executions of prisoners who probably were innocent. Without media exposure of these cases, death penalty proponents will continue to assert smugly that no innocent person has been executed. Meanwhile, Virginia prosecutors refuse to allow DNA testing of evidence that could help to show that Joseph O'Dell, who was executed in 1997, was innocent, as he had claimed.

Two of the many other cases of executions of likely innocent prisoners include Jesse Tafero in Florida and Wayne Felker in Georgia.

Tafero's co-defendant was freed on evidence that also...