The PACE is monitored by three entities that check the public's pulse.
 It is elementary that the legislative body, in making decisions about whether to have a death penalty and the classification of crimes that qualify for it, is certainly a key player in identifying the public's attitude about the PACE. Below are two examples.
•Under an early post-Furman death penalty statute in South Carolina, prospective jurors were not eliminated from the jury simply because they were opposed to the death penalty. This, of course, greatly restricted the number of death sentences. The legislature changed this and allowed Witherspoon [Witherspoon v. Illinois  391 U.S. 510 (1968)] jurors to be excluded from the jury.
•Recently, Colorado converted from a jury capital sentencing determination to capital sentencing by a three-judge panel. The public's political scrutiny of the judges will no doubt result in more death sentences. Colorado rejected a proposal which would have allowed the decisions of the individual judges to remain anonymous.
 In these examples, the political processes in the legislatures of South Carolina and Colorado expressed the desire of society in those areas to increase the PACE.
 The federal judiciary, particularly in the Fifth and Eleventh Circuits, played an important role in the years immediately following Gregg [Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976)].
  For a number of years, a majority of the cases before each of these courts were sent back for new trials. These courts substantially reduced the number of executions. Then the erosion of this resistance to society's perception of the PACE became obvious as these courts began creating and exercising procedural doctrines that shielded them from deciding the merits of the constitutional issues in most of the cases.
 We now have enough experience to know there is little difference in the pre-Furman universe of persons eligible for the PACE than in the post-Furman universe.  The so-called protections of the post-Furman statutes have been obliterated by strict waiver and procedural default rules in post-conviction review. For example, during the trial, or pre-trial in some instances, if the lawyer doesn't articulate an issue to the trial court in as explicit a manner as an appellate lawyer articulates it to a post-conviction court, that issue may be deemed waived by the client. We are learning that review of a state conviction in a federal habeas corpus proceeding is about as restricted as a demonstration in Tiannamen Square.
 The zeal and attitude of the legal profession about the death penalty has a real effect on the PACE. It is the legal community at the trial level which frames the issues that can be understood by society. Without a proper framing of the issues surrounding the death penalty charade, most members of society will maintain the pedestrian view that the proceedings are held to determine innocence or guilt and then a determination is made for the "appropriate" disposition of the case. The convicted person's fate is determined by some formula that is almost mathematical in nature.
 A failing of the legal community is that few lawyers possess the skill, tenacity, and commitment to justice to effectively and graphically expose the events which deprive their clients of the Constitution's protections.     

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