Last month, Scheck gave testimony to a Senate Judiciary Committee on Post-Conviction DNA Testing, drawing calls for change from even such a hoary old foe as Senator Orrin Hatch. Eventually, the Innocence Protection Act will require all states to establish DNA databanks like those in New York and Illinois, which can be sued in miscarriage-of-justice cases. Meanwhile, Scheck thinks the Graham case will lead to a short-term examination of the American way of justice.
"I just came from a television show where they were discussing Gary Graham and I was on with Jennifer Thompson," he says. "Do you know Jennifer Thompson?"
Jennifer Thompson is a walking, talking argument for Gary Graham's life to have been spared. The statistics for the reliability of eyewitness accounts are depressing, but Thompson's story tells the story better.
In 1984, when she was a bright, high-achieving college student, Thompson was raped. During her ordeal, she consciously studied the face of her assailant so that she might be able to identify him later. Duly, and without doubt, she identified Ronald Junior Cotton as the man who had raped her.
Eleven years later, DNA evidence completely exonerated Cotton and found that a man called Bobby Poole had committed the assault. Thompson and Cotton have become friends since his release and she has been outspoken on the dangers of convictions based on single eyewitness testimony - to the point that she met George W. Bush to press Graham's case for a retrial.
"Applying Jennifer's experience to the Graham case," says Scheck, "she should be afforded the utmost respect for her position. DNA has afforded us this unique learning moment, where it can be applied to eyewitness cases. That's what is so disturbing.
"Today, we can see the execution of Gary Graham, a man who admittedly committed many awful crimes, but was put on death row on the basis of the testimony of a single eye-witness who had a fleeting opportunity to see the perpetrator; Gary Graham - who had a lawyer who did not put on two witnesses who said that Graham is not the individual, who did not put into evidence that the gun Graham was arrested with couldn't have been the murder weapon. Additional lawyers, more bad ones, have put the case at a point where no court will ever hear that this isn't the man. And this is not unusual."
It is not unusual and the entire tragedy is compounded by the process of identification which the single witness, Bernadine Skillern, went through. Having told police that the man she saw in the dark, from 40 feet away through her car windscreen, had a short afro haircut and a hairless face, she was shown 10 pictures, of which only one, Graham's, vaguely fitted that description. She still pronounced herself unsure, until the police provided a live line-up where, again, Graham's was not just the only face which fit the bill, but was the only face that had been shown to her in the photos. From there on, she was adamant in her testimony.
And it is here, 19 years after the crime, that the lines of law and politics intersect so violently. In a presidential election year, George W. Bush needs to both hang tough and act concerned as the air around him becomes filled with troubled voices.
"It isn't just Bush, although his hunger for the process is alarming," says Scheck. "They have all been running on the death penalty for quite some time, pretending it will solve the crime problem. It was the issue which defeated Dukakis in 1988 and then probably Cuomo here in New York. Well, the Democrats saw what was happening and abandoned the principle. Look at Clinton. He changed his mind after losing an election in Arkansas and in 1992 he went home to supervise the state killing of a man called Ricky Ray Spector, who was so borderline mentally retarded (Spector had even had a lobotomy) that he asked the guards to save his last meal for him till he came back. We have lost our moorings on this issue, the system has been allowed to fester and grow."
Meanwhile Scheck, Neufeld and Dwyer attack the cancer in the system from every possible angle. The Abner Louima case offered a chance for Dwyer to expose the random acts of police brutality visited upon others in the immigrant community and offered Scheck and Neufeld the opportunity to expose the role of the police union in imposing a code of silence on members wherein the good guys were afraid of the bad guys.
The Pizzuto case sees a similar action being taken against the prison guards union after guards beat Pizzuto to death having arresting him for "driving while black" and got tired of hearing his pleadings for methadone (he was on a methadone replacement programme).
"In moral and spiritual terms," says Neufeld, "the debate is shifting towards the reliability question. Are we executing innocent people? Could we be? Is that acceptable? Most people think it's wrong to execute innocent folks. That's even the right wing, even they are putting on the brakes. The issue of reliability has become a lynchpin."
That has been their tactic in this long war. In the 1980s, Scheck and Neufeld discovered the wonders of DNA testing as applied to criminal cases - a magic box, they call it, which, when opened, provides the truth. They have become the foremost legal experts in the US on the new forensic science and have used their expertise as a lever with which to lift the lid on the gamut of judicial failings. Bad lawyering, mistaken eye-witnesses, racism, coerced confessions and so on.
They are from the old school of radical politics. They don't mourn, they organise. Their book tour was an organisation tour, recruiting students, professors and volunteers to a network of Innocence Projects which have sprung up across the US.
"Isn't it amazing," ponders Scheck, "that a scientific advance can stimulate a re-examination of a social institution, shed so much light on its failures. We need to correct injustices and minimise mistakes. Everybody can get behind something that simple."
And the kid who first wanted to be a lawyer when he saw an old black and white TV series called The Defenders has a wish born out of an old 1948 movie favourite.
"You remember that old Jimmy Stewart movie, Calling Northside 777? Stewart was a crusading reporter who is hired by a washerwoman in Chicago, Ida Slotsky. She gets this cynical reporter to take on the case of a guy who is upstate in jail. Why aren't there more of those guys put there, more Jim Dwyers?"
On June 22nd, inside a redbrick prison in Texas, Gary Graham was led kicking and screaming to the gurney upon which the State killed him. Bernadine Skillern's evidence ensured he was put to death for a crime he says he didn't commit, all those years ago when he was 17 and too young to even buy his first legal drink.
Actual Innocence, by Dwyer, Neufeld and Scheck, is published by Doubleday Books, $24.95