Even those of us who support capital punishment should be worried by cases like Rudolph Holton's.

If his story were an episode of "Law & Order" or "The Practice," we'd enjoy the courtroom drama with the comforting assumption that those things don't really happen. But Holton's case didn't occur in one hour with four commercial out-cues and a preview of next week's "ripped from the headlines" adventure.

He spent 16 years in a 7-by-9-foot cell on Florida's Death Row.

Surely police and prosecutors don't really withhold exculpatory evidence, accidentally or on purpose. Surely it doesn't really take over nine years for lawyers to see public records, such as an investigation report implicating another suspect.

Surely the state's reliance on jailhouse snitches and the mistaken identity of a hair found on the victim are just the figment of some TV writer's imagination. Surely, if all this did happen, they wouldn't try to abolish the state agency that handles capital appeals and replace it with catch-as-catch-can private lawyers working for 60 percent of an already shoestring budget.

Oh, yes they would.

Holton, now 49, was a burglar and drug addict in Tampa when he was arrested in 1986 for the murder of Katrina Graddy. She was strangled and sodomized in an abandoned crack house, her body set on fire.

Graddy had told police 10 days earlier that another man had raped her. He certainly had a reason to wish her dead, and another man placed him near the scene at the time of the murder. But this was never told to the defense - and, therefore, never told to the jury.

Records of the investigation couldn't be located because of a mixup in the names or aliases of those involved.

Furthermore, a hair found in the victim's mouth was not Holton's, as trial testimony indicated. DNA evidence showed it came from the victim herself.

With all respect for the public defender, or whoever spoke for Holton at trial, all of this would have been known before he was even indicted, if he could afford F. Lee Bailey or Johnnie Cochran. The former prosecutor, Joe Episcopo, admitted after an evidentiary hearing in 2001 that he was having second thoughts - and Supreme Court Justice Barbara Pariente called Holton's appeal "close to one of the strongest cases of potential for actual innocence" that she's ever seen.

The American public wants executions. Look at the outcry in Illinois this month, when ex-Gov. George Ryan commuted all death sentences just before he left office. Floridians voted by nearly a 70-percent margin last November for a constitutional amendment fixing a glitch in the state's capital punishment system.

But doing it presumes doing it right. The Bill of Rights provides that life may be taken, but that same amendment requires due process of law. When they don't tell the defense about another suspect, it's hard to call that due process.

Gov. Jeb Bush said he might want an investigation of how this happened. The governor has a large legal staff, unlimited money and lots of policy experts to advise him. They've assured him that everyone executed on his watch has been guilty.

But Rudolph Holton says he thinks he met other innocent men on Death Row. If Bush wants anything more than a perfunctory check of the records, and a rubber-stamp assurance that everything is OK now, he might want to talk with Holton.

Holton doesn't have the education or legal resources at the governor's disposal. But he sure has had time to study the system.