And it seemed a story with a happy ending indeed. Edgar Smith had been convicted 14 years earlier of the murder of a 15-year-old girl and sentenced to death; twice he came within hours of being executed but was rescued by resourceful lawyers. He was, WFB tells us, "in the death house longer than anyone in the history of the United States," and during that time he taught himself law and wrote a book, Brief against Death, which convinced many people, including Mr. Buckley and the Washington lawyer Steve Umin, that he was in fact innocent. An hour and a half before this taping, Mr. Smith was discharged from the death house at Trenton, N.J., after pleading guilty to a lesser charge (only because, he claims, of the extraordinary difficulties a new jury trial at this remove of time would pose). He speaks movingly about his time in prison, how he was convicted in the first place, and where he goes from here ("At the present time, I'm trying to believe the fact that I'm not still in the death house. It's very difficult").