By Paul Duggan Washington Post Service

WASHINGTON - U.S. states have executed 96 death row inmates so far this

year, a significant increase over last year and far more than any annual

total since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in

1976.

The number of prisoners put to death in the 1990s rose to 476 Thursday

when a convicted murderer, Andre Graham, 29, was given a lethal injection

in Virginia. His was the 596th execution in the United States since the

resumption of the death penalty 23 years ago. And at least three more

condemned men are likely to die this week before the customary

Christmas-season execution hiatus begins.

It has been another year of death-penalty controversies, with execution

opponents pointing to high-profile cases in Missouri, Florida, Illinois

and elsewhere as new evidence that capital punishment is arbitrary,

unconstitutionally cruel and fraught with the potential for irreversible

mistakes. And yet it has been another period of capital punishment growth.

Not since 1951 have more U.S. prisoners been put to death in a single

year.

In a joint anti-death-penalty campaign begun last week, the nation's Roman

Catholic bishops and leading rabbis have vowed to lobby state legislators

and activate protest groups, hoping to infuse the opposition to capital

punishment with the fervor of the anti-abortion movement. In a similar

effort, more than 4,000 death-penalty foes - including civil rights

groups, the American Bar Association and some members of Congress - began

calling last month for a moratorium on executions.

The death penalty is on the books in 38 states, and the momentum seems to

favor its continued use.

''I'm not going to sit here and say that this is the end, it's all over,

we're all going to give up and run away,'' said Bryan Stevenson, head of

Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama group that provides appellate lawyers

for death row prisoners. ''But it's bad, and it's going to get worse

before it gets better.''

Capital punishment supporters welcome the trend. With 250 to 300 death

sentences being meted out annually for the past decade, this year's 96

executions ''is still a tiny number,'' said Robert Pambianco, chief policy

counsel for the pro-death-penalty Washington Legal Foundation.

But, he added, it shows that the system is progressing to the point that

''an actual execution will no longer be years and years removed from the

imposition of the sentence.'' He said that will enhance what he and others

contend is the death penalty's deterrent effect on crime.

The growing number of annual executions - there were 68 last year -

reflects the graying of death rows. After years of fighting in court to

stay alive, more and more inmates who were condemned in the 1980s and

early 1990s are reaching the end of their appeals. Lawyers said that

provisions of the federal Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act

of 1996 that were meant to hasten the appeals process also have begun to

be felt.

New Mexico, meanwhile, is preparing for its first execution since 1960.

Terry Clark, 43, who admitted to abducting and fatally shooting a

9-year-old girl, has said he would rather die by lethal injection than

live on death row. If a judge lets Mr. Clark give up his appeals, then,

early in 2000, New Mexico will become the 32d state to put an inmate to

death since the death penalty was restored.

''Among the staff, there's a feeling of anticipation,'' said Tim Le

Master, warden of the New Mexico penitentiary in Santa Fe. Although he and

the prison's staff are determined to conduct the execution smoothly, he

said, ''The staff here is just like the public. There's a feeling among

everyone: Is this right? Is this something we should do or something we

shouldn't do? There's always that question.''

In its 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia, the Supreme Court effectively

threw out death-penalty laws nationwide, saying that death sentences were

being imposed arbitrarily, especially on blacks, with little or no

guidelines for what constituted capital murder. The ruling emptied death

rows across the country. Then, states began enacting tighter statutes and

repopulating their death rows with new inmates.

Today, the debate goes on: Capital punishment does or does not deter

crime; the disproportionate number of blacks awaiting executions, compared

with the nation's overall black population, is or is not evidence of a

racially skewed death-penalty system; public support for the death

penalty, consistently measured at 70 percent to 80 percent since the

mid-1980s, is or is not soft; executions are morally repugnant or a

morally acceptable form of retribution.

In 1972, public support for capital punishment had been declining for

years, no executions had been carried out since 1968, and the death row

population nationwide was about 620. Today, more states have capital

punishment laws than had them before 1972, and, at last count, the death

row population was 3,565.

Both sides in the debate agree on the current Supreme Court's

death-penalty thinking: None of the justices believe executions are

fundamentally unconstitutional.

What death-penalty foes hope is that some justices will change their

minds, as they review more and more challenges to individual aspects of

the death-penalty process.

This year, for instance, the court agreed to decide whether Florida's

notorious electric chair, with its sparks and flames, is so gruesomely

unreliable that it violates the ban on cruel and unusual punishment.