ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) – When the last court says no and the clock ticks on execution, a prisoner’s only chance is a plea for mercy.

That’s when death row’s dry legal phrases turn into tales of personal struggle told through children’s letters, baptism certificates, photos, even poetry.

Now, the University at Albany has begun the first national attempt to collect these last requests, along with other records, providing an intimate look at one of America’s most divisive issues.

The first boxes arrived this month from a private donor at the university’s new National Death Penalty Archives. Inside were 137 pleas, mostly from the South and all since 1977 when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty. Some were addressed to then-Texas governor George W. Bush, with bold titles (“Earl Washington Jr.: An Innocent Man”) and arresting sentences (“We believe, as strongly as human beings can believe, that the life of James Adams is in your hands today solely because he is a poor black Southerner.”).

Capital punishment was back on the national stage last month as Crips gang founder Stanley Tookie Williams and supporters pleaded for his life in California but failed. And earlier in December, North Carolina put Kenneth Lee Boyd to death, the 1,000th execution in the U.S. since the death penalty resumed in 1977.

The archive’s co-founders admit their quest is a step behind: Most of the people in those file folders are already dead. But the archive could help researchers learn what can go wrong in the justice system, with the goal of trying to fix it before more are executed.

Recent projects across the country have scrutinized the cases of death row inmates for mistakes, sometimes getting reduced sentences or setting people free. The archive makes it possible to take that effort back in time. Patterns of past mistakes can be documented and changes recommended.

The files will be open to the public, giving advocates, lawyers, journalists and others a look at some of capital punishment’s more human details. The archive also contains interviews with inmates and jurors and other personal writings.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center, says the collection is invaluable for others who want to file petitions. “We have often received requests for this kind of information,” he wrote in an e-mail.

“When you read those petitions, some of them cry out that something very bad occurred,” says James Acker, an archive co-founder and professor of criminal justice.

Take the case of Virginia’s Calvin Swann. Two weeks before his scheduled execution for murder in 1999, students at Skidmore College in upstate New York were asked to help on a last-minute petition for clemency. They worked around the clock in shifts with an alumnus, a New York-based lawyer. They found state-employed doctors had diagnosed Swann as schizophrenic at least 41 times and committed him to psychiatric hospitals at least 16 times.

“Yet, under the mental health system that existed in years past, Calvin was repeatedly released without supervision or treatment,” the petition reads.

The argument worked and Swann was granted clemency.

But clemency is rare, says Charles Lanier, the archive’s other co-founder. Besides 167 inmates whose death sentences were commuted when Illinois Gov. George Ryan left office in 2003, only 63 others have been spared since 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Of the 137 cases in the new archives, just 15 got clemency, a vacated death sentence or a new trial.

Most prisoners still try and their efforts are found in the archive’s bulging files, “a gold mine of things that wouldn’t show up in legal papers,” says Bill Bowers, who recently moved his Capital Jury Project, a national research effort into how juries make decisions, to Albany from Northeastern University.

One file holds two pounds of letters in support of confessed murderer William Neal Moore of Georgia, including ones from relatives of the victim. “Billy was just a stranger in the wrong place at the wrong time,” one relative wrote. “Now we feel like we know him, and … he’s be welcome in our homes.” Clemency was granted.

Whoever filed the petition for murderer James Lee Clark of Texas strayed far from legalities into Albert Einstein anecdotes and passages from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” The petition ends with footnote No. 34: “I encourage everyone to listen to the Dallas Wind Symphony’s rendition of “Stars and Stripes Forever’ … RealAudio and MPEG-3 versions are available.” Clemency was denied.

Collecting the rest of the pleas will be a challenge, the archive’s co-founders say. They quickly found petitions are not always treated as public record. Thirty-six states have death penalty laws, and two others, New York and Kansas, have laws that have been declared by courts to be unconstitutional. Some states are reluctant to release the papers.

One reason is family privacy, Acker says. “There is no shortage of stories that describe just horrendous upbringings.” At the end, the details of abuse and mental illness are brought out for sympathy, because the prisoner has nothing more to trade on.

And a governor usually has few guidelines to go on but conscience.

Which is why Acker and Lanier are collecting these pleas for public record, mostly on their own time, with no outside funding.

“You would think anyone with a life-or-death decision would want the best information possible,” Acker says.

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On the Net:

University at Albany Capital Punishment Research Initiative: http://www.albany.edu/scj/cpri.htm

Death Penalty Information Center: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/