The Republic of T. Archives

I haven’t blogged yet about the next big capitol punishment case to be taken up in the blogosphere; that of Corey Maye, a black man on death row in Mississippi, whose case can be summarized as follows.

Let’s summarize: Cops mistakenly break down the door of a sleeping man, late at night, as part of drug raid. Turns out, the man wasn’t named in the warrant, and wasn’t a suspect. The man, frigthened for himself and his 18-month old daughter, fires at an intruder who jumps into his bedroom after the door’s been kicked in. Turns out that the man, who is black, has killed the white son of the town’s police chief. He’s later convicted and sentenced to death by a white jury. The man has no criminal record, and police rather tellingly changed their story about drugs (rather, traces of drugs) in his possession at the time of the raid.

The main reason I haven’t commented on it is because, as I said before, sometimes I get tired of pushing that rock up the hill. Fortunately, others have taken up the fight, and for the record I’d like to urge others to do the same. Battlepanda has the info on what you can do.

It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that I don’t think Maye — or anyone else — should be executed by the state. Period. And even though it’s an uphill battle — Maye is a black man in Mississippi who killed a white cop who was the sheriff’s son — it’s one that still needs to be fought. However, I’ve caught wind of a disturbing conversation thread among anti-death penalty bloggers that makes me think we’ve already resigned ourselves to losing this fight.

Liberal Oasis links to a number of “big time” liberal bloggers and paraphrases their concerns around the Tookie Williams case and why they think the left perhaps shouldnt’ have taken it up.

LiberalOasis was surprised at the number of anti-death penalty bloggers, who argued that clemency for Stanley “Tookie” Williams was an impractical or wrongheaded cause.

The underlying argument in these posts seems to be the only sensible candidates for high-profile clemency campaigns are those whose guilt is (or should be) in doubt.

Over the time I’ve been writing on this blog about the death penalty, I think I’ve slowly come to believe — as Lorin, a friend and reader here, has pointed out in his comments on the matter — that getting into hair-splitting like that above is a step away from the basic principle upon which death-penalty opposition is or should be founded: that the state should not be in the business of killing, period.

Give an inch on that principle — for example, by conceding that maybe the state should execute the guilty, but not the innocent — and before you know it, you’ll have lost a mile or more, because you’ve let them change the subject to one of their choosing. You’re no longer arguing about the wrongness of the death penalty, because you’ve let them change the terms of the debate. Instead you’re arguing about the guilt or innocence of one person in one case, and there in many cases, there will be some room for doubt.

One of my main arguments against the death-penalty in the past has been that its existence guarantees the state will execute the innocent as well as the guilty. The bloggers at LiberalOasis bring up that point too. However, I’ve begun to think it’s not only a step towards conceding ground on the right of the state to execute, it’s also a kind of self deception.

At least, it was in my case. My assumption was that the argument about possibly executing the innocent would appeal to most people, because most people would consider the execution of one innocent person too high a cost for the state to go on killing the guilty. I no longer believe that’s true of most people, or that executing an innocent person would cause most or even a majority of people to lose so much as a moment’s sleep.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 15th, 2005 at 10:50 am and is filed under Blogs, Crime, Current Events, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.