THE DEATH PENALTY….I’m basically with Max on the whole Tookie Williams/death penalty thing: I’m not opposed to the death penalty qua death penalty, but I long ago became convinced that it was impossible to administer fairly or reliably and thus should be abandoned. At the same time, if anyone does deserve the death penalty, Tookie Williams is surely it. Regardless of what he’s done since, the man was a gangster and a thug and hardly deserving of our sympathy.
Cory Maye, however, is a whole nother story. Radley Balko has the grim details here, and even though something about it continues to niggle at me, it hardly matters. Regardless of whether or not there’s more here than meets the eye, there’s not much doubt that Maye doesn’t deserve to die. It’s yet another example of how capriciously the death penalty is applied in the United States, and Maye’s case is an almost perfect demonstration of the intersection of race, lousy representation, and likely police misconduct that are so often the hallmarks of capital cases.
