Why You Should Care About Cory Maye

via Angelica, this disgusting story:

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 story gets more bizarre from there.

Maye's attorney tells me that after the trial, she spoke with two jurors by phone. She learned from them that the consensus among jurors was that Maye was convicted for two reasons. The first is that though they initially liked her, Maye's lawyer, the jury soured on her when, in her closing arguments, she intimated that if the jury showed no mercy for Maye, God might neglect to bestow mercy on them when they meet him in heaven. They said the second reason May was convicted was that the jury felt he'd been spoiled by his mother and grandmother, and wasn't very respectful of elders and authority figures. The facts of the case barely entered the picture. Gotta' love the South.

It gets weirder. Maye's family terminated his trial attorney after he was convicted. In her place, they hired a guy from California with no legal experience who convinced them that he'd had bad representation (given his lawyer's closing argument, he was probably on to something). The new fellow has since failed on several occasions to file the proper appeals.

Maye's case is an outrage. Prentiss, Mississippi clearly violated Maye's civil rights the moment its cops needlessly and recklessly stormed his home in the middle of the night. The state of Mississippi is about to add a perverse twist to that violation by executing Maye for daring to defend himself.

First of all, the reason you should care about Cory Maye is because his case is an outrage, and he shouldn't have been convicted, much less sentenced to death. But if that's not good enough for you, there are more parochial reasons to be interested in Maye's case.

Canada has mercifully been spared a debate on the death penalty since Parliament last voted against it, in 1987. It was defeated by a relatively slim margin of 21 votes. Since then, the Supreme Court has ruled that capital punishment is unconstitutional, and even gone so far as to rule that the Canadian government cannot extradite a suspect in a capital crime without assurances that they will not be executed. So this issue is not immediately relevant for Canadians.

All the same, I don't think we've seen the last of the death penalty debate in Canada. The conservatives won't be gone forever, even if they're defeated in this election. If gun crime continues to get worse in Toronto, don't think the CP wouldn't score some extra votes by running on the death penalty. They'd have to amend the constitution to do it, but they've already basically proposed to do that with gay marriage. So why not?

Maye's case shows us all why bringing back the death penalty would be a mistake. Aside from being morally repugnant, (and I don't put that aside at all) there's no evidence it works as a deterrent. All the death penalty seems to be truly effective at is killing dark-skinned people, and for that we've already got the US Army.

Honestly, I don't understand why this is even a debate anymore. Canada saw a 30-year trend of decline in violent crimes after capital punishment was abolished, and we know of at least 6 cases where convicted murderers were later released after being found not guilty. I hope our justice system isn't so bad that there are lots more like those, but the simplest pragmatic problem with the death penalty is also its supposed benefit - its finality. Any justice system in which there is capital punishment has almost certainly killed innocents, and that is simply not something we should tolerate in - to borrow a phrase the Liberals used to use - a just society.