PolySciFi Blog

I'm not going to shed tears for Tookie Williams one way or the other, but since we've been talking about the death penalty here recently, this story caught my eye:

So imagine it's around midnight and you're sound asleep with your eighteen-month-old daughter. You're woken by someone dressed in black paramilitary gear kicking down your door. This isn't in Iraq, and you have no criminal record. You do have a gun, with which you attempt to defend yourself. Unfortunately, you're a good shot, and the man you shoot is a police officer; worse, the son of the local police chief. Worse yet, you're black, he's white, and you both live in Prentiss, Mississippi (in Jefferson Davis County, which should give some picture of race relations there). This was Corey Maye's crime, and for it, he's currently sitting on death row. Some more relevant things about the case, before you jump to any conclusions:

• The police officers had a warrant to search Corey Maye's neighbor's house, not his; the two men shared a duplex. After raiding his neighbor's house, they went around to the side door, not realizing it was a separate residence. There's disagreement over whether they announced themselves as police officers before kicking the door in; the police say they did, Maye says they didn't (or perhaps they did, but he was asleep). There's little reason to believe they would have, since they believed they were re-entering the same house by another way.
  
  
• Maye had no previous criminal record. Police did find the remains of a marijuana cigarette in one of his ashtrays, but no other drugs.
  
  
• Maye's name wasn't on the warrant; police entered his home illegally (albeit by mistake).
  
  
• Mississippi law defines justifiable homicide as "When committed in the lawful defense of one's own person or any other human being, where there shall be reasonable ground to apprehend a design to commit a felony or to do some great personal injury, and there shall be imminent danger of such design being accomplished..." I think a jackboot breaking down your door at midnight qualifies as "reasonable ground to apprhend a design to commit a felony."
  
  
• Maye's jury was all-white. According to his lawyer (who isn't necessarily the most reliable source on this, since she lost what would seem to have been a slam-dunk case), two jurors told her after the trial 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 Agitator has more here, and here. I think that this case should be a rallying point for anti-gun control, anti-government intrusion libertarians; it seems to be pissing John Cole off, not to mention Glenn Reynolds, which is a good sign.

I think problems like this (dumb decisions by juries, incompetent counsel, over-aggressive prosecutors, &c., &c.) are endemic to our justice system and none are easily solved. I think as long as they're part of the problem, it doesn't make sense to allow our courts to impose the ultimate penalty, even though there are cases where I believe it is deserved. Allowing it in truly exceptional cases leads inevitably to common-place applications, which leads to mistakes that cannot be part of a just civil society. Allowing the state of Mississippi to execute Corey Maye would be one of those mistakes.

UPDATE: Here's Maye in his own words, from the Hattiesburg American:

Cory Maye, 23, said he was asleep on a chair in the living room of his Prentiss apartment as his 14-month-old daughter slept in the bedroom when he heard a loud crash at his front door. "I immediately ran to my daughter's room, got a pistol, put in a magazine and chambered a round," said Maye, who is on trial for capital murder in Marion County. "As I laid on the floor by the bed, I heard kicks at the back door. I was frightened, I thought someone was trying to break in on me and my daughter."

Maye testified that it was dark in his apartment when he heard someone breaking into the back door, which was located in the bedroom. "That's when I fired the shots," Maye said. "After I fired the shots, I heard them yell 'police! police!' Once I heard them, I put the weapon down and slid it away. I did not know they were police officers."

Disgraceful.

Update: It appears there was a separate warrant to search Maye's residence; so the officers weren't there illegally. However, there are still any number of problems with executing Maye for what happened that night; I recommend reading The Agitator on this story as it develops.
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