Maye is Innocent

Most of us are the kind of parent who'd protect their child against armed intruders. Cory Maye believed he was doing just that.

Most of us want the police to follow decent procedures, that protect the rights of everyone and the lives of everyone, to the furthest extent possible. There will be errors, but there's a huge gray area between mistakes and legal culpability. This case isn't in that gray area.

The death penalty is a mistake. It creates dilemmas that are not worth whatever it is we gain by authorizing the state to take lives in slow, deliberate, premeditated fashion. But if we must have a death penalty, we must agree that it should only apply to the unredeemable, those whose crimes make it impossible for us to imagine that their continued lives would serve any positive purpose, in prison or out. Cory Maye is not that criminal.

[Thanks to Lawrence Krubner for bringing the buttons and MayeIsInnocent.com website to my attention (and contributing the bandwidth to the cause). I don't do sidebar buttons mostly, but I will put the link there.]