Death penalty

If the New York Times or the Washington Post had a proper measure of imagination one or other of them would have asked Radley Balko to write a criminal justice column for their op-ed pages. Their loss has been the Huffington Post's gain. Before he moved to HuffPo Balko was a stalwart figure at Reason. It was there that he first wrote about the appalling case of Cory Maye, a Mississippi man convicted of killing a cop and placed on death row. That was five years ago. Today Maye was finally released, a free man at last, after agreeing to accept a lesser charge of manslaughter in return for being released having spent the last ten years in prison.

You'd need a closed heart not to feel great sympathy for the family of poor Milly Dowler. Her killer Levi Bellfield is a vile, appalling creature and one can understand why the Dowler family would wish him executed. Many will share their sentiments. Among them is Guido who writes: The political class complains that the public is disengaged, could that be in part because there are a number of issues where the political class refuses to carry out the wishes of the people. All polls since 1965 when hanging was abolished show that there is majority support for capital punishment, yet there is no majority for it in parliament. It is not even an issue for parliamentarians even though the incidence of homicide is higher now than it was before the abolition of hanging.