New York State’s capital punishment law is in limbo [0], but the federal courts retain the power to put New Yorkers to death. And suddenly it’s looking like a trend. Just days after the sentencing of Ronell Wilson [1], a jury in Brooklyn's federal court convicted drug kingpin Kenneth McGriff [2] of hiring hit men to murder his rivals. Prosecutors are expected to pursue the death penalty.

As the Albany Times-Union reports [3], Wilson's prosecutors may have been trying to make an end run around the New York Supreme Court's 2004 decision overturning the state's death penalty - "forum shopping," it's called. The United States of America will still strap a man down and put the needle in his arm, if New York won't. Of course, the Wilson jurors were New Yorkers, so let's not let ourselves too far off the hook here.

Meanwhile, Clyde Haberman has an interesting column [4] comparing McGriff's case to Wilson's. "Some death penalty cases are less equal than others," Haberman observes. He does not think McGriff will get death, because McGriff did not kill the same kind of people:

The death penalty is arguably not so much about the killers as it is about their victims. Whom they murder often counts more than the fact that they murder.

I won't delve too far into all the many reasons why the death penalty is an abomination in a democratic society. It is, of course, arbitrary, ineffective, profoundly racist in its application, and, we've learned, very often given to innocent people. You can read plenty more about it at the excellent Death Penalty Information Center [5] website.

I don't feel any personal compassion for Wilson or McGriff, loathesome individuals both. But, ironically, it was a conservative speaker who recently reminded me that passion - for mercy or for vengeance - is not necessarily a political virtue. The real political virtue in a democracy is justice. And the death penalty, despite what its supporters claim, has absolutely nothing in the world to do with justice.

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