Say you’re asleep in your house with your kid in the middle of the night, and some people bust in with paramilitary gear, and you — law-abiding, gun-owning citizen that you are — open fire on the intruders in an effort to protect yourself, your daughter, and your home. Say you kill one of the intruders. Why, where I live, they’d probably give you a slap on the back and buy you a beer.

You certainly wouldn’t expect to end up on death row, would you? Certainly not in Texas. Certainly not in the Mississippi I grew up in, either. Except, of course, if you’re black, and the intruders are dimwitted redneck cops storming the wrong home in search of a drug den, and the guy you killed is the white son of the chief of police. Then all bets are off, and you may well find yourself in a world of hurt. For example, you might be on death row.

Christ.

There are some things so irredeemably fucked that they transcend party politics, and this is one of them. It’s monstrous.

More on the case here; that blogger follows it pretty closely, so his top page is always a good place to go.