What We Now Know - The Plight of Cory Maye Suppose for a moment that youre 21 again. Its late at night and youve fallen asleep in a chair in the living room of your duplex apartment. You have an 18-month-old daughter whos sleeping peacefully in her bedroom. Youve never been arrested and have no record of violent behavior, but youre black, youre poor, youre unemployed, and you live in a bad neighborhood.
Picture yourself in this situation, now aroused from a sound sleep by the noise of someone trying to break down your front door. Men are shouting. Youre startled and disoriented, but your first instinct is to defend yourself and your child. You race to the bedroom, grab your pistol and wait there, tension mounting, in the dark.
The pounding at the front door has ceased, but suddenly it resumes, at the back. A few moments later, the door splinters and there are strangers inside. Commotion, confusion. One of them enters the bedroom where you crouch, prepared to defend yourself and your little girl. You fire three shots in rapid succession. You dont take careful aim; your primary hope, since youre clearly outnumbered, is that gunshots might scare these people away.
Only then do you hear screams of Police! Police! The lights come on. For the first time, you realize youre in the middle of a police raid. You immediately drop the gun and surrender.
We assume that imagining this scenario will be difficult for most if not all of our readers. Nevertheless, something much like it could happen to you, or anyone you know. Being a middle-aged, middle-earning white resident in a middle-class neighborhood will help a lot, but they are not guarantees of protection from a no-knock SWAT assault on your home. Not when these raids number in the tens of thousands each year. Not when even the NYPD admits that one in ten is erroneous in some way. Wrong person, wrong house, bad informant
That is what happened to Cory Maye in the town of Prentiss, Mississippi, on the night of December 26, 2001, when police stormed into both halves of a duplex Maye shared with Jamie Smith, a suspected marijuana dealer. Smith was the only person named on the police warrant, Maye was not suspected of anything.
Unfortunately, one of the shots fired by Maye hit Officer Ron Jones just under Joness bulletproof vest, and the officer died. Worse, Jones was the son of the towns police chief. Worse yet, Jones was white.
As if that didnt stack the cards against Cory Maye high enough, his legal counsel during the ensuing murder trial made the mistake of asking for a change of venue, which was granted. The prosecution was hardly going to object, since the move transferred Maye from his African-American majority home county to a nearby county that is overwhelmingly white. So was the jury.
Maye was charged with capital murder and found guilty as charged. He now resides on Mississippis death row.
As always in cases of this nature, there are points of contention. For example, the police maintain that they announced themselves; Maye says they did not. But really, what difference does this make? If youre just coming awake, disoriented, theres a good chance you wont hear what strange men are shouting. Even if you do, criminals have been known to disguise themselves as cops in order to gain entry to the victims house. When you live in a high-crime area and are yourself blameless, you make assumptions.
Maye also denies that there were any drugs in his house, and immediately after the raid police confirmed that they found none. Yet a second search a couple of days later suddenly turned up a small bag allegedly containing marijuana, as well as a burnt cigarette allegedly contaminated with traces of the drug.
Drug charges were never filed against Maye nor, peculiarly, were they brought against neighbor Smith, who actually was in possession of significant quantities of pot. In fact, the only criminal charge resulting from the operation was Mayes murder rap.
Other questions that might have been raised about the legitimacy of the raid died with Jones, the lead officer in the case. Since Jones was solely responsible for the investigation, and since he apparently kept no written records, the identity of his confidential informant (and that informants evidence, if any) will never be known.
What is known is that Jones conducted no background check on Maye, ran no sting operation against him and, in all likelihood, didnt know the identity of the man living on that side of the duplex at all.
Now Jones is dead, and Maye is scheduled to die for having accidentally shot him. Why? Jurors told Mayes first attorney, after the trial, that they were swayed by two things: the lawyers suggestion in her closing argument that God would remember whether or not they'd shown Maye mercy come Judgment Day; and that they didnt like Mayes upbringing, finding him spoiled and disrespectful.
We have written before on the frightening proliferation of SWAT teams among the nations police departments (a trend that has spread even to small towns), and the increasingly flimsy pretexts under which these units are launched into action. What on earth could be the justification for a 2 a.m., no-knock, battering-ram assault on the home of someone suspected of possessing some quantity of illegal hemp flowers?
Thats beyond us. Also puzzling, and disturbing, is the complacency with which Americans have given up their right to self-defense. The Second Amendment means nothing if citizens are not allowed to protect themselves from what seems imminent harm. Consider that while those who mistakenly shoot police officers are always charged (in Mayes case, with the maximum offense), officers who shoot or otherwise cause the death of the wrong person in a raid gone bad are virtually never called to account.
Remember the famous 1992 case in which the home of Malibu millionaire Donald Scott, heir of the Scott Paper fortune, was entered by police in a no-knock raid. Scott, alarmed by the vigorous pounding on his front door, went into the bedroom to get his gun. When he returned, the police officerswho had meanwhile broken down the door and were holding Scotts wife at gunpointshouted at him to put the gun down. Even though he complied, he was shot three times and killed instantly. Needless to say that the officers who shot Scott were not held responsible for his death.
The reason for the raid: Allegedly, aerial surveillance of Scotts property had shown suspicious plant growth that might have been marijuana (which it wasnt). The conspiratorially inclined suspected another reason for the raid. It seems that the federal government had repeatedly tried to buy some of Scotts land, which was adjacent to federal park land, but he refused to sell. Go figure.
But back to Cory Maye. Not surprisingly, the mainstream media (a/k/a defenders of the status quo) have buried his story. It came to our attention only through the efforts of the Cato Institutes Radley Balko, who has extensively documented it on his website
www.theagitator.com, and other bloggers who have picked it up.
We hope it does reach a national audience. Its a sad fact that 2nd Amendment supporters and those who believe in a wholesale overhaul of drug laws (like Cato, were both) seldom communicate with one another. But if ever there was a case that showed them their common ground, its this one. A fresh dialogue would be most welcome.
Meanwhile, Cory Maye has a new attorney and is appealing his conviction. Given the lengthy review process for death penalty cases, there is still a reasonable chance that Corey Mayes life will be spared if and when somewhere down the long appeal chain hell find a judge who says, Hold on a minute, this just isnt right. . .
http://www.howestreet.com/mainartcl.php?ArticleId=1906*FW Note:The 2nd Amendment was intended by the founders to assist American citizens to defend themselves from despotic government. The problem is that if the government is dishonest and despotic at every level, then how does an innocent man defend himself against institutional oppression?
Will it always be necessary to fight all the way in, and fight all the way out, whenever citzens deal with false accusations by the government?
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