RADLEY BALKO: After 10 Years In Prison, Cory Maye Comes Home. I don’t think he should have served a day.

RADLEY BALKO: Photos From Cory Maye’s Homecoming.

RADLEY BALKO: Cory Maye Freed After 10 Years In Prison: The Back Story.

CORY MAYE UPDATE: SOME EXCELLENT NEWS: “After 10 years of incarceration, and seven years after a jury sentenced him to die, 30-year-old Cory Maye will soon be going home. Mississippi Circuit Court Judge Prentiss Harrell signed a plea agreement Friday morning in which Maye pled guilty to manslaughter for the 2001 death of Prentiss, Mississippi, police officer Ron Jones, Jr. Per the agreement, Harrell then sentenced Maye to 10 years in prison, time he has now already served. Maye will be taken to Rankin County, Mississippi, for processing and some procedural work. He is expected to be released within days.”

While personally I don’t think that Maye should have served time in prison at all for what seems to have been a tragic mistake in the course of a botched no-knock raid, this is about as good as could realistically be expected. Some background here. And here’s a collection of InstaPundit posts on the case going back several years.

A VICTORY FOR JUSTICE: Mississippi Supreme Court Grants Cory Maye A New Trial. (Via Rand Simberg, who comments: “In a just world, Radley Balko would get a Pulitzer for this.” True.)

GOOD NEWS: Mississippi Supreme Court to hear Cory Maye case.

NICK GILLESPIE: Mississippi Drug War Blues: The Case of Cory Maye.

Plus, Radley Balko: A New Trial For Cory Maye.

TERRIFIC NEWS: Cory Maye Gets A New Trial.

WRONG-DOOR RAIDS AND INJUSTICE IN THE JUSTICE SYSTEM: I talk with Radley Balko about the Cory Maye case, SWAT raids gone wrong, and more. Now if they’ll just let me out of this cage . . . .

MISSISSIPPI DRUG WAR BLUES: A short documentary on the Cory Maye case.

FROM RADLEY BALKO, a Cory Maye update.

CORY MAYE’S MOTION FOR A NEW TRIAL has been denied. It’s an injustice worthy of Mike Nifong. Will Haley Barbour intervene? He should.

RADLEY BALKO’S REASON ARTICLE ON CORY MAYE is now available on line and you should read the whole thing. But here’s a bit on how no-knock wrong-house raids go wrong and the double standard in prosecuting innocent citizens who respond appropriately to having their doors kicked down by unidentified strangers:

In 2000 drug cops in Modesto, California, accidentally shot 11-year-old Alberto Sepulveda in the back of the head at point-blank range during a botched raid on the boy’s home. In 2003 police in New York City raided the home of 57-year-old city worker Alberta Spruill based on a bad tip from an informant. The terrified Spruill had a heart attack and died at the scene. Last year Baltimore County police shot and killed Cheryl Lynn Noel, a churchgoing wife and mother, during a no-knock raid on her home after finding some marijuana seeds while sifting through the family’s trash.

There are dozens more examples. And a botched raid needn’t end in death to do harm. It’s hard to get a firm grip on just how often it happens—police tend to be reluctant to track their mistakes, and victims can be squeamish about coming forward—but a 20-year review of press accounts, court cases, and Kraska’s research suggests that each year there are at least dozens, perhaps hundreds, of “wrong door” raids. And even when everything goes right, it’s overkill to use what is essentially an urban warfare unit to apprehend a nonviolent drug suspect.

Criminal charges against police officers who accidentally kill innocent people in these raids are rare. Prosecutors almost always determine that the violent, confrontational nature of the raids and the split-second decisions made while conducting them demand that police be given a great deal of discretion. Yet it’s the policy of using volatile forced-entry raids to serve routine drug warrants that creates those circumstances in the first place.

Worse, prosecutors are much less inclined to take circumstances into account when it comes to pressing charges against civilians who make similar mistakes. When civilians who are innocent or who have no history of violence defend their homes during a mistaken raid, they have about a one in two chance of facing criminal charges if a policeman is killed or injured. When convicted, they’ve received sentences ranging from probation to life in prison to, in Maye’s case, the death penalty.

It’s a remarkable double standard. The reason these raids are often conducted late at night or very early in the morning is to catch suspects while they’re sleeping and least capable of processing what’s going on around them. Raids are often preceded by the deployment of flash-bang grenades, devices designed to confuse everyone in the vicinity. While narcotics officers have (or at least are supposed to have) extensive training in how to act during a raid, suspects don’t, and officers have the advantage of surprise. Yet prosecutors readily forgive mistaken police shootings of innocent civilians and unarmed drug suspects while expecting the people on the receiving end of late-night raids to show exemplary composure, judgment, and control in determining whether the attackers in their homes are cops or criminals.

This is wrong. It’s not only a reason why no-knock raids should be banned except in life-or-death situations, but it’s also an example of how unfettered prosecutorial discretion is unfair and dangerous. In cases like this, there should be much more accountability for decisions to prosecute, or not to prosecute.

I’d also like to see federal legislation — justified under Congress’s 14th Amendment section 5 powers — limiting such raids and providing for legal remedies, including money damages without the shield of official immunity for officers, supervisors, and agencies.

I think such legislation would be fairly popular, but I suspect that the power of the interests involved is sufficient to ensure that it doesn’t ever happen.

And Jim Henley gives Radley Balko a much-deserved pat on the back for his excellent work on this case.

CORY MAYE UPDATE: Radley Balko reports:

Cory Maye will not sleep on death row tonight. Nor, for that matter, any night for the foreseeable future.

At the conclusion of the hearing today, Judge Michael Eubanks ruled on two of the defense team’s battery of arguments. Both rulings from the bench tonight dealt with Rhonda Cooper’s competence. Judge Eubanks found that Ms. Cooper was competent for the trial, but incompetent for the sentencing.

I have my quarrels with that ruling, obviously. But in the short run, it means that Cory will at the very least get a new sentencing trial. And until and if that happens, he will no longer be on death row, and for the moment is no longer condemned to die.

Judge Eubanks did not issue a ruling on any of the other defense arguments — and there were lots of them. It may be a month or more before we hear what he has decided. That said, I am cautiously optimistic.

Read the whole thing. And Radley’s piece on the case in Reason — alas, not available online yet — is really good. Alas, one thing he reports is that Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) won’t even consider clemency, which strikes me as a serious abdication of responsibility on Barbour’s part.

CORY MAYE UPDATE:

Defense lawyers argued today that Cory Maye should be taken off death row and given a new trial.

On Jan. 23, 2004, a Marion County jury sentenced Maye to die by lethal injection in the 2001 killing of Prentiss Police Officer Ron Jones during a drug raid.

Statements by a confidential informant, Randy Gentry, led authorities to raid the duplex where Maye lived. Authorities found only remnants from a marijuana cigarette in Maye’s duplex.

In a hearing today in Pearl River County Circuit Court, defense attorneys attacked Gentry’s credibility. Gentry took the stand and said he wasn’t prejudiced. But then he admitted on the stand that in a message left on defense attorney Bob Evans’ answering machine he used profanity and the “n” word, repeatedly saying “those f— — n——” and referred to Maye a “c— s—–.”

Gentry testified he bought, as a confidential informant for Jones, two rocks of cocaine from Jamie Smith, 21, who lived in the other side of the duplex from Maye. He said he saw Smith go into Maye’s house. Gentry said he saw a drug transaction between the two through a thin window curtain in Maye’s house. But he acknowledged it wasn’t “as plain as day.”

Smith was charged but never prosecuted, Evans said. He skipped bail and has never been found.

Maye, who had no prior criminal record, insists he killed Jones in self-defense and had no idea he was an officer. He had been watching his 18-month-old daughter when officers burst in his side of the duplex.

A classic example of why paramilitary drug raids, especially based on the tips of confidential informants, are a bad idea.

CORY MAYE UPDATE: Radley Balko has been pursuing this story indefatigably, and he’s now identified the informant whose call led to the wrong-house no-knock raid:

After the guy realized the investigator was working for the defense team, he clammed up. When Bob Evans — Cory Maye’s lead attorney — called to tell him that if he didn’t talk, they’d compell his testimony with a subpeona, the informant flipped out. He called Evans, and left a rant on Evans’ answering machine that, when Evans played it for me the other night, blew my mind. It’s a 45-second clip of absolute fury, brimming with f-bombs, anger, hate, and — by my count — at least four utterances of the word “nigger.”

This is the “trustworthy” informant whose tip led to the raid on Cory Maye’s home. An unabashed bigot. Makes you wonder how many other black people have been raided, arrested, and imprisoned based on this guy’s tips.

Jeez. You have to have informants for some law enforcement tasks, of course, but the peculiar dynamics of the Drug War lead to much more reliance on these usually unsavory types, and drastically higher risks of tragic outcomes when, as here, they’re paired with no-knock raids on what turns out to be the wrong house.

Another reason, among many, for getting rid of the Drug War, of course.

CORY MAYE UPDATE: “A man’s life hangs in the balance. Whose judgment do you trust, twelve duly appointed jurors or one lone blogger?”

RADLEY BALKO is back from Mississippi and has much more on the Cory Maye case.

THIS, AS BEST I CAN TELL, is how the Cory Maye case should have turned out:

A little more than two years ago, Mario Barcia Jr. was awakened in the dead of night by banging on his door. Startled — and shaken from two previous robberies — he grabbed his gun and ran to the front of the house.

Within a matter of seconds his life would change forever. Seeing what he described only as a bright light shining through his back door, Barcia fired a single shot.

Five shots were returned. Then Barcia fired twice more.
His first shot had hit Miami-Dade County police officer Chad Murphy in the back.

Barcia was arrested and charged with attempted first-degree murder of a law enforcement officer, a crime that could have left him imprisoned for life. Murphy, wearing a flak jacket, survived with a bloody bruise.

On Wednesday, it took a Miami-Dade County jury less than 30 minutes to decide Barcia did nothing wrong in shooting Murphy, who had entered Barcia’s property without permission or a warrant.

It’s still been no picnic for Barcia, but at least he’s not in jail like Cory Maye, who acted similarly under very similar circumstances. Radley Balko has a lot more on the Maye case on his blog. Just keep scrolling.

CORY MAYE UPDATE: Radley Balko reports:

As I’ve mentioned before, Cory Maye’s lawyer on appeal is Bob Evans, who also happens to be the public defender for Jefferson Davis County. For ten years, Evans has also served as the public defender for the town of Prentiss, the seat of Jefferson Davis County.

It now appears that the Prentiss Board of Aldermen have fired Evans as the Prentiss public defender. His transgression? Representing Cory Maye. Evans told me last month that he’d been warned that if he agreed to take this case, he could well be fired. Looks like whoever warned him was correct.

The whole thing smells.

ANOTHER REASON, BESIDES CORY MAYE, why no-knock raids are a bad idea.

CORY MAYE UPDATE: Radley Balko has posted transcripts.

THE NATIONAL JOURNAL’S DANIEL GLOVER looks at Cory Maye, “Tookie” Williams, and the blogosphere.

And Dave Kopel writes in The Rocky Mountain News: “After all the attention the mainstream media, including the Denver dailies, gave to the execution of the unrepentant quadruple- murderer Tookie Williams, it would be nice if the media focused on a man on death row who is actually innocent.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: John Leo looks at the Tookie case. But why not a column on Cory Maye?

RADLEY BALKO has more on Cory Maye.

RADLEY BALKO has a big Cory Maye roundup posted.