HERE’S MORE ON THE CORY MAYE CASE from CBS’s Public Eye blog.
Search Results
MORE ON CORY MAYE: Orin Kerr has a lengthy post on the subject, and so does Kieran Healy. And Alan, Esq. wonders why the Maye case is getting so much more attention in the blogosphere than in the mainstream media.
DRUG PROHIBITION LEADS TO NO-KNOCK RAIDS, WHICH LEADS TO PEOPLE DYING. OR BEING CHARGED IF THEY DEFEND THEIR HOMES AGAINST UNKNOWN INTRUDERS, AS IN CORY MAYE’S CASE. Breonna Taylor and the Moral Bankruptcy of Drug Prohibition. Note that you can blame police for this, but you should reserve some blame for the politicians who passed the laws they are enforcing.
STANDING UP FOR FREEDOM: Virginia Tea Party organization fights planning commision issuance of search warrants for suspected “code violations.”
In a semi-related matter, reader Damian Burch emails: “I was about to e-mail you to suggest that you post something about Cory Maye, but I see that you already have. Now I have a question for you: Is there a (reputable) charity that we can donate to which supports citizens whose homes have been erroneously invaded by the government?” I don’t know. Any suggestions?
UPDATE: Pima County GOP Establishment Backing Sherriff Dupnik over botched no-knock raid?
Pima County Republican Party leaders voted late Thursday to take away party chairman Brian Miller’s keys to the GOP headquarters and called a special meeting to try to remove him from his post.
Miller has been under fire from party stalwarts for the past month, with meetings called in recent weeks after he criticized a SWAT raid in May that resulted in the shooting death of a man law enforcement officers suspected of involvement in drug trafficking.
Several elected officials and party leaders have complained his comments pitted the party against law enforcement at a time when city elections are looming and candidates are gearing up for bigger 2012 races.
In other words, they value political alliances with government employees over the constitutional rights of constituents. Nice to hear them make that clear.
Tucson Tea Partier Robert Mayer adds: “Pima GOP chairman Brian Miller, who leans libertarian as we do, criticized the raid. Now, the old guard GOP that makes up the executive committee has voted to take away his credit card, keys to the office, and forbids him to speak as chairman. They are planning a change to the county bylaws to allow for them to remove him from office. The president of the AZ police union also called up every Republican candidate and elected official in the state telling them ‘you’re fucked’ if you don’t condemn Brian Miller.”
Another reason why police unions shouldn’t be allowed, as if we needed one after their politicization in the Wisconsin fracas.
Greetings, Instanation. Since I’m new to the Instapundit guest blogging crew, I thought I’d take a moment to introduce myself. (And plug some my work, of course!)
I’m a senior editor for Reason magazine, where I write a weekly crime column and a couple of investigative features per year, generally on criminal justice issues. I’m also a media fellow with the Cato Institute and I publish the weblog TheAgitator.com. If you read this site regularly you might recognize my name from the Cory Maye case, my reporting on SWAT teams and police militarization, or my investigations into Mississippi’s forensic system, particularly the controversial medical examiner Steven Hayne and his sidekick, fraudulent bite mark specialist Michael West.
Like our esteemed host, I also dabble in amateur photography. I’ll post a photo or so a day of some of my favorites over the years. I currently live with my pup Daisy in Alexandria, Virginia, though I’ll be moving to Nashville, Tennessee in a couple of weeks.
Welcome to my fellow guest bloggers. And a big thank you to Glenn for inviting me to help fill in for him this week.
PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: Collateral Damage and the War on Drugs: Reflections on the Calvo Case.
Mayor Calco and his wife are white, middle class progressives, who live in a two-story, red-brick house in a Washington suburb. In addition to being a part-time mayor, Calvo works at a nonprofit foundation that runs boarding schools. His wife is a state finance officer. All of which suggests they’re in precisely the same demographic as most MSM reporters. The Washington Post or NY Times reporters look at this case and immediately think: “It could happen to me!†So the story gets saturation coverage–even in Great Britain!
Meanwhile, the MSM ignores the plight of African-American and Latino minority communities caught in the War on Drugs’ crossfire between paramilitary SWAT stormtroopers and gang thugs. How many brown and black families per year are terrorized by cops erroneously executing no knock warrants on the wrong premises? We don’t know because the media only pays attention to collateral damage from the War on Drugs when it happens to people like Mayor Calvo.
Indeed. Look how little traction the Cory Maye case has gotten, outside of blogs and Reason magazine.
AT PAM’S HOUSE BLEND, a complaint about a lack of attention from “progressive” bloggers to the Jena 6.
Far be it from me to speak for the progressive blogosphere, but — as I was discussing with a colleague whose work on the “school-to-jail pipeline” has had him following the case closely — one big problem is that the facts have trickled out, and it was hard to get a clear narrative that made sense of what was going on. The signal-to-noise ratio wasn’t that good. Contrast this to the Cory Maye case, where Radley Balko made things quite clear early on. We’ve seen this in cases involving foreign bloggers in trouble, too, where people wonder why some get a lot more attention than others. Almost always it involves whether there’s a clear story online that someone can link to, and people who can get the story out to bloggers with an explanation of why it’s important. My Jena 6 email all seemed to be in media res, which is why I consulted Radley Balko. The email conveyed that people were upset, but that’s not enough — in the blogosphere, people are always upset!
UPDATE: Related thoughts from Orin Kerr.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Unconvinced.
TIM CAVANAUGH LOOKS AT No-Knock raids after Hudson and sees more danger for innocent civilians and police alike:
Ironically, part of the impetus for the no-knock raid is the safety of police and civilians. There’s a certain logic to that: A quick and efficient raid, in which the power of the police is immediately established and no resistance is possible, would seem like the quickest means of assuring domestic tranquility. But what happens when a citizen with a legally purchased handgun reacts to a home invasion, by people who have not knocked and are less than prompt in identifying themselves as police officers, in the most reasonable manner available—by shooting one of the invaders? The Mississippian Cory Maye is famously sitting on death row for shooting a cop who didn’t identify himself before trespassing on Maye’s residence. But Officer Ron Jones, by all accounts an excellent cop and standup guy, is dead. This case is not directly applicable (Maye’s home was not part of the search Jones was conducting), but the principle is the same: A violent home invasion increases the likelihood that somebody will get hurt, and the Supreme Court ought to proceed with caution before raising the likelihood of an event like that. We can take a charitable view and assume that Scalia and the high court majority are committed to reducing the amount of violence in America. But the best way to avoid a fight is not to start it.
Armed people breaking into homes unannounced ought to be in danger of being shot at. Police shouldn’t put themselves in that situation except in extraordinary cases — where, for example, someone’s being held hostage. Worries that someone might flush a bag of reefer don’t qualify, in my opinion.
HALEY BARBOUR is reportedly getting a “red-carpet reception” in Washington as he asks for Katrina relief money.
I wish he’d turn at least a bit of his attention to the Cory Maye case.
IN THE MAIL: Joel Miller’s Size Matters : How Big Government Puts the Squeeze on America’s Families, Finances, and Freedom.
Miller has also been my editor on An Army of Davids, and in fact I was attracted to the publisher by the chance to work with him, since I was a big fan of his drug-war book, Bad Trip, which seems especially insightful in light of the Cory Maye case.
JOEL KOTKIN: Silicon Valley’s Useful Idiots: Tech elites paid for the rope that may hang them.
The term “useful idiot,” often credited to Vladimir Lenin, applies to people supporting a cause or movement injurious to their own self-interest. Nowhere is this more relevant these days than in Silicon Valley, a place dominated by brilliant technologists and marketers who often seem to have the social and political acuity of middle schoolers, as evidenced by their strong support for progressive Democrats poised to destroy the underpinnings of their businesses.
California governor Gavin Newsom is expected to sign the recently passed Assembly Bill 5, which will effectively turn many contractors into employees. AB5 codifies the California Supreme Court’s unanimous May 2018 ruling in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court of Los Angeles that many contractors should be treated as employees. The legislation’s prime backers are the state’s unions, which see it as an ideal way to organize now out-of-reach workers.
The new measure is potentially devastating, though, for companies like Uber, Lyft, and Postmates, all built around part-time employees, and none yet profitable. Many other tech firms—including profitable ones—use contractors for everything from app development to catering to cleaning. As many as 2 million Californians are employed in so-called gig work. If AB5 passes, job losses won’t just be felt by the ride-hailing firms but also by many other businesses, including newspapers, small trucking firms, some medical providers, and even franchise owners.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Silicon Valley, like many industries, placed its bets on both political parties. Moderate Republicans like Pete McCloskey, Ed Zschau, and Tom Campbell routinely won congressional elections, as did similarly minded members of the state legislature. But over the past few decades, the Valley has become politically monochromatic, with virtually no elected Republicans. Almost all contributions from Silicon Valley tech owners and employees in the 2016 and 2018 elections went to Democrats. Tech money helped Newsom outspend his GOP rival by three to one—with major contributions from former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, and Lauren Jobs (widow of the Apple founder) at the top of the donor list. Former Google chairman Eric Schmidt heads data efforts for several Democratic presidential candidates, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and arch-populist Elizabeth Warren. Tech employees are, if anything, more progressive-leaning in their political contributions than their corporate masters.
Just a few years ago, these investments seemed to be paying off.
Now not so much.