Back in Christmas, 2001, Cory Maye was in the lounge room of his Mississippi duplex with the TV on, his 14-month-old daughter in the bedroom, when he heard a lot of commotion and banging at his door.
This much is not in dispute.
Dozing off, he woke up scared, confused and thought he was about to be subject to a violent home invasion. He got up, ran to his bedroom, got a gun, lay on the floor with his daughter, and hoped whatever the hell was going on by his front door would go away. It didn’t. Instead it moved away from the front of his duplex to the back, nearer to where he was lying in the dark, gun loaded. Soon his back door was crashed in, followed by the bedroom door. He fired three bullets at an approaching man. Then someone shouted: Police! Police! You just shot an officer!” He stopped firing and surrendered. In front of him, bleeding on the floor was Ron Jones, a well-liked policeman in his town.
That’s Maye’s story.
The police, who were serving a drug warrant on both residences of the duplex, have a different account of that night. They say that someone jiggled the blinds by the front door when they first arrived and thus knew who they were. After announcing that they were the police they later went in. Maye knew who was coming and shot anyway; it was murder.
Maye was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death; he is appealing.
When the writer Radley Balko first heard about the case and looked into it, things didn’t quite make sense. The raid was hastily organised and undertaken by an inexperienced team. The warrant for the raid only mentioned by name the occupant of the other part of the duplex, Jamie Smith. He was a suspected drug dealer and drug-making equipment was found in his place; he was never charged. Only a joint was found in Maye’s apartment.
Throw in existing racial tension in the town (Maye was black, Jones was white), an incompetent defence attorney and an increasingly militarised police force serving drug warrants and for Balko the Corey Maye case is a microcosm of the state of the war on drugs, all laid out in a recent edition of Reason magazine; it is now available online.
