Cory Maye coverage

The always-excellent Radley Balko has posted an in-depth musing the on the sad case of Cory Maye, the Mississippi man currently serving live without parole in prison (originally, he faced the death penalty) for killing a police officer in self-defense during a misfired no-knock raid on the wrong house. As always seems to be the case, the raid was an artifact of the "war on drugs" -- an attempt to arrest people for engaging in commerce in officially disfavored intoxicants.

Balko has followed this case from the beginning. While he's been a consistent advocate for Cory Maye, his reportage is notable for the sympathy he expresses toward Ron Jones, the man killed when police burst into Maye's bedroom in the middle of the night.

You have one man taken from his family, in the prime of his life. You have another man, also taken from his family, now losing the prime of his life. You have a son taken from his mother and father. And you have a loving father being taken from his son and daughter.

Thank this war. The goddamned drug war. It is so incredibly senseless and stupid. And it’ll continue to claim and ruin lives, because too few politicians have the backbone to stand up and say after 30 years, $500 billion, a horrifyingly high prison population, and countless dead innocents, cops, kids, nonviolent offenders, decimated neighborhoods, wasted lives, corrupted cops, and eviscerations of the core freedoms this country was allegedly founded upon, the shit isn’t working.

From my perspective, the case against Maye seems rooted in the twin evils of racism -- Maye is black and Jones was white -- and the insane assumption that police are automatically due cringing subservience, even when they crash through your door as unidentifiable raiders in the middle of the night.