The Case of Cory Maye

A cop is dead, an innocent man may be on death row, and drug warriors keep knocking down doors.

Radley Balko from the October 2006 issue

(Page 6 of 7)

“Informants are an important tool in police work,” says Peter Christ, a retired police captain with some 20 years of narcotics experience. Christ also co-founded Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an organization of ex-cops opposed to the drug war. “But when you use them to investigate consensual crimes, you invite all sorts of problems. You tell a suspect, ‘You’re facing 20 to life unless you help us out.’ Common sense says that’s more motivation to make something up than a sound way of obtaining reliable information.”

With so many deployments using such violent, confrontational tactics based on often flimsy information, it’s not hard to see how tragic mistakes might happen. And they do. The death of Ron Jones is just one of dozens of unnecessary deaths that overly aggressive drug searches have produced since the mid-’80s. The list of fatalities from botched drug raids includes not only police officers such as Jones but bystanders, wrongly targeted innocents, and harmless, nonviolent drug users.

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.

The raid on Cory Maye’s apartment wasn’t exactly like the usual paramilitary assault. Most notably, it was conducted not by a trained and seasoned SWAT team but by a small group of mostly untrained officers. Jones himself had little experience in warrant service and in fact was taking classes in narcotics policing at the time of the raid. But in many other respects, the operation had the elements of a typical botched drug raid, including a questionable lead from a confidential informant with little follow-up investigation, a rubber-stamp warrant approval by a local judge, unnecessarily violent and confrontational “dynamic entry” tactics, and the use of such tactics against a home with a child inside.

‘If We Don’t Take a Stand…’

After Maye was sentenced to death, his family fired Cooper and asked Evans to return to the case and handle Cory’s appeal. Evans agreed.

In December 2005, as Evans was preparing Maye’s appeal, he received a phone call from Prentiss Mayor Charlie Dumas, who is close to Officer Ron Jones’ family. Dumas told Evans that several of the town’s aldermen had expressed concern about his decision to handle Maye’s appeal. Although representing an indigent defendant on appeal was Evans’ job as the town’s public defender, Dumas told Evans he could lose that job if he continued to act as Maye’s attorney. Evans ignored the threat.

Six weeks later, in January 2006, Dumas called Evans with the news that Prentiss had fired him as its public defender. Evans says Dumas explicitly cited his representation of Maye as the reason for his termination. “I have officially been Prentiss public defender since February 1995, and unofficially for several years prior,” Evans says. “During that time there hasn’t been a single official complaint communicated to me about my performance.”

Dumas told me in a phone interview that his conversations with Evans were private, and that I should ask the town’s aldermen why they fired him. Sylvia Ward, the only alderman to return my calls, said she wasn’t allowed to give the reason, and suggested I get a copy of the minutes from the meeting. The minutes only note the motion to fire Evans, which was passed unanimously. They offer no reason for the motion.

As of this writing, Maye is awaiting a hearing at which the trial judge will rule on his defense team’s motions for a directed “not guilty” verdict or a new trial. The hearing will likely take place in the fall. If Maye is not successful there, he will get a direct appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court and, if that also fails, begin his federal appeals process.

Hope for a pardon or clemency seems dim. Aides to Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican, have indicated both publicly and privately that Barbour doesn’t believe in pardons or clemency, even for people he thinks are innocent. Apparently he doesn’t even bother to read pardon petitions. Of course, there’s a chance that someone else will occupy the governor’s mansion by the time Maye nears an execution date.

Comments

|10.10.09 @ 2:53AM|#

excellent article, both compelling and documented, you're a credit to the field of writing.

Pingback| 11.17.09 @ 3:11PM

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…Crack rock, rolling paper, switchblade | Main | November 17, 2009 All Libertarians Only Care About Taxes and White People By Mona Everyone “knows” that, right? Well Radley Balko’s Pulitzer-worthy journalism was the sine qua non of this. Or at least, his publicity-generating investigations mean that Cory Maye will now have a superb defense team. (And for those who may not know, Maye is an…

Pingback| 11.19.09 @ 2:43AM

Why you should care about Cory Maye and Cameron Todd Willingham » North by Northweste links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

…Writing Politics Multimedia Magazine RSS Why You Should Care / Nov. 18, 2009 at 11:20 pm Why you should care about Cory Maye and Cameron Todd Willingham By Matt Zeitlin It’s hard to imagine a more depressing story than that of Cory Maye. In September, 2001, when he was just 21 years old, Maye fell asleep on the couch of his duplex in Prentiss, Mississippi. Hours later, armed men assaulted his home and burst into his…

|11.21.09 @ 1:32AM|#

This is absurd, self defense is a god given right, this cop crossed the line, and got what he had coming. I've got nothing against cops per-say, but when they use Nazi tactics, and lose, justice turns pervert. It's not even justice anymore, our system is so corrupt, and one sided, you are NOT presumed innocent,until you can prove it beyond doubt, any doubt. The second one sets foot in a courtroom, they're guilty, and the court is prejudice.

|11.21.09 @ 1:37AM|#

This is absurd, self defense is a god given right, this cop crossed the line, and got what he had coming. I've got nothing against cops per-say, but when they use Nazi tactics, and loose, justice turns pervert. It's not even justice anymore, our system is so corrupt, and one sided, you are NOT presumed innocent,until you can prove it beyond doubt, any doubt. The second one sets foot in a courtroom, they're guilty, and the court is prejudice.

|11.21.09 @ 4:17AM|#

A really simple solution to the problem of "he said, he said", would be to mandate by law recording devices be present during these raids. A man's life hinges upon whether the police shouted "Police!" before he started shooting at them. How simple it would have been to have a video, or even audio recording of the raid.
The standard of proof would be statutorily pegged, that if the police did not make the recording, in violation of law, then the presumption of credibility will lie with the defendant.

|11.21.09 @ 10:43PM|#

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