Another no-knock warrant death
Only this one is taking a while. One Cory Maye is on death row for shooting and killing a police official’s son during a no-knock raid that happened to be on the wrong house. Radley Balko, Glenn Reynolds and Publicola have more background. Radley has been doing some follow up as well.
December 9th, 2005 at 10:00 am
[…] Thanks to Say Uncle for linking to this Sometime in late 2001, Officer Ron Jones collected a tip from an anonymous informant that Jamie Smith, who lived opposite Maye in a duplex, was selling drugs out of his home. Jones passed the tip to the Pearl River Basin Narcotics Task Force, a regional police agency in charge of carrying out drug raids in four surrounding counties. The task force asked Jones if he’d like to come along on the raid they’d be conducting as the result of his tip. He obliged. […]
December 9th, 2005 at 1:42 pm
Er, where’s Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton on this? Where’s the hollywood involvement and the movie? They do that sort of thing for actual criminals, why not help an actually innocent person?
December 9th, 2005 at 7:13 pm
Dammit…I can’t read Radley’s site because he’s on the No-Go list at work…and for the rest of my TDY time, the work computer is the only computer.
Keys to this as I see it:
Finding of fact: Did the police announce themselves as police when they entered Maye’s portion of the duplex? One news story I read, from 2001, says they did. Radley says they apparently only announced themselves when entering the other part, since they apparently were too dumb and/or lazy to know that the building was a duplex.
Legal questions:
1-Are the two residences that compose the duplex legally different, thus requiring separate warrants, and separate announcements upon entry? This should be yes, otherwise the police could search an entire apartment complex based on a warrant for a single apartment.
2-Was Mr Maye reasonably in fear for his life? I say yes, especially if the police didn’t announce themselves upon entering his residence. However, even if they did yell “POLICE!,” I think Mr Maye would have been justified, since he knew he hadn’t broken any laws, and thus had no reason for the police to be executing a forced entry on his house.
The possibility of the cops screwing up and executing one of these warrants on my home makes me want to load slugs in my shotgun.
December 10th, 2005 at 1:41 am
Unfortunately Mr. Maye will be doing time on this one. Does anyone remember the video of the officer in Knoxville doing 90 MPH on a back road with hills and curves only to T-Bone an unsuspecting teen as she made a legal left turn with her blinker flashing? It will be the same scenario; the cops are always in the right as long as they have another cop to confirm the lie. The fact is this is a tragedy and taking a life for an accident will not resolve anything, especially when the officers were in the wrong and Mr. Maye was well within his rights to shoot. Just goes to show that the draconian empire will take your life based on their mistake. I can’t say as I blame him though, anyone burst through my door unannounced and they will suffer the same fate as this officer’s son, the same fate anyone doing the same thing to this officer’s house would receive.