Topic: Convicted Cop-Killer To Be Released From Prison

[rickl]

And it's a great day for liberty.

Why?  Because it's Cory Maye.

You may have heard of him.  He's been in prison for 10 years for defending himself, his young daughter, and his property from a wrong-address SWAT raid.

This was one of the worst miscarriages of justice in American history.  It's great that he's getting out, but he'll never get those years back.

[John Florida]

About time!

[Libertas]

He should file suit for wrongful imprisonment, but little consolation for having ten years of your life trashed!

 

[charlesoakwood]

 [blockquote]

http://reason.com/archives/2006/10/01/the-case-of-cory-maye/6

At least 40 innocent people have been killed in paramilitary-style drug raids since the early 1980s, as have at least 15 police officers. And there are at least 150 cases of “wrong door” raids, in which SWAT teams or similarly aggressive police units have raided the wrong home.
...
Smith [the other duplex tenant] gave up without a struggle. According to police, someone in Smith’s home immediately opened the door when the officers arrived, and those inside the apartment—Smith, his girlfriend Audrey Davis, and a 15-year-old boy named Jimmy—surrendered without incident. Police found marijuana in the bathroom and kitchen of Smith’s apartment, as well as scales containing crack cocaine residue. Yet as of press time, Smith has yet to be charged for any of the drugs found in his apartment nearly five years ago.

Maye, meanwhile, had no prior criminal record, and police had discovered nothing in the apartment to indicate drug dealing. They found a little more than a gram of marijuana, most of it old and ashen—at worst a misdemeanor. “Under any other circumstances, he’d have gotten a $50 ticket,” says Evans. But Maye had just killed a cop. Worse, he had killed the well-liked, widely respected son of the town’s police chief.
...
 I first discovered the case of Cory Maye in December 2005, while doing research for a Cato Institute paper on the sharply increased use of paramilitary tactics in domestic policing.
...
It takes me just a few hours in Prentiss to find another woman who says she too was on the receiving end of a violent, forced-entry drug raid. Though the police didn’t find the meth lab they were looking for, they nevertheless jailed her brother for months (he couldn’t afford bond) before releasing him without explanation.
...
Fox Butterfield—author of the aforementioned front-page story about Prentiss—told me in a phone interview that the town’s white police officers cautioned him not to consult McCullum for the story. McCullum was a black man, they told Butterfield, and he couldn’t be trusted.
...
There are more troubling details in the case against Maye. To begin with, there is no record of Ron Jones’ investigation of Jamie Smith and the Mary Street duplex. Nobody knows the identity of the confidential informant who tipped Jones off. There are no written records of the informant’s past tips or his reliability, or of any surveillance or corroborating investigation Jones did to supplement the informant’s tip. Judge Kruger testified at the trial that he merely took Jones at his word and didn’t press him for details about the informant’s record or Jones’ investigation.
...
Peter Kraska, a criminologist at Eastern Kentucky University and a widely cited expert on the militarization of U.S. police departments, has conducted extensive surveys on the use of SWAT teams dating back to the early 1980s. According to Kraska, the number of SWAT call-outs jumped from about 3,000 per year in the early 1980s to more than 40,000 per year in the early 2000s. The vast majority of that increase has been for drug policing.

Stocked with surplus Pentagon equipment that Congress has made available for drug enforcement, police departments across the country have formed SWAT teams at an alarming clip, even in absurdly small towns where violent crime is unheard of. Mt. Orab, Ohio—population: 2,700—has its own SWAT team. Unicoi County, Tennessee, has 17,700 people, and it hasn’t had a reported murder in six years. Its SWAT team recently acquired an armored personnel vehicle.
...
As Maye put it in a letter to one of his Internet supporters, “We as citizens sit back and say, ‘Well, this could never happen to me.’.…But it’s happened before…and if we don’t take a stand, it’s gonna continue to happen to others.”

[/blockquote]


The para-militarization of our police is interesting but in this article it distracts from the tragedy of Cory Maye.  Cory Maye was the victim of arrogant lusty fools who would have carried out this deed regardless of equipment or the lack thereof. 

[IronDioPriest]

What a nightmare. A society that would see such a thing happen to a citizen in the name of justice... ugh... I can't even think it.

[Pandora]

I am so glad to hear he's finally out.  What happened to Cory Maye is a scenario that could easily be visited on anyone through no fault of their own.  The only worse that could have happened did .... to Jose Gureno.

Something needs doing about the SWATting up of the cops, like a de-SWATting.