I recently wrote about drug war victim Cory Maye, who is on death row because he dared to defend himself when police officers broke into his house.
Radley Balko of The Agitator is doing his own investigative journalism on Cory’s behalf. Hopefully, he’ll make some progress in getting Cory’s case looked at by people who actually understand that it’s not alright for the police to break down your door in the middle of the night and then charge you with murder when you try to defend yourself.
I’ve heard secondhand from people close to Cory Maye that even some police officials, particularly with the sheriff’s department, will off-the-record concede that the Pearl River Basin Narcotics Task Force is excessively aggressive, and that it wouldn’t be all that surprising to learn that, indeed, they hadn’t announced themselves before kicking down the door to Maye’s apartment. “Cowboy mentality” was the phrase used more than a couple of times.
What’s amazing to me is that people are much more interested, on the whole, in what I have to say about war in Iraq than they are in what I have to say about war at home in the United States. In case you have missed the news, the United States incarcerates more citizens per capita than any other nation. For a country that calls itself the land of the free, that’s kind of odd, don’t you think? Prisons are a growth industry in the United States. That’s a sign of troubled times ahead.
Read all about Cory Maye. Thanks Radley, for your work on this important case, in which Cory’s life is at stake.