SAN DIEGO MONITOR
Page 14
The San Diego Monitor
After 10 Years In Prison, Cory Maye Comes Home Radley Balko Radley.Balko@huffingtonpost.com
M
ONTICELLO, Miss. -- When Cory Maye rises up to speak before the 75 or so people who have gathered to welcome him home from prison, his eyes well up, his head drops, and he stammers. He rubs the bridge of his nose, and he cries. His chief lawyer, the burly and bearded Bob Evans, puts a beefy arm around Maye's shoulder and pulls him in. "I think you've just said all there is to be said, son," Evans says. Maye's friends, family and supporters cheer, applaud and cry between bites of cake, corn pudding and blueberry crunch. The party's being held at the Atwood Water Park, a collection of outdoor shelters, campsites and picnic areas along the Perl River. The site seems appropriate; it's a wet afternoon, with rain showers pausing only to let in the sweltering southern Mississippi humidity. But spirits are high. There's a feast on the table. It includes ribs that have been slowcooking on a truck-towed smoker, chicken wings and sausages. And there's a smorgasbord of soul food, from fried chicken gizzards and baked beans to mac and cheese and slow-cooked raccoon. (It tastes a bit like pot roast.) This party was a long time coming. Maye was arrested in 2001, the day after Christmas, for killing Prentiss, Mississippi, police officer Ron Jones during a botched drug raid on Maye's home. Maye, now 30, was convicted in 2004 of capital murder, or the intentional killing of a police officer. He was sentenced to death. Maye says he was asleep as the raid began at 12:30 a.m. and had no idea the men breaking into his home were police. The police say they announced themselves. Maye had no prior criminal record, and police found all of a marijuana roach in his apartment, which under other circumstances would bring a $100 fine. The man who lived next door to Maye in that bright yellow duplex, Jamie Smith, already had drug charges pending against him and appears to have been the actual target of the police action that night. The police found a significant supply of drugs in Smith's apartment, though Smith has
never been tried. I first began reporting on Maye's case in 2005, after finding an Associated Press write-up of the case while researching a paper on SWAT teams I was writing for the Cato Institute. I wrote a post about the raid on my blog that night. It was soon picked up by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, and within a few days it had caught fire on blogs from across the political spectrum. Cory Maye was on death row at the time. Now, he takes his kids, and others, for rides on a fourwheeler. The mug shot of him in an orange jumpsuit -- for a long time one of the few images you could find of him in the press -- now fades to shots of him with his new fiance, catching up with acquaintances and clowning with his son Cory Maye Jr. He has a Facebook account now. At the party, he collects phone numbers and enters them into his new smartphone. There have been other changes over the last 10 years. Maye's daughter Ta'corriana, the 18month old baby who slept on his bed the night of the raid --- the child Maye says he was defending -- is now a playful, mischievous, camerafriendly 12-year-old. Bob Evans, who was fired as the Prentiss public defender for his decision to defend Maye, still has a criminal defense practice just across the street from the Lawrence County courthouse. But he's also now a member of the Mississippi legislature. Two of Maye's main defenders from D.C. law firm Covington & Burling, Abe Pafford and Ben Vernia, have since left to start their own practices. A third, Jessica Gabel, now teaches law at Georgia State University. There are a lot of themes in Maye's story. It is a story about the drug war, about the death penalty, about race and class in the South. It's a story about the inadequacies of the criminal justice system, and it's a story about the conflict between a man's right to defend his home and a creeping tendency of police departments in America to serve routine search warrants by breaking down doors. But looking back over the last five-and-a-half years, here among Maye's party of aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters, the most poignant moments that come to mind all seem to revolve around family. Pafford, for example, first read about Maye's
Cory Maye, with his children Cory Jr. and Ta'corianna, girlfriend Jaunita Mayes, and her daughter Tamy case on the conservative website National Review Online. Pafford has a daughter the same age as Ta'corianna and immediately empathized with Maye after pondering what he'd have done if he had been in Maye's position the night of the raid. Evans says that the first thing he thought about upon hearing about the raid was his own son, who is Maye's age and went to school with Maye. That Evans has become a paternal figure for Maye becomes clear when you see the two interact. A half day before the warm embrace when Maye was at a loss for words, for example, I listened to Evans give Maye a fatherly berating for forgetting to call me back for a planned interview. For the decade he was in prison, Dorothy Maye was torn between preserving his room for the day she hoped he'd be free, and watching his kids, her grandkids, ask questions, then break into tears, when they'd see their daddy's old bedroom. She is all hugs and smiles today. She's also celebrating her 60th birthday. Maye's father, Robert Brown, was absent for much of his life, but he returned to his life in Maye's late teens. Brown then emerged shortly after the raid to take charge of Maye's defense. It was Brown who decided to eschew Evans, the public defender, and pool what money the family had to hire Rhonda Cooper, an AfricanAmerican attorney in Jackson, who convinced Brown that in such a racially-charged case, the
family needed a black attorney. Brown's intentions were good, and his instincts may have been right, but the decision backfired. Evans is one of the best defense attorneys in Mississippi. Cooper, who had no death penalty experience, made some critical mistakes and likely cost Maye an acquittal. Then there's Cory Maye, the father. One of the more moving moments in this saga came during the 2006 hearing in Poplarville, when Mississippi Circuit Court Judge Michael Ewbanks threw out his death sentence. Until that hearing, Maye had been on death row and allowed only "no-contact" visits with his family. That means he could only interact with his kids behind a several-inch-thick plate of glass. No touching, no embracing. Just before that hearing began, Evans called Cory Jr. back to the witness room to see his dad, no glass between them this time. He leapt up, went back for his visit and emerged minutes later with a smile as big as his mouth would hold. It was also at that hearing that Michelle Longino testified on Maye's behalf. Longino is the grandmother of Ta'corianna and was a character witness for Maye. That in itself is worth appreciating. Here was mother of the woman Maye got pregnant out of wedlock taking a witness stand to attest to what a great father he was to his kids. He cooked for them, she said. He Continued on page 17