AT 11:00PM ON DECEMBER 26, 2001…
Members of the Prentiss, Mississippi police force and the Pearl River Basin Narcotics Task Force conducted a drug raid on the duplex apartment of Jamie Smith. Cory Maye lived in the other apartment that made up the duplex. Maye was not named in the police warrant for the duplex. Smith was arrested for marijuana possession. As the raid on Smith commenced, some officers went around to the other side of the duplex, in search of more contraband. They either thought the other side of the duplex was part of Smith’s apartment, or they may have thought it was abandoned. The door was actually a door to Maye’s home. Maye was asleep and awoke when he heard the rear door being smashed in. The rear door opened into the rear bedroom where Maye’s 18 month old daughter was asleep. Fearing for himself and his daughter, Maye picked up his gun and fired at the intruders as they came into his daughter’s bedroom. A bullet hit and killed the first officer to enter, Ronald Jones. When other officers shouted “Police,” Maye ceased firing and surrendered to arrest. Maye is now on death row for the killing of a police officer.

Sound fair? Black man with no criminal record, just criminal neighbors. Shoots a white cop. Sentenced to death by a white jury. High priced defense attorney Public defender.

This story is several years old, but only in December did it start to gather national attention. There is now a petition to have Maye set free (their server is shaky at the moment, probably due to traffic from BoingBoing), which I’ve signed, and I hope you’ll consider. The links below make it clear that bloggers made this story, and only recently has the mainstream news media started to cover it.

Links: CBS News roundup, Fox news story with lots of detail, BoingBoing post.

Maye did what any of us would have done in a similar situation. Millions of Americans keep guns nearby for home defense, and if the police are going to conduct raids on the wrong apartment in the middle of the night, sooner or later they are going to get shot in the stomach, as officer Jones did. A tragedy that may be, but not nearly as big a tragedy as sentencing a man to death for acting quite reasonably to protect his daughter from harm. You can get a lot more details from the Agitator blog archive on Cory Maye.