TheAgitator.com
Maye, Self-Defense, and Paramilitary Drug Raids
Sunday, December 11th, 2005In January 2004, the Hattiesburg American (sorry, no link) ran this quote from Maye’s first attorney, Rhonda Cooper:
“The thing that bothers me the most is the notion that this 21-year-old who was out on his own for the first time and caring for his daughter was supposed to act reasonably and perfectly, but the officer did not. The reason why the officer lost his life is because he failed to do a thorough investigation. There was no surveillance, no controlled buys. There was no announcement that he was a police officer.“Everybody has to bear some responsibility for this. Cory reacted like any other person who thought someone was breaking into his apartment. He was scared. There was no intent to kill.
And therein lies the problem with hyper-militarized, highly-weaponized drug raids. Citizens on the other end of these raids are expected to behave perfectly rationally. They’re supposed to be cognizant, alert, and aware that it is police, and not illegal intruders, who are storming their homes. At the same time, police typically justify the tactics used in no knocks — including raiding late at night or just before dawn, and deploying dangerous “flashbang” grenades designed to confuse and bewilder a house’s occupants — for the precise reason that they catch drug suspects off guard, and disorient them. How, then, can they turn around and say that the innocent victim of a no-knock who shoots back should have known better?
For my upcoming paper on no-knock and short-notice drug raids, I’ve researched probably close to a hundred examples of botched drug raids, where cops clearly conducted a middle-of-the-night raid on an innocent person or family. Thus far, I haven’t found a single incident in which police themselves were ever charged with a crime for either raiding the wrong home, or shooting someone once inside.* In a handful of the more egregious cases in which a “wrong-door” raid has resulted in the actuall death of an innocent person, the city government has paid compensation, but even then, the settlements are generaly only paid under threat of a lawsuit. But even that is rare. Baltimore County, Maryland, for example hasn’t paid the family of Cheryl Lynn Noel a penny.
On the other hand, I’ve come across several cases where police raided the wrong home and the resident was prosecuted for firing back. Here are three:
What’s clear from the cases I’ve looked at is that courts, prosecutors, and certainly police investigators give cops a huge amount of leeway in these raids. A cop who shoots an innocent person is almost always given the benefit of the doubt. In one case, a cop was cleared of wrongoing after shooting and killing a guy who was holding an ashtray when police stormed his bedroom. The cop thought it was a gun.
We citizens, on the other hand, are supposed to exercise great caution and reservation to make sure the people breaking down their doors to our homes aren’t police, despite the fact that police typically use tactics that are specifically designed to disorient and confuse us.
(*In one case in Miami, cops put 120 rounds of ammunition into the apartment of a 73-year-old man while raiding on a drug warrant, killing him. His great-grandaughter was home during the raid, and cowered in the bathroom during the gunfire. Police were cleared of all wrongdoing by local prosecutors and the internal affairs unit. They were, however, iindicted years later as part of a larger federal investigation into corruption at Miami PD. They were found to have planted evidence and lied about the raid in subsequent reports and investigations.)
Breaking Down Cory Maye’s Door
Cory Maye is a man on death row in Mississippi for killing a police officer who broke into his house as part of a "no-knock" drug raid. The residence in question was not on the search warrant and Maye was not a subject of the raid (nor did h