Two reader responses to District Attorney McDonald’s answers to my questions:

If the informant in the Maye case is “anonymous,” and if Jones is the only person who knew the identity of the informant, and if that identity “died with Jones,” and if prosecutors “did not know the name of the informant” (which I highly doubt, because the prosecutors I know ALWAYS knows the names of the informant, and most states have procedural rules that allow–in some cases–the defense attorneys to uncover the name of an anonymous source), then how does the prosecutor know that Maye “knew the informant”?

If no one knows who the informant is, how could they know Maye’s relationship to him? The only explanation I can come up with is that Jones assured the rest of the team that the informant was solid. But can that possibly be the standard? An assurance by the guy conducting the raid that the raid was legitimate, and that he didn’t fuck up?

Besides the warrant itself, there should be a record of the request for the warrant, written by Jones, and to the judge, outlining the case for reasonable suspicion/probable cause (whatever the standard in Mississippi is). You should be able to look at that, too.

Here’s another:

I find it nearly impossible to believe that Jones did not leave any record of the information regarding Cory Maye. In particular, the entry and search teams should have insisted on having whatever information Jones had. How can you plan a high-risk drug raid without having all the information available?

To me, it just doesn’t add up. Either the entry and search teams were incredibly negligent and sloppy in their work, or someone is lying. My guess would be the latter.

I encourage anyone interested in this case to offer their own observations, particularly those with legal training and experience in criminal law. I’m certain I’m not qualified in criminal law to do all the dirty work here. And the more heads we get thinking about how the various pieces of this case fit together, the better.

We’ll make this a kind of open source campaign to get Maye some justice.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2005 at 7:53 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Cory Maye. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.