(Note: I’m putting these posts up pretty quickly, while simultaneously writing an op-ed on this case. Please forgive spelling errors, typos, etc. (Of course, if you spot some, do let me know) I’ll go back and correct them as I have time.)
I received one set of search warrants and affidavits this morning at 8:45am. There was one warrant and one affidavit for each apartment at the duplex. They were very spare — boilerplate, really — with no details about Officer Jones’ due dilligence to confirm that Cory Maye was dealing drugs. I then got a second fax at 9:50am, which included a document called “Underlying Facts and Cirucmstances,” in which Officer Jones lays out his reasons for requesting the warrants.
Here are the PDFs:
Warrant on Maye’s residence.
Affidavit on Maye’s residence.
Underlying facts on Maye’s residence.
Post-raid evidence sheet on Maye’s residence.
Warrant on Smith’s residence.
Affidavit on Smith’s residence.
Underlying facts on Smith’s residence.
Post-raid evidence sheet on Smith’s residence.
My observations:
First, a concession. There does seem to be a separate warrant and affidavit for each residence at the duplex. Warrants for Smith’s residence were issued in the name of “Jamie Smith.” Warrants for the residence occupied by Cory Maye were issued under “persons unkown.” This runs contra to an earlier post of mine in which I wrote that Maye’s original attorney believed police weren’t aware that the building was a duplex. It now seems pretty clear that they were. I’ll soon put up a post with corrections to the story thus far. As I mentioned when I first learned of this story, my account of the raid was pieced together from various media accounts — some of them contradictory — and interviews with Maye’s former lawyer, who hadn’t seen the case in nearly two years. This story seems to be moving pretty quickly. I’ll continue to correct and clarify details on the fly. When I’m wrong, I’ll concede I’m wrong. It appears that I was wrong in stating that police didn’t know that the building shared by Maye and Smith was a duplex. But this detail by no means undermines Maye’s innocence.
That out of the way, it’s important to note that though his residence is cited, Cory Maye isn’t mentioned by name anywhere on the search/affidavit documents. Only Jamie Smith is mentioned. Officer Jones refers to Jamie Smith as “a known drug dealer,” but refers to Maye only as “persons unkown.” Indeed, while police found marijuana all over Smith’s apartment (as well as “crack cocaine residue”), they barely found any in Maye’s (and even that is questionable, which I’ll get to in a moment). Newspaper accounts of the case have reported that Maye had been renting the duplex from Smith for less than two months before the raid. So it seems unlikely that Maye, who had just moved into the apartment with his baby daughter, and who (once again) had no criminal record, would have entered into the drug business with Smith. And while it isn’t essential that a defendant be expressly named in a search warrant, the fact that Maye wasn’t in this particular case lends evidence to the theory that his house was raided not because he was dealing, but because he had the misfortune of living next to a known dealer.
Note also that the “Underlying Facts and Circumstances” documents are exactly the same for both Maye and Smith. Which means that Officer Jones did no independent investigation of Maye. He didn’t even know Maye’s name. You’d think he might have checked to see who was living in the other apartment in the duplex, and whether or not the person living there had a previous record before launching a late-night raid. Instead, he relied on the informant’s assertion, and traffic to and from the house. Even more evidence, I think, that Maye’s only real transgression here was living next to a “known drug dealer.”It might be interesting to find Smith, and ask him if he knew Maye to be a dealer. Of course, given that Smith is facing his own drug charges (or doing time for them already — no one seems to know what happened to Smith after the raid), I wouldn’t put too much stock in what he says.
There’s something very suspicious about the evidence sheet from Maye’s apartment. Immediately after the raid, media outlets reported that police said no drugs were found in Maye’s side of the duplex. Jackson, Missippi’s Clarion-Ledger, for example, reported:
No drugs were found at the yellow duplex, which authorities said Maye rented. The duplex, adorned with a Christmas wreath on the door, Christmas lights and a small bike on the porch, was cordoned off by police tape.
The raid took place on December 26th at about 11:30pm. That story ran on December 28th, which means it was probably filed on December 27th. So apparently, someone in the police department told the press the day after the raid that there were no drugs found in Maye’s residence.
Now look at the evidence sheets for Maye and Smith. Smith’s sheet is dated December 26th. Two times were drawn in, then blotted out. I can’t decipher what they said before they were blotted. Given the blottings, there’s no time given for whent he evidence was seized from Smith’s place other than “December 26.” But if the Smith sheet was filled out on the 26th, it means police searched his apartment and drew up the sheet immediately after the raid.
But Maye’s evidence sheet wasn’t filled out until the 27th. And once again, there are two times of day scribbled on the sheet, then blotted out. The final time reads 5:20am.
This brings up a number of questions. Why did someone tell the media fairly late into the day on the 27th that no drugs had been found in Maye’s apartment? Why did it take (at least) five hours longer to fill out Maye’s sheet than it did to fill out Smith’s? Why were the times on both Maye’s and Smith’s sheets scribbled out twice? What did those times originally say? Did the times on Maye’s sheet originally read later than 5:20am? Did officers Brown and Bullock — who filed the evidence sheets — go back to Maye’s apartment and re-search for drugs? If so, did this happen before or after they learned of Officer Jones’ death? And before or after police had already told the media no drugs were found in Maye’s apartment?
These are important questions. If police returned to the scene to conduct a second search — either after learning of Jones’ death, or after the media began filing stories about the police chief’s son getting shot in a drug raid on a home where no drugs were found — I think reasonable people might rightly grow suspicious about the drugs police claim to have found in Maye’s home.
Officer Jones’ informant says he saw “a large quantity of marijuana being stored in both apartments located on Mary St.” Unfortunately, we’ll never know the identity of that informant. One of the many unfortunate aspects of the drug war is that because drug crimes take no victims, police have to rely on tips from informants. Most of the time, informants are pretty shady — felons who exchange tips for leniency, rival drug dealers, and people with grudges to settle. Nearly every botched no-knock raid I’ve looked into in my research came about as the result of a tip from a confidential informant. But as DA McDonald told us, the identity of Jones’ informant and all of the details of Jones’ investigation “died with Jones.” So we’ll never really know how credible the informant actually was. Jones swears in his affidavit that the informant had given tips in the past that led to an arrest (though, curiously, not a conviction). That means little. I’ve read cases where cops have described an informant as “reliable” when his tips proved to be accurate less than half of the time.
Officer Jones’ statement that he “personally surveillanced said apartment and witnessed a large amount of traffic at unusual hours traveling to and from said apartments” isn’t all that compelling, either. If Smith was a drug dealer, it’s understandable why there’d be traffic. That shouldn’t implicate Maye.We should also note that we’ll never see any of the documentation of Officer Jones’ surveillances. All we have is the assurances of a dead cop that he conducted him. We don’t know how many times he surveilled the place, how long he stayed, how much traffic is “unusual” and precisely how many cars visited Maye’s residence, versus how many visited Smith’s. Keep in mind, Maye had a baby daughter. The daughter shared time between Maye’s place and her mother’s parents’ place. And according to the Hattiesburg American, the daughter’s mother — Maye’s girlfriend — sometimes worked the night shift at a Marshall Durbin plant in Hattiesburg. Which means she probably came and went at odd hours.
Even if we take the evidence sheets at face value, I think they discredit Jones’ informant. Cops found “1 small bag” of marijuana in Maye’s apartment, and three pieces of a burnt cigar, which they believed to have contained marijuana before it was smoked. If Maye was indeed storing “a large quantity of marijuana” in his apartment 24 hours before the raid, as the informant alleged, he must have sold it very quickly in the hours before the raid. I suppose it’s possible, as DA McDonald suggests, that Maye flushed it all down the toilet in the seconds between the first knocks on his front door and when police broke down his back door. But he’d have to have found time to flush his stash (and keep it down), run back to his bedroom, and load his gun in those few seconds. That’s quite a lot to take care of in so short a time.I suppose a hardcore law-and–order type could argue that the presence of a small bag of marijuana proves that Maye was at least involved in illicit drugs. True enough. But is recreational marijuana use really just cause to break down someone’s door in the middle of the night?
My take? The search warrants raise far more questions than they answer. Officer Jones seems to have gone ahead with the raid on Maye’s home with very little evidence of wrongdoing. Smith’s home? Yes, given his history. But not Maye’s. And if the raid on Maye’s home wasn’t justifiable, it makes Maye’s affirmative defense all the more believable. Why would a man with nothing to hide attempt to take on a raiding squadron of armed police officers? Seems far more likely that he’d let them in.
Of course, even if Maye was a small-time marijuana peddler, it doesn’t justify breaking down his door in the middle of the night. Nor does it mean it wasn’t reasonable for him to assume that the people doing the door-breaking were coming to do him harm.
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on Monday, December 12th, 2005 at 11:26 am by Radley Balko
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