I just had about an hour-long conversation with Bob Evans. Evans is the Jefferson Davis County public attorney, and he’s represtening Cory Maye on appeal.

The good news is, to my admidetly untrained ear, Evans knows his shit. I think too often families of the accused recoil when they hear the words “public defender,” and immediately move for someone, anyone else. But public defenders have a lot of exeperience in these kinds of cases, and unless you can afford a Johnnie Cochrane, they’re probably your best bet. In this case, Maye’s family fired Evans and hired Rhonda Cooper, a nice woman who seems to have done the best she could, but who had never tried a capital case, and who in my judgment made some devastating mistakes. I’ll get to those later.

I’ll have much, much more on this soon. There’s quite a bit more evidence in Maye’s favor we haven’t discussed yet. But I have a few other things I need to take care of first.

In the meantime, keep up the buzz. Evans said he’ll tell Maye the next time he sees him that there’s some support building for his case.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 at 11:09 am 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.