Here’s the latest, according to Bob Evans, Maye’s attorney:

The gun was stolen, not unregistered. Mississippi doesn’t require guns to be registered. The prosecution apparently wanted to push the fact that the gun was stolen in an attempt to discredit Maye (in Evans’ delightfully Southern parlance, “They tried to ride that horse long and hard”). But documents apparently show that the gun was stolen at least a year before Maye was found with it (I’ll have to check the trial transcripts when I get them to see just how long before the raid it was stolen), and that it was stolen in Natchez, Mississippi, about 100 miles away.

In other words, it’s almost certain that Maye’s assertion that he got the gun from a friend was correct. And Mississippi has no law against private transfers of guns. So the only thing illegal about the gun was that it was stolen, and there’s no evidence to suggest that Maye stole it, or knew that it was stolen.

All of this is probably why the trial judge suppressed the gun evidence, never letting it get to the jury.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 at 3:57 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.