Sunday, January 29th, 2006
Seems to me that two things stick out in the documents below. The first is a pretty striking revelation in the autopsy report that never came up in trial. I’ll get to that in a moment.
But the second, which I’ll address now, is the continued accumulation of evidence of the ineffectiveness of Maye’s trial attorney. Rhonda Cooper’s long list of dropped balls is documented here, in Bob Evans amended motion for a new trial for Maye. Among her more egregious mistakes:
In the two years between the raid and Cory Maye’s trial, Cooper met with her client a maximum of three times.
Cooper had no prepared jury instructions for the death penalty phase of the trial. According to Evans, who was in the courtroom at the time, when the judge asked why she had failed to prepare instructions, she replied, “Because I didn’t think it would get this far.”
If you read the trial transcripts, you might have noticed the evidence of a lack of preparation by Cooper for that portion of the trial. The only two witnesses she calls — Maye’s mother and his aunt — do him more harm than good. The reason for that is also borne out in Evans’ amended motion — Cooper did nothing to prepare them to testify.
There’s the venue problem, which we’ve aleady discussed here.
Cooper failed to seek an independent autopsy of Jones’ body (which, as we’ll see in the next post, was crucial) and of the bullets found at the crime scene (this was also extremely important — again, we’ll expore why in the next post).
Cooper offered zero evidence to bolster Cory Maye’s claim that he felt his safety was in jeopardy other than having Maye himself testify. To give you an example of just one thing she might have done, consider this case from Florida, decided just last week, in which it took a jury just 30 minutes to clear a homeowner of charges after he shot at police officers who had no business being on his property. To show just how difficult it would have been for the defendant to have known the men behidn the flashlights were police, the defense attorney turned out all the light in the courtroom, and shined a flashlight in each juror’s eyes.
Cooper might have offered evidence of the sketchy neighborhood where Maye lived. She might have subpeoneaed neighbors, or Jamie Smith. She might have tried some sort of dramatic demonstration similar to the one above to demonstrate how difficult it would be for events to have transpired as the police say they did.
Cooper failed to adequately cross examine medical examiner Dr. Stephen Hayne. By all appearances, for rreasons I’ll get to in a moment, she didn’t even carefully read the autopsy report.
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on Sunday, January 29th, 2006 at 3:06 pm by Radley Balko
and is filed under Cory Maye.
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