Tomorrow, I’ll be discussing the case from 6 to 7pm ET (that’s 5 to 6pm local time) on 1180 WJNT in Jackson, Mississippi. You can listen here.

Also, yesterday I got in touch with Fox Butterfield, the longtime NY Times reporter (now retired) who briefly mentions the Maye case in this article, written in early 2002, about six weeks after the raid (see this post for background).

Butterfield could only remember the basics of the trip he took to Prentiss to report the article, but he did say that whatever facts he reported, including the wrong ones, would have been given to him by one of the two police officials he spoke with — Prentiss Police Chief Ronald Jones (now retired), or Jefferson Davis County Sheriff Henry McCullum.

So the conversation with Butterfield didn’t move the ball much either way. We’re still stuck with the fact that his article, written weeks after the raid, asserts that there was only one warrant (not two), and that it was for crack (not marijuana). Both of those facts contradict the police account of the raid at trial, and both contradict them in ways that suggest tampering with the warrants, and thus in ways that are favorable to Cory Maye.

But because Mr. Butterfield can’t recall the specifics of his reporting (and in his defense, the Prentiss story was jsut a small part, almost an aside, of a broader piece), we’re stuck wondering whether the facts reported in Butterfield’s piece were the result of misunderstanding (either on the part of Butterfield, or perhaps McCullum, who to my knowledge didn’t have much, if any, involvement in the raid or investigation) or something more sinister.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 9th, 2006 at 5:56 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.