Gregg Sangillo writes a nice profile of your humble Agitator in this week’s National Journal (sorry, no link):

Who is Cory Maye? The name may not ring a bell for a many people, but it’s meant a lot to Radley Balko. While doing research on anti-drug raids by paramilitary police, Balko stumbled upon Maye’s case. An African-American in Mississippi, Maye was convicted of capital murder for shooting a police officer during a drug raid in 2001.

But Balko, a new senior editor with the libertarian Reason magazine, came to believe there was more to the case than met the eye, pointing out a few inconvenient facts that clouded the prosecution’s case. First, Maye didn’t know that the men who raided his duplex were with the police, and he shot the officer in self-defense; second, Maye received inadequate legal counsel; and third, the raid was based on a tip from a confidential informant who was facing drug charges. Balko was then a policy analyst for the Cato Institute and was authoring his own blog. He began writing about the case, and law firm Covington & Burling later provided Maye pro bono counsel. A circuit judge recently ordered a new sentencing trial in the case, and Maye could conceivably get a whole new trial.

At the start of his research, Balko says, “it just sort of leaped off the computer screen at me as something that wasn’t right about this case — the fact that a guy with no criminal record, and at most a misdemeanor amount of marijuana in his house, would knowingly kill a police officer.”

Balko, 31, whose blog is called The Agitator, was with Cato for five and half years, starting out in the marketing department and ending up as an analyst covering civil liberties, drug policy, and criminal justice issues. He hails from
Greenfield, Ind., and graduated from Indiana University with a degree in journalism and political science.

In his new job, he will write and edit, as well as oversee Reason’s Web site. “I think I’ve always had sort of a journalism bug,” he says. “I think I’m writer at heart more than a wonk, so I think it’s a good transition for me.”

For a guy leaving a think tank, I think I may use the phrase “I think” too much.

I think.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 9:36 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.