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Cory Maye had no criminal record and was never named as a suspect in any criminal investigation, but now he’s on death row. One night, a man broke down the door of Maye’s apartment and came charging in with a gun; Maye, trying to protect his daughter, shot and killed the man, who turned out to be a police officer conducting a drug raid.
Frightening quotes:
To convict Maye, the jury had to believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a man with no criminal record, a man who had just moved out of his parents’ home to make a life with his daughter and girlfriend, a man who had only a minuscule amount of marijuana in his apartment, looked out the window to see a team of police officers was about to enter; decided to take them on, even though he had done nothing wrong; waited for them to forcibly enter his home; fired three shots, killing just one of them; and then surrendered, leaving four bullets still in his gun. When I ask District Attorney Buddy McDonald, who prosecuted Maye, why a man would go through such a series of puzzling and contradictory acts, he replies only that “sometimes people do irrational things.”
Hope for a pardon or clemency seems dim. Aides to Gov. Haley Barbour, a Republican, have indicated both publicly and privately that Barbour doesn’t believe in pardons or clemency, even for people he thinks are innocent. Apparently he doesn’t even bother to read pardon petitions.
As Maye put it in a letter to one of his Internet supporters, “We as citizens sit back and say, ‘Well, this could never happen to me.’.…But it’s happened before…and if we don’t take a stand, it’s gonna continue to happen to others.”