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Monday, December 12, 2005I don't know whether Corey Maye is a small-time drug dealer who offed a cop and played dumb or a poor man who had the misfortune to live next to a more clearly nasty peddler.Neither does anyone else. And we may never know. Curiously, the police sought, the judge issued and the police enforced warrants on the hearsay of an officer and none of them left written documentation. I'm baffled. Our Constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure should imply that law enforcement need cross a meaningful threshhold before being allowed unrestricted access into our homes. And yet no one involved in the issuance of warrance regarding persons unknown kept a sheet handy explaining what the hell they were doing busting into Corey Maye's house? To read the statements of the prosecutor, the details of tactics and more, one gets the feeling that Mississippi prosecutors and law officers are operating in the Old South were stringing up a Black man was par for the course, not in the 21st century. This story, whatever it says about Maye, says it all about law-and-order and to hell with the niceties attitudes indicating that 20th, never mind 21st, century hasn't made it to Ole Miss after all. One hopes the governor, now sometimes mentioned as having national prospects, will take corrective action, working to assure that whatever the status of Mr. Maye, Mississippi is no longer a place where law-and-order is a law unto itself and citizens' rights are only operative if they don't inconvenience local law enforcement. Seriously, the police chief's son barging into a house on the basis of a name unknown warrant whose justifications are neither documented nor known to the issuing judge except that they come from an unknown informant? That's Dukes of Hazzard stuff, worthy of addled writers at the CBS of the 1970s. In real life, the seedy South can and should do better. 
posted by gbarto at 4:25 PM |
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Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
