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Sunday, December 11, 2005Imagine:One dark night, a Mississippi man is sleeping in a spare bedroom with his 18 month old daughter. He knows he lives in a bad neighborhood. He's pretty sure his duplex neighbor is a dealer. He keeps a piece under his pillow for protection. On this dark night, his neighbor has gone one step too far. His client just got home with a sack of flour and sugar. The neighbor's client is back. And high. And confused. He busts into the neighbor's house, finds no one, runs out. He sees a door. He forces his way in. He wants his ice. And his vengeance. A frightened and bewildered Corey Maye, awakened by the commotion, has had just enough time to know something scary's happening. And to get his hand on his gun. An unidentified man bursts into the room. Maye shoots. Prosecutors are nervous about pressing charges. The man, after all, was defending his own home in a murky situation. No charges are filed. A few community activists whisper that he is, in fact, a hero, for protecting his family from the mean streets. * * * We don't know enough to be certain. But until fellow police officers started going to their buddy, it's plausible from what we do know that this scenario is exactly appropriate to the life Corey Maye was stuck in. * * * America is ostensibly a free country. One of our freedoms is from having government officials invade our property on a whim. For this reason, police need search warrants to enter our homes against our wills. I would think the bar would be especially high for an unannounced search. So... Either the judge who issued this no-knock search warrant was careless about handing out such a document to officers who didn't really know what they were planning to search or... Police gave the judge the impression they knew more than they claimed. How else to explain an officer breaking into the wrong house? Even if Maye was wrong to shoot, the maximum penalty he should have faced was negligeant homicide. He didn't shoot an officer who was performing his duties. He shot an officer who was manifestly failing to perform his duties and violating a free citizen's most basic Constitutional protections. As for the claims that there had been shouts of "Police," so what? Does this not make it just as likely that the unidentified man who just banged his way into your house is fleeing the police as a member of them? If there's no cause for police entering your house, I think it does. If Corey Maye is put to death, it will send a very clear signal for all of us: In the name of the war on drugs, our Constitutional rights are now null and void and officers of the "law" are free to do anything, however stupid or wrongheaded, with the citizenry expected to be more professional than so-called "law-enforcement professionals" when things get tight. 
posted by gbarto at 5:07 PM |
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Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
