Bloggers take up case of Mississippi death row inmate

Late on the night of December 26, 2001, Cory Maye, 21, laid asleep in his Prentiss, Mississippi duplex apartment, with his 1-year-old daughter in a crib nearby. A armed man entered his bedroom. Maye shot the man, who turned out to Ronald Jones, 29, part of a police SWAT team searching for drugs. Jones, the son of the local police chief, died from his wound. No drugs were found in Maye's apartment, although a search of the grounds and the adjoining property produced evidence leading to the arrest Maye's neighbor, Jamie Smith, for drug possession and trafficking. Despite Maye's contention that the shooting was in self-defense, a jury convicted him of murder in January, 2004, and he was sentenced to die by lethal injection.

These are the facts I learned about Cory Maye from reading the five brief stories about his case listed in the Lexis-Nexis database. All told, there were four AP stories and one from the Advocate of Baton-Rouge, Louisiana, with a total count of 1946 words, with the last story running at the time of Maye's sentencing nearly two years ago.


The reason that the world knows about the case at all is because Radley Balko, of The Agitator did some investigative reporting on his own (and be sure to read more here and here and here. He posts an e-mail from the prosecutor here. Battlepanda reports that bloggers are lining up across the red-blue divide to denounce the government's actions in the case.
I'll be paying attention to whether Maye's case attracts renewed mainstream press attention to his case. Stay tuned.