Cory Maye won’t be getting a new trial. Not yet. But he’s no longer on death row.

Longtime listeners will remember that Maye is the Mississippi man whose home police broke into, late at night, unannounced. On the basis of a warrant for another apartment. In short, a mistake from the get-go. Maye only knew that criminals were apparently breaking into his home. Afraid for his life, he shot and killed one of the intruders. He surrendered after the police identified themselves.

There is controversy about exactly what happened. But enough holes in the case against Maye to make his murder conviction a gross miscarriage of justice. Nevertheless, a motion for retrial has just been scuttled by one Judge Michael Eubanks.

Radley Balko, who has reported on the case for many months at agitator.com, notes that “the town of Prentiss has done everything in its power to deny Cory Maye a fair crack at justice, including firing his lawyer as the town’s public defender. And Balko reminds us that Cory had no prior criminal record.

Balko fumes: “How a judge can look at all of this, shrug, then dash off an
eight-page opinion essentially stating that Maye deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison is beyond me.”

The good news: Balko’s reporting on the Maye case has recently been favorably cited in a separate case by the Mississippi Supreme Court. A court that has yet to consider Maye’s appeal. Stay tuned.

When amazed, we often call the object of our amazement a “miracle,” as a sort of short-hand. But the proper next step isn’t to try to outlaw the miracle.

Take the recent AP story about scrapping the Internet. It seems that a few gangs of university researchers have set to work on a new infrastructure, something to replace the haphazard organization of today’s Net. They want a “clean slate.” Even if some find the idea “unthinkable,” as the article puts it, or “even absurd.”

It’s not of course unthinkable. It is all-too-thinkable. Some people are control freaks. Adam Smith called them “men of system”; they don’t like systems that advance piecemeal, adapting to circumstances without much of an overarching plan.

Today’s Internet grew out of some early computer networks. Some of them, like ArpaNet, were government financed. Others, like CompuServe and the Bulletin Board systems, were privately provided. The Internet grew out of these early efforts, quickly.

It is very much like a market. You need a few ground rules and the rest almost takes care of itself.

A Rutgers professor says that “It’s sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today.”

Yes. Evolved systems like markets and the Internet do seem miraculous. That’s no reason to take the miracle out of the system, is it?

I’d be a lot more comfortable with researchers if they’d concentrate on understanding how decentralized networks work, rather than planning to remake them from scratch.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Forgive me if I over-imbibe. I tip only one drink per day, but that’s one too many…according to some folk.

I refer, of course, to Coke.

In saner times , you would have thought that I must have been referring to alcohol in its drinkable forms. Any referent switcheroo to Coca Cola you’d’ve discounted as absurd.

But these are not sane times, and today the regulation and even prohibition of big-name “sodas” is all the rage.

Odd? Yes! Soft drinks (as they were once called) were invented as alternatives to (or cures for) the “hard stuff,” alcohol. The health food crowd now lauds wine as a cure-all while blasting Coke and Pepsi as the devil’s own true brew.

Today, the hard stuff is sugar, and we worry about sugar’s substitutes.

But forget aspartame and sucralose: the ultimate sugar replacement is sugar.

I mean, of course, “high fructose corn syrup.” This mad-scientists’ sugar gets stuffed into nearly everything from cakes to colas these days, and it is, according to our most popular health advisors, far worse for us than the refined sugar it replaced.

And its prevalence is in great part because of high sugar tariffs.

Whereas some people now talk about increased regulation of sugar substitutes, I simply advocate ending the sugar tariff. After all, outside of the U.S., refined sugar is what you drink in non-diet soft drinks.

Until we end those tariffs, while others go to Europe for the wine, I’m tempted to travel for the Coke.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Oh, what a tangled web the politicians weave. In California’s capital of Sacramento, political operatives connected to Senate President Perata and Speaker Nunez are pushing an initiative to weaken term limits.

But the measure is being sold as reducing the amount of time legislators can stay in office. You see, polls show voters support tougher term limits, not weaker.

The Perata-Nunez initiative would actually allow most legislators to double their time in the Assembly or to serve 50 percent longer in the Senate. But for about 10 percent of legislators, who currently serve the maximum in both chambers, it would decrease their time by two years.

Except there’s another twist. Under current law, Speaker Nunez and 30 percent of the Assembly will be termed out in 2008, as will Senate President Perata and 45 percent of the Senate. But none will be termed-out under the new initiative. They’ll all get a special exemption to stay in office.

Recently, Attorney General Jerry Brown issued a title and summary to explain the measure to voters. In a column entitled “Term-limit summary’s misleading,” Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters agreed with U.S. Term Limits that Brown “virtually plagiarizes” the politicians’ “self-serving description” of their initiative.

U.S. Term Limits has filed suit against Brown’s slanted title and summary.

“Rather than make the logical case for softening term limits, the campaign wants to trick voters into thinking that they are tightening up limits,” wrote Walters. “Jerry Brown is abetting that strategy.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Open government is not the most passionate political issue. But you can’t have a free society if citizens don’t control their government. And citizens can’t effectively control government if they can’t find out what government’s up to.

Information is power. The truth shall set you free.

Of course, some folks in government don’t always see it this way. Sometimes they’d like to do things their own way and not have pesky citizens butting in. We can understand, but that’s why there are laws to protect citizen access to information.

Let’s celebrate Linda Seiler’s recent victory in Old Bridge, New Jersey. But why did she have to fight so hard to get the lousy minutes to an executive session of the Old Bridge Economic Development Corporation?

Since 2005, the Washington, DC police have lost track of 1,500 Freedom of Information Act inquiries, replying to less than one out of every seven. Certainly the police should follow the law.

I like the attitude of John Ehinger with The Huntsville Times in Alabama. He thought a recent closed meeting of the Madison City Council to discuss “economic development” was lawful. But he argued that holding the meeting in secret was still a big mistake.

“If things work out, Madison will chip in millions for a shopping center,” he wrote. “Those millions will come out of the pockets of the Madison citizenry. Don’t people have a right to know what something’s going to cost them?”

The answer is yes.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.