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.