Mississippi Death Row Inmate Cory Maye To Be Freed for 2001 Death of Police Officer Ron Jones Jr. in Case Tainted by Racism

Black death row inmate, Cory Maye, set to walk out of a Mississippi prison, after serving 10 years for the death of police officer Ron Jones Jr., in case tainted by racism.

Cory Maye, 30, is set to walk out of prison after serving 10 years of a death sentence handed down by a Mississippi court. Mississippi Circuit Court Judge Prentiss Harrell signed a plea agreement Friday morning in which Maye pled guilty to manslaughter for the 2001 death of Prentiss, MS, police officer Ron Jones Jr. The case was tainted by racism.

Cory Maye had settled into a chair in front of the television and was drifting off to sleep. It was around 9 p.m. on the day after Christmas, 2001, and the 21-year-old father had put his 18-month-old daughter, Tacorriana, to bed an hour earlier. Her mother—Chenteal Longino, Maye’s girlfriend—had left for her job on the night shift at the Marshall Durbin chicken plant in Hattiesburg, more than an hour away. The three shared half of a small, bright yellow duplex on Mary Street in Prentiss, Mississippi, a depressed town of 1,000 people in Jefferson Davis County, about halfway between Jackson and the Gulf Coast.

Later, in court, Maye would testify that he awoke to a violent pounding at his front door, as if someone was trying to kick it down. Frightened, he ran to his bedroom, where Tacorriana was sleeping. He retrieved the handgun he kept in a stand by the bed, loaded it, and chambered a bullet. He got down on the floor next to the bed, where he held the gun and waited in the dark next to his little girl, hoping the noises outside would subside.

Maye insists he didn’t hear the officers announce they were police until after he’d fired his gun. Asked by his lawyer at the trial what he’d have done if he’d known the intruders were police, he replied, “I would have let them in.”

A jury rejected this account of mistaken self-defense and sentenced Maye to death for the murder of Ron Jones. But the evidence strongly suggests Maye was telling the truth. His conviction has provoked outrage not only among left-liberals concerned about racially charged Southern justice—Maye is black and Jones was white—but among conservative supporters of the right to keep and bear arms.

Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2006/10/01/the-case-of-cory-maye/singlepage. No matter how you view it, the death penalty is a flawed process that has seen innocent people being killed for crimes they did not commit. Coupled with the fact that the cards are stacked against someone black or Latino in many cities, states should join Illinois is putting the death penalty on hold as a form of punishment.