The case of Cory Maye: a cop is dead, an innocent man may be on death row, and drug warriors keep knocking down doors.

• Author: Balko, Radley

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 14-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.

They didn't. They got worse. The commotion moved from the front of his home to the back, closer to Maye, and just outside the door to the room where he and his daughter were lying.

"Thought someone was trying to breakin on me and my child," Maye testified.

"And how were you feeling?" an attorney asked.

"Frightened," Maye said. "Very frightened."

One loud, last crash finally flung the rear door wide open, nearly separating it from its hinges. Seconds later, someone kicked open the bedroom door. A figure rushed up the steep, three-step entrance to the house and entered the room. Maye fired into the darkness, squeezing the trigger three times.

Maye says the next thing he remembers is hearing someone scream, "Police! Police! You just shot an officer!" He then dropped his gun, slid it away from his body, and surrendered.

One of the three bullets had found its way around Officer Ron Jones' bulletproof vest, pierced his abdomen, and ripped through several vital organs. Jones would die of massive internal bleeding on the way to the hospital.

The police offer a different version of the night's events. They say they announced themselves several times upon arrival and again before each attempt to kick down the doors to the apartment. At Maye's trial, the raiding officers also testified that someone inside the home jiggled the apartment's front blinds when they first arrived, suggesting Maye peered out the window, meaning he should have known the men invading his home were police, not criminals.

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.

Beyond the issues of race and guns, beyond even the question of Cory Maye's guilt or innocence, the death of Ron Jones illustrates the dangers of an increasingly literal war on drugs featuring unnecessarily aggressive, militaristic tactics that regularly lead to tragedies for police officers and civilians alike. At least 40 innocent people have been killed in paramilitary-style drug raids since the early 1980s, as have at least 15 police officers. And there are at least 150 cases of "wrong door" raids, in which SWAT teams or similarly aggressive police units have raided the wrong home.

'He Used to Cook for Me All the Time'

Cory Maye was born to Dorothy Maye Funchess on September 9, 1980, the youngest of seven children. His father is Robert Brown, a man who was absent for much of Maye's childhood but reconnected with his son when the young man was in his late teens. Maye takes his last name from Kenneth Maye, who was married to his mother for several years and was the primary male influence during his formative years.

Maye grew up poor, though Punchess went to great lengths to keep a clean house, assigning each of her kids a series of household tasks. Cory seemed especially drawn to the kitchen. "It's what I miss most [with] him being in prison," Funchess says. "He used to cook for me all the time."

According to Maye's relatives, teachers, and previous employers, he was a good kid growing up. He had no history of violence, no bad temper, no trouble with the law. He was close to his family, shy, and reserved. His grades were average, but to help with family expenses he dropped out of high school in the 10th grade and began working for his biological father's construction and landscaping business. When he wasn't working for Brown, Maye did some freelance landscaping and brick masonry. He was unemployed at the time of the raid: Jobs dry up when the weather turns wet, and December brings the thick of South Mississippi's rainy season.

Maye was growing increasingly unhappy with his living arrangements at the time of the raid, and his unemployment was only part of the problem. He adored his daughter, and he and Longino had moved from nearby Monticello to Prentiss to try to make a life together. But Maye missed his home and his family, and he didn't like the seedy neighborhood where they'd found an apartment. "He called me every day," Funchess says. "He wanted to bring the baby and Chenteal and come home." Maye complained about the tenant living on the other side of the building, who made a lot of noise and had people coming and going all hours of the day and night, often waking Tacorriana.

On December 23, a homesick Maye returned to Monticello. Longino immediately pleaded with him to come back to Prentiss, ultimately convincing him to stick it out until after the holidays. After the New Year, she said, they'd think about finding a new apartment, or perhaps move in with his or her parents. Maye agreed, and his mother, aunt, and siblings spent Christmas with him in Prentiss.

On the night of the raid, while Maye was dozing off in front of the TV, Officer Ron Jones was visiting the home of Prentiss City Judge Ron Kruger, presenting him with an affidavit for two search warrants, one for each apartment at the duplex. According to the affidavit, a confidential informant told Jones there was a "large stash" of marijuana in each of the duplex apartments. Though there appear to have been two warrants, it also seems clear that Jones was primarily interested in a man named Jamie Smith, who lived in the apartment opposite Maye and Longino. Smith already had drug charges pending against him from four months before. On the warrant afffidavit, Jones described Smith as a "known drug dealer" By contrast, neither Maye nor Longino was mentioned by name in any of the affidavits or warrants, and other than the alleged assertions of the confidential informant, there's no reason to suspect that either was selling drugs.

After getting the search warrants he needed from Kruger, Jones returned to the police station and waited for the arrival of the ad hoc raid team he'd assembled. Jones usually referred drug tips to the Pearl River Narcotics Task Force, a multi-jurisdictional SWAT team that specializes in serving drug warrants. But for reasons that are still unclear--perhaps because the team wasn't readily available over the holidays and he wanted to act quickly--Jones put together his own team, enlisting one member of the task force and one volunteer officer along with local police from Prentiss and nearby towns.

Jones and five other officers left for the Mary Street duplex, which was just a few blocks from the police station, about II p.m. They split into two teams. The first would take Jamie Smith's apartment, on the north side of the duplex. The second would hit the apartment on the south side, Maye and Longino's home, whose occupants were described in the second warrant as "person(s) unknown." The fact that they weren't explicitly identified in the warrant is important, because it shows that neither of them was even known to police, much less individually suspected of a crime. (Bob Evans, Maye's current attorney, says his client never met Jones. Several officers and Judge Kruger testified at trial that they had never heard Cory Maye's name until after the raid.) The only evidence against Maye leading police to come to his home that night was the alleged assurance from a confidential informant that there was marijuana inside his half of the duplex.

As the squad cars pulled into the gravel drive, Christmas lights flickered from Cory Maye and Chenteal Longino's front porch. A child's bicycle leaned against the railing. A wreath hung from the young couple's door.

Jamie Smith gave up without a struggle. According to police, someone in Smith's home immediately opened the door when the officers arrived, and those inside the apartment--Smith, his girlfriend Audrey Davis, and...