United Liberty

Great news broke yesterday. Cory Maye, who was convicted for the murder of Prentiss Police Officer Ron Jones during a botched drug raid, will receive a new trail.

For a detailed background on this case, you check out the work Radley Balko has done on Maye’s case over at Reason or watch Mississippi Drug War Blues, a video put together by Reason TV.

The short version of the story is that Maye was asleep in the living room of the home on December 26, 2001 and was awaked by noise outside. He lived in a duplex next a known drug dealer, who was actually named in the warrent obtained by police.

Maye grabbed a gun and went into his daughters room to protect her from what he thought was an intruder, contending that his actions were in self-defense. Upon entering the room, Officer Jones was shot three times. One of the rounds hit Jones below his bulletproof vest, and he died from internal bleeding.

According to Maye, it was a no-knock raid, meaning the police did not announce. He says he didn’t know the intruder was a police officer until after he had fired his weapon. The other officers involved say they announced before entering the home.

After receiving poor legal counsel, Maye was convicted and sentenced to death in 2004. His sentence has since been reduced to life without parole. His legal team, which includes Orin Kerr, petitioned the court for a new hearing earlier this year.

Mark your calendars everyone. This is an historic day, if you are familiar with my thoughts on government spending, especially spending involving the police, because today I am proposing that the government spend taxpayer dollars on something that they do not already. I want them to spend time and money to educate police about dog behavior and body language.

This week, a news story about an off-duty police officer in Iowa shooting a Labrador Retriever named Gus with his service weapon prompted me to share my thoughts on proposing spending that I think most Americans can get behind. I want to see police departments, from Mayberry-style towns to major metropolises, spend a very small amount of their budgets to educate officers in a basic understanding dog behavior and canine body language, preventing stories like this, this, and that from affecting another family. I could link to and list stories of innocent family pets gunned down by law enforcement, but this article would get very uninteresting very fast if I did so. In fact, at one point, I considered starting a blog focused on nothing but stories of ill-equipped and inadequately trained police and their assault on our family pets, but I found that I would be unable to maintain my positive outlook and sunny disposition if I immersed myself in stories of that nature.