The American Way of Justice

If the New York Times or the Washington Post had a proper measure of imagination one or other of them would have asked Radley Balko to write a criminal justice column for their op-ed pages. Their loss has been the Huffington Post’s gain. Before he moved to HuffPo Balko was a stalwart figure at Reason. It was there that he first wrote about the appalling case of Cory Maye, a Mississippi man convicted of killing a cop and placed on death row. That was five years ago.

Today Maye was finally released, a free man at last, after agreeing to accept a lesser charge of manslaughter in return for being released having spent the last ten years in prison. Maye could have proceeded with a retrial – in which his claim of legitimate self-defense could have been tested – but preferred to accept the plea so he could return to his family.