Earlier today, Radley Balko wrote about the latest developments in the case of Cory Maye, a man unjustly accused of murder in a drug war case redolent with racial issues. Balko has been tracking this case for years and his journalism was instrumental in getting Maye off Death Row in Mississippi and getting him a new trial.

In May 2008, Reason.tv released a documentary on the case. Produced by Paul Feine with Roger Richards as director of photography and Drew Carey as host, Mississippi Drug War Blues garnered a prize at the Tupelo Film Festival. Watch it below and go here for downloadable versions of this troubling take on American justice.

In 2008, Balko talked about his experience in investigating the Maye case with Reason.tv. Watch that interview here.

Earlier today, Radley Balko wrote about the latest developments in the case of Cory Maye, a man unjustly accused of murder in a drug war case redolent with racial issues. Balko has been tracking this case for years and his journalism was instrumental in getting Maye off Death Row in Mississippi and getting him a new trial.

In May 2008, Reason.tv released a documentary on the case. Produced by Paul Feine with Roger Richards as director of photography and Drew Carey as host, Mississippi Drug War Blues garnered a prize at the Tupelo Film Festival. Watch it below and go here for downloadable versions of this troubling take on American justice.

Health care reform advocates have taken, in recent weeks, to noting that insurance premiums on the individual market in Massachusetts—the state where a variant on proposed national reforms is already in place—have fallen in recent years. And if you look at data provided by America's Health Insurance Plans taken immediately before the 2007 reforms were enacted, the average premium for an individual plan cost $8,537. Now, according an AHIP report released last month, that price has dropped to $5,143.

But upon closer examination, this isn't quite the point in favor of reform that its advocates seem to think. Here's why: In 1996, Massachusetts passed an earlier set of reforms—community rating and guaranteed issue—that required insurers to take all comers, and to sell plans to individuals at the same price, regardless of their individual health status.

For pretty obvious reasons, those sorts of reforms drive up premium prices tremendously. In New York, for example, similar reforms have driven up individual insurance premiums enough that the Manhattan Institute estimates that premium prices would drop 42 percent if they were repealed. And going back to AHIP's reports, sure enough, New York and Massachusetts are the states with the two most expensive individual market premiums.

So what the 2007 reforms in Massachusetts did was to bring more people into a very expensive pool, adding about 45,000 people to the individual market. That brought the prices down from their initial inflated position, but, it should be noted, they're still the second highest in the nation.

More to the point, given that the individual markets in most of the country are not already regulated by community rating and guaranteed issue provisions, this effect is unlikely to show up across the country. And if enough people choose to pay the penalty and opt out of coverage, it's possible that the effects of reform could actually lead to both premium increases and decreased coverage.

Either way, I suspect that, as in Massachusetts, under reform legislation, the overall average price for premiums will rise significantly and overall levels of health care spending will grow to be even more of a problem than they are now. Indeed, many reform advocates have more or less explicitly admitted this, touting the "buy now, pay later" strategy in which we guarantee coverage now and worry about costs down the road once everyone is locked into the system.

'Tis the season of middle class entitlements, and the Room for Debate blog over at the New York Times site has a good forum up about everyone's favorite entitlement—higher education!

One great contribution, from engineer Alfonso Trujillo:

Subsidizing top-tier universities in the hope of getting more underprivileged students to attend is tantamount to subsidizing top-tier department stores in the hope that some underprivileged consumers will be clothed. In the end, both results are predictable: higher prices, higher status for those who purchase the product, and an inefficient method of helping the poor.

(Wanting to know more about Trujillo, I Googled him and found this: The BBC seems to have used him as a "hombre on the street" in a forum about Latino voters in 2004. Five years later, Trujilo has become a person who "writes often on education issues" and blogs, fittingly enough, as Hispanic Pundit. Nice work dude.)

We, too, expressed a certain amount of skepticism about the current system at Reason.tv this summer:

The limited success of the men's rights movement has prompted angry denunciations and fearmongering journalism from the feminist left. But as Contributing Editor Cathy Young writes, real feminism means equality for men, too.

Earlier this month DoubleX, Slate's short-lived female-oriented publication (launched six months ago and about to be folded back into the parent site as a women's section), ran an article ringing the alarm about the dire threat posed by the power of the men's rights movement. But the article, written by New York-based freelance writer Kathryn Joyce and titled "Men's Rights' Groups Have Become Frighteningly Effective," says more about the state of feminism—and journalistic bias—than it does about men's groups.

Joyce's indictment is directed at a loose network of activists seeking to raise awareness and change policy on such issues as false accusations of domestic violence, the plight of divorced fathers denied access to children, and domestic abuse of men. In her view, groups such as RADAR (Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting) and individuals like columnist and radio talk show host Glenn Sacks are merely "respectable" and "savvy" faces for what is actually an anti-female backlash from "angry white men."

As proof of this underlying misogyny, Joyce asserts that men who commit "acts of violence perceived to be in opposition to a feminist status quo" are routinely lionized in the men's movement. This claim is purportedly backed up with a reference that, in fact, does not in any way support it: an article in Foreign Policy about the decline of male dominance around the globe. Joyce's one specific example is that the diary of George Sodini, a Pittsburgh man who opened fire on women in a gym in retaliation for feeling rejected by women, was reposted online by the blogger "Angry Harry" as a wake-up call to the Western world that "it cannot continue to treat men so appallingly and get away with it." But does this have anything to do with more mainstream men's rights groups? The original version of the article claimed that Sacks, who called "Harry" an "idiot" in his interview with Joyce, nonetheless "cautiously defends" the blogger; DoubleX later ran a correction on this point.

Sacks himself admits to Joyce that the men's movement has a "not-insubstantial lunatic fringe." Yet in her eyes, even the mainstream men's groups are promoting a dangerous agenda, above all infiltrating mainstream opinion with the view that reports of domestic violence are exaggerated and that a lot of spousal abuse is female-perpetrated. The latter claim, Joyce asserts, comes from "a small group of social scientists" led by "sociologist Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire, who has written extensively on female violence." (In fact, Straus, founder of the renowned Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire, is a pre-eminent scholar on family violence in general and was the first to conduct national surveys on the prevalence of wife-beating.)

Joyce repeats common critiques of Straus' research: For instance, he equates "a woman pushing a man in self-defense to a man pushing a woman down the stairs" or "a single act of female violence with years of male abuse." Yet these charges have been long refuted: Straus' studies measure the frequency of violence and specifically inquire about which partner initiated the physical violence. Furthermore, Joyce fails to mention that virtually all social scientists studying domestic violence, including self-identified feminists such as University of Pittsburgh psychologist Irene Frieze, find high rates of mutual aggression.

Reviews of hundreds of existing studies, such as one conducted by University of Central Lancashire psychologist John Archer in a 2000 article in Psychological Bulletin, have found that at least in Western countries, women are as likely to initiate partner violence as men. While the consequences to women are more severe—they are twice as likely to report injuries and about three times more likely to fear an abusive spouse—these findings also show that men hardly escape unscathed. Joyce claims that "Straus' research is starting to move public opinion," but in fact, some of the strongest recent challenges to the conventional feminist view of domestic violence—as almost invariably involving female victims and male batterers—come from female scholars like New York University psychologist Linda Mills.

Contrary to Joyce's claims, these challenges, so far, have made very limited inroads into public opinion. One of her examples of the scary power of men's rights groups is that "a Los Angeles conference this July dedicated to discussing male victims of domestic violence, 'From Ideology to Inclusion 2009: New Directions in Domestic Violence Research and Intervention,' received positive mainstream press for its 'inclusive' efforts.'" In fact, the conference—which featured leading researchers on domestic violence from several countries, half of them women, and focused on much more than just male victims—received virtually no mainstream press coverage. One of the very few exceptions was a column I wrote for The Boston Globe, also reprinted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Whatever minor successes men's groups may have achieved, the reality is that public policy on domestic violence in the U.S. is heavily dominated by feminist advocacy groups. For the most part, these groups embrace a rigid orthodoxy that treats domestic violence as male terrorism against women, rooted in patriarchal power and intended to enforce it. They also have a record of making grotesquely exaggerated, thoroughly debunked claims about an epidemic of violence against women—for instance, that battering causes more hospital visits by women every year than car accidents, muggings, and cancer combined.

These advocacy groups practically designed the Violence Against Women Act of 1994, and they dominate the state coalitions against domestic violence to which local domestic violence programs must belong in order to qualify for federal funds. As a result of the advocates' influence, federal assistance is denied to programs that offer joint counseling to couples in which there is domestic violence, and court-mandated treatment for violent men downplays drug and alcohol abuse (since it's all about the patriarchy).

Against the backdrop of this enforced party line, Joyce is alarmed by the smallest signs that men's rights groups may be gaining even a modest voice in framing domestic violence policy. She points out that in a few states, men's rights activists have succeeded in "criminalizing false claims of domestic violence in custody cases" (this is apparently meant to be a bad thing) and "winning rulings that women-only shelters are discriminatory" (in fact, the California Court of Appeals ruled last year that state-funded domestic violence programs that refuse to provide service to abused men violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection, but also emphasized that the services need not be identical and coed shelters are not required).

To bolster her case, Joyce consistently quotes advocates—or scholars explicitly allied with the advocacy movement, such as Edward Gondolf of the Mid-Atlantic Addiction Research and Training Institute—to discredit the claims of the men's movement. She also repeats uncorroborated allegations that many leaders of the movement are themselves abusers, but offers only one specific example: eccentric British activist Jason Hatch, who once scaled Buckingham Palace in a Batman costume to protest injustices against fathers, and who was taken to court for allegedly threatening one of his ex-wives during a custody dispute.

The article is laced with the presumption that, with regard to both general data and individual cases, any charge of domestic violence made by a woman against a man must be true.

One case Joyce uses to illustrate her thesis is that of Genia Shockome, who claimed to have been severely battered by her ex-husband Tim and lost custody of her two children after being accused of intentionally alienating them from their father. Yet Joyce never mentions that Shockome's claims of violent abuse were unsupported by any evidence, that she herself did not mention any abuse in her initial divorce complaint, or that three custody evaluators—including a feminist psychologist who had worked with the Battered Women's Justice Center at Pace University—sided with the father.

More than a quarter-century ago, British feminist philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards wrote, "No feminist whose concern for women stems from a concern for justice in general can ever legitimately allow her only interest to be the advantage of women." Joyce's article is a stark example of feminism as exclusive concern with women and their perceived advantage, rather than justice or truth.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine and a columnist for RealClearPolitics.com. She is the author of Ceasefire: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality. This article originally appeared at Forbes.

The title quote comes from online sex-mag Nerve, in a feature titled "Sex Advice from Dungeons & Dragons Players." Also in the piece: Advice on the advantages and disadvantages of dating your fellow gamers:

My Game Master and best friend recently divorced — killing three long-term games in the process. On the other hand, dating your dice-mates  guarantees that when you joke about the enhancement bonus of your morning coffee, you won’t just get a blank look. Plus, they’ll understand why you can’t go out on Friday night — your party needs you!

I'd snark, but given Megan and I frequently make CBO jokes when drawing up wedding budgets, it's probably best I refrain.

Remember when real estate foreclosures were decimating neighborhoods in Cleveland, eroding neighborhoods in Boston, creating ghost towns in Chicago?

No? Then maybe you remember the foreclosure-driven crime wave that hit Washington D.C.; Atlanta, Georgia; and Charlotte, North Carolina; prompting New York State ACORN President Pat Boone to explain, "It is common sense that foreclosure and crime go together."

Still drawing a blank? Then surely you recall how 2008 Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both proposed a $30 billion fund to combat crime and blight in high-foreclosure areas. Republican candidate John McCain considered rising foreclosure rates so hazardous to civil order that he proposed having the Treasury Department buy up all the bad home loans in America.

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Massachusetts Connecticut) spelled out the connection between foreclosure and crime with admirable specificity last year:

It isn't just the foreclosed property that causes the problem. There's the next door neighbor, the community that also suffers. For every one foreclosure in a square block, one-eighth square mile, there is a decline in value almost immediately of 1 percent of every other home in that square block. There's an increase of crime of 2 percent almost immediately in that area.

You don't recall any of this because none of it happened. If the foreclosure-driven crime trends that journalists and politicians have been predicting since 2006 had actually come to pass, our streets would by now be impassible wastelands where Toecutter and Bubba Zanetti prey upon the citizens with impunity.

Yet crime statistics continue to head downward throughout the country -- even or especially in those areas marked out as foreclosure clusters. Camden, New Jersey, supposedly America's most crime-ridden city, has seen a 14 percent crime reduction in 2009.

Prince William County, Virginia, which has the highest rate of foreclosures in Old Dominion, nevertheless saw its violent crime rate fall by 36.8 percent between 2008 and 2009. Foreclosure-plagued Oakland, California has seen a 3 percent annual drop.

Still, the perception that foreclosures are linked to the deterioration of law-abiding areas is not necessarily susceptible to statistics. Many intelligent people say they have a sense that crime is getting worse as more residences end up unoccupied. Again, my own experience contradicts this: I live in a not-so-nice part of Los Angeles County and spend plenty of time in less-nice areas (in California nothing ever goes below nice), yet I am absolutely certain I hear less gunfire and fewer police helicopters this year than I did in 2006.

So I try to keep up on an area-by-area basis with the great sub-prime crime wave. Today I spoke with Lance Eber, the statistics guy for the Merced, California police department. Merced is famously known as California's "ground zero" for foreclosures. If any place were to experience an increase in crime, this should be it. According to Eber, on a year-to-date basis, 2009 violent crime (including homicide, rape, robbery, assault, burglary and larceny) is 14 percent below its 2008 level. What about victimless offenses that you might expect to see goosed by the presence of unoccupied buildings, such as prostitution, drug use, and vagrancy? "Those are continuing problems," says Eber, "but we have not seen any increases in those."

Am I missing something? If you click on the Charlotte link above you'll see that with a sufficient amount of gnat-straining and to-be-sure-ing you can create the impression of a foreclosure-driven crime increase even with the statistics against you. Could I just be misreading the crime numbers from nationwide-foreclosure-leading Florida, for example? If anybody has evidence of a foreclosure/crime correlation in the current recession, I'm eager to see it.

Because in a way, I agree with the ACORN president. It does seem to be common sense that high foreclosures would lead to an increase in crime. It's just that there is no evidence to back up the common sense.

Columnist Ron Hart on Sarah Palin and Oprah Winfrey:

Contrary to what many think, Oprah and Sarah have something in common: they both helped Barack Obama get elected. But when Gov. Palin was asked if she would be campaigning to become the leader of the free world in 2012, she seemed uncomfortable — maybe because the current, self-appointed leader of the free world was sitting right there.

Sarah Palin has done at least one thing of value.

She has helped to unmask the left-winged media as a harsh, partisan and manipulative group bent on advancing its own ideology. She may keep the media distracted while the GOP desperately searches for its next real Ronald Reagan. Sadly, at this point I have no idea who that is.

Whole thing here.

Hart's collected cols are now available in No Such as a Pretty Good Alligator Wrestler: Kids, Politics, and Family—Why Daddy Drinks. Along with PJ O'Rourke, Bernie Marcus (co-founder of Home Depot), and Bob Johnson (founder of BET), I was happy to blurb the book, writing

...Hart is one asset that has soared in value over the past decade of partisan misrule. He is the Alan Greenspan of political columnists—he keeps the interest rate dangerously low.

You can buy the book here.

The email revelations from the British Climate Research Unit sure have provoked a lot embarrassed spinning by proponents of impending catastrophic climate change. For example, Australian Broadcasting Online offers these choice observations from global warming activist, Australian of the Year (2007) and Copenhagen Climate Council chairman Tim Flannery:

A few days ago computer hackers stole private emails and research documents from the University of East Anglia.

In one of the leaked emails, respected US climatologist Kevin Trenberth admits that scientists cannot account for the lack of global warming to date.

"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't... Our observing system is inadequate," the email says.

Climate change sceptics are hailing the emails as proof the research data has been skewed and suppressed.

But Dr Flannery says the scientific community knows enough to say greenhouse gases cause global warming, and that humans are responsible.

"The thing is we deal with an incomplete understanding of the way the Earth's system works, we know enough to say as the IPCC said that greenhouse gases cause warming," he said.

"They are 90 per cent-plus sure that it's caused by humans, we can go that far.

"In the last few years, where there hasn't been a continuation of that warming trend, we don't understand all of the factors that creates Earth's climate, so there are some things we don't understand, that's what the scientists were emailing about."

Dr Flannery says scientists are working to find out how the whole system works.

"These people (scientists) work with models, computer modelling. When the computer modelling and the real world data disagrees you have a problem. That's when science gets engaged.

"What Kevin Trenberth, one of the most respected climate scientist in the world, is saying is, 'We have to get on our horses and find out what we don't know about the system, we have to understand why the cooling is occurring, because the current modelling doesn't reflect it'.

"And that's the way science progresses, we can't pretend to have perfect knowledge, we don't."

He says science works through a robust interchange and testing of ideas that can look messy when you are in the middle of it.

Hmmm. Data not agreeing with model predictions. Very interesting. And of course, Flannery is right, science does work through "a robust interchange and testing of ideas." But interchanging ideas about how to hijack some aspects of peer review and by trying to suppress the work of researchers with whom one disagrees? Messy indeed.

About a decade ago, I picked up a copy of John Follain’s wonderfully entertaining potboiler Jackal: The Complete Story of the Legendary Terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, a precise catalog of the brutal murders and pointless “commando operations” masterminded by the former Venezuelan revolutionary. Even by the standards of 1970s terror groups—think the PFLP, Red Brigades, RAF—Carlos’s brutality stood out. But as he withers away in a French prison, having predictably transformed himself into a warrior for Allah, he will be happy to discover that he still has fans in the land of his birth:

Hugo Chavez has defended the alleged terrorist mastermind Carlos the Jackal, saying the Venezuelan imprisoned in France was an important "revolutionary fighter" who supported the cause of the Palestinians….Ramirez gained international notoriety during the 1970s and 80s as the alleged mastermind of a series of bombings, killings and hostage dramas. He is serving a life sentence in France for the 1975 murders of two French secret agents and an alleged informant.

"They accuse him of being a terrorist, but Carlos really was a revolutionary fighter," Chavez said during a televised speech to socialist politicians from various countries, who applauded.

In his speech, Chavez also sought to defend other leaders he said are wrongly labeled "bad guys" internationally, including Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Chavez called both of them brothers and said he now wonders whether Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was truly as brutal as he was reputed to be.

If Carlos isn’t exactly to your taste, how about a different lunatic anti-Semite that terrorized people?

"We thought he was a cannibal," the Venezuelan leader said, referring to [Ugandan dictator Idi] Amin, whose regime was notorious for torturing and killing suspected opponents in the 1970s. "I have doubts. ... I don't know, maybe he was a great nationalist, a patriot."

A fairly large quibble with the Associated Press writer Ian James, who writes that Chavez "defended the alleged terrorist" Carlos the Jackal. Alleged? At what point does a man convicted of three murders, who has been forthcoming about his involvement in terrorism (“When he was in front of me, I shot him between the eyes. When he hit the ground, I shot him in the left temple.”), who released a book from prison praising Osama bin Laden and defending terror as an “anti-imperialist” tactic, qualify as an actual terrorist? And why isn't Amin the alleged dictator of Uganda?

Lefty blogger and expert-in-everything Matt Yglesias provides us with the dumbest argument of the day, writing that having been defanged by the brilliant Obama administration (!) “seems to have left Chavez a bit adrift and looking to push the envelope. How else to explain the idea of praising Idi Amin in a speech.”

Yes, the normally sedate and statesman-like Chavez, who in those dark pre-Obama years praised Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, Chairman Mao, Bashar Assad, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Carlos the Jackal (this wasn’t the first time), Daniel Ortega, the FARC, Hezbollah, and Muammar Gaddafi, was pushed into a corner by Washington and is most likely acting out by saying outrageous things he couldn't possibly believe.

Last week, the Mississippi Court of Appeals granted a new trial to Cory Maye, the 29-year-old Mississippi man convicted of murdering a police officer in 2001. The court ruled that Maye should have been allowed to move the trial back to the county where the shooting took place after Maye had initially requested it be moved elsewhere. Reason Senior Editor Radley Balko looks at the decision, and argues that the court ruled correctly that if he wants it, a defendant should have the right to be tried before a local jury.

Last week the Mississippi Court of Appeals granted a new trial (PDF) to Cory Maye, a 29-year old man serving a life sentence for the murder of Prentiss, Mississippi police officer Ron Jones. Maye, who had no prior criminal record, says he was sleeping in his home when Jones and a makeshift drug raid team kicked down his door in the middle of the night on December 26, 2001. Maye claims he thought the police were criminal intruders and feared for his life and that of his daughter, 18-month old Ta'Corianna, who was asleep on the bed in the room where the shooting occurred. Police found a small amount of mostly ashen marijuana in the apartment. (For more, read my October 2007 Reason feature on Maye's case, or watch Reason.tv's documentary about Maye's story.)

Maye was eventually convicted of capital murder for the intentional killing of a police officer. He was sentenced to death the same day. When I first began writing about the case on my personal blog in late 2005, it attracted the attention of Abe Pafford, an associate at the large D.C.-based law firm Covington & Burling. Pafford, who has a daughter about the same age as Ta’Corianna, says he empathized with Maye after thinking about what he would have done if put in the same situation. A team from Covington joined local public defender Bob Evans (who was not Maye's attorney at trial) in early 2006, bringing aboard their own team of investigators and forensic experts. In the fall of that year, Mississippi Circuit Judge Michael Eubanks threw out Maye's death sentence, citing his inadequate defense counsel during the death penalty portion of the trial. Prosecutors agreed not to seek a new sentencing hearing, which resulted in Maye being re-sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Maye's new defense team then presented a long brief (PDF) outlining a multitude of problems with Maye's trial and conviction. Last week’s appeals court ruling, while certainly welcome news for Maye and his defense team, granted Maye a new trial only on the issue of venue, argued by then-Covington attorney Ben Vernia, now in his own practice. It considered 12 other issues, and ignored altogether the two issues that took up over half of the argument in Maye's appellate brief: namely, that the warrant to search Maye's apartment was obtained fraudulently, and that given the controlling Mississippi case law, there was insufficient evidence to support Maye's conviction.

I'll have more on those issues in a future column. But the issue of venue is why the court granted Maye a new trial, and it's worth considering in detail here.

Shortly after Maye's arrest in 2001, his family sought out the services of Rhonda Cooper, a private attorney in Jackson. Cooper had no prior death penalty experience, though Maye's family says she told them she did. Cooper made a number of critical mistakes during Maye's trial, but her first and perhaps most devastating one was to immediately ask for a change of venue. That might seem like a smart move in a case where a black man stands accused of killing a white cop (who also happened to be the son of the town's police chief), but a closer look at the demographics of southern Mississippi shows why it was actually in Maye's interest to be tried in Jefferson Davis County, where the raid took place.

Jefferson Davis County is 58 percent black. Lamar County, Cooper's initial venue request, is 85 percent white. Lamar County is also more politically conservative. Unsurprisingly, the prosecution didn't object and Cooper’s request was granted. Bob Evans, the attorney that Maye's family hired after his conviction, quipped, "I imagine the prosecution was doing cartwheels on their way to the courthouse," after Cooper's motion. Cooper soon realized her mistake, and asked that the trial be moved back to Jefferson Davis County. This time, however, the prosecution did object. District Attorney Claiborne "Buddy" McDonald would later argue in a post-trial hearing that the state feared Maye couldn't get a fair trial in Jefferson Davis County, a show of compassion that rang hollow for Maye’s new attorney Pafford, who noted that it came from the same man who was trying to have Maye executed.

Judge Eubanks eventually moved the trial to a third county, Marion County, which is where Maye was convicted. Like Lamar County, Marion County is whiter and more conservative than Jefferson Davis County. Maye's jury was comprised of 10 whites and two blacks.

The Mississippi State Constitution guarantees the right to a trial in the county where the alleged crime took place. The prosecution argued that Maye waived that right when he initially asked that the trial be moved. The Court of Appeals ruled last week that the right still applies even if the defendant initially gives it up, so long as the defendant isn't using a change of venue request to delay or obstruct the trial. Maye asked that the venue be switched back two months before his scheduled trial. Eubanks, the court ruled, should have granted Maye's request to move the trial back to Jefferson Davis County.

It seems counterintuitive that a defendant would actually want to be tried in the county where his alleged crime took place, particularly a defendant accused of murdering a cop. But the Mississippi Court of Appeals affirmed every Mississippian’s right to a jury local to where the crime was committed, at least, if that's what they want. There's good reason that right is in the state's constitution, even beyond the raw demographic data. Maye's case illustrates why.

The region of Mississippi where all of this happened is still largely segregated. Rural areas are overwhelmingly black, towns and small cities are mostly white. Racial animus not only persists, it's pervasive, often suffocatingly so. In Jefferson Davis County, black people live in fear of the mostly white police department in Prentiss, the county seat. Nearly every black person I've spoken to there has a story of police abuse, whether it happened to them or someone they know. White people, meanwhile, speak derisively of the mostly black county sheriff's department. Rumors circulate among white residents about Jefferson Davis County Sheriff Henry McCullum abetting drug pushers.

The informant in Maye's case is a local named Randy Gentry. Gentry, who had been used in other drug cases, is an unapologetic bigot, known in and around Prentiss as such. Yet the officers who used him, including Officer Ron Jones, routinely vouched for Gentry's trustworthiness and reliability in obtaining search warrants based on his sworn statements.

I described the area's racial tension in my 2006 article on Maye's case for Reason:

When people in the area talk about why they don’t trust law enforcement, you hear the same cops named over and over again. You hear about many of the same incidents, then learn that the officers involved never really stop policing; they just move from one department to another. It takes me just a few hours in Prentiss to find another woman who says she too was on the receiving end of a violent, forced-entry drug raid. Though the police didn’t find the meth lab they were looking for, they nevertheless jailed her brother for months (he couldn’t afford bond) before releasing him without explanation. The Monticello County Sheriff’s Department, where the man was jailed, claims he was bound over to circuit court for trial. But eight months later, he has yet to be charged or tried.

And it’s not just civilians who make such accusations. One black officer warns me not to trust what I hear from white cops in the area. “The badge and the gun don’t mean anything,” the officer says. “It doesn’t mean they found what they say they found.”

Maye's case boils down to his credibility and the credibility of the police officers who conducted the raid. They claim to have announced themselves. Maye says he didn't hear them. If he did hear them, he's guilty of murder. If they didn't announce themselves, or if he didn't hear that announcement, he’s at worst guilty of manslaughter and may well well be completely innocent, having merely defended his home from a violent intrusion.

In a case where the defendant's guilt or innocence turns almost entirely on these issues of credibility, it makes sense to have a jury with the complete information to make that determination. And that means finding jurors that have absorbed the racial and law enforcement dynamics of the area where the crime took place. That idea might not sit well at first with those accustomed to thinking of jurors as clean slates. But consider the alternative: Jurors who may bring assumptions about law enforcement from their own communities that aren't applicable to the case they'll be hearing. The right in question here is the basic right to be judged by a jury of your peers. 

The prosecution in Maye's case told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger last week that they will appeal the ruling. First they’ll petition to have the Court of Appeals rehear the case. If that's denied, they'll appeal to the Mississippi State Supreme Court. If that also fails, Maye will be retried in Jefferson Davis County. The one drawback for Maye: If he's convicted a second time, the prosecution could again ask the jury to give him the death penalty.

Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason magazine.

In the last three years, The Washington Post reports, Mexico's National Human Rights Commission has received more than 2,000 complaints about abuses committed by soldiers waging the country's U.S.-backed war on drugs. But according to the Interior Ministry, only one of those cases has resulted in a conviction: A soldier who fired on civilians at a checkpoint, killing one of them, received a nine-month sentence. The military says there have been 10 convictions, but it declines to provide details. The U.S. State Department puts the number of convictions at 12 and says another 52 soldiers are being investigated for homicide, torture, kidnapping, and extortion. Evidently 97 percent of the complaints proved groundless.

A military spokesman who demands anonymity assures the Post that "the army does not systemically violate human rights." But even if it only does so in an unofficial, disorganized way, the alleged abuses—which include torture, beatings, illegal raids and arrests, and gunfire aimed at civilians—are a predictable result of expecting soldiers to act like cops and cops to act like soldiers. The military spokesman complains:

It's like the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan, only more difficult because they can usually tell who are the criminals and who are the civilians. We do not have that luxury. In the drug war, the line between criminal and civilian is blurred.

According to Abel Barra, executive director of the Tlachinollan Human Rights Center in Guerrero, "militarization has caused more damage to society here than it has helped us live in peace." Yet the U.S. supports this policy financially and politically while disclaiming responsibility for its consequences:

"The U.S. Congress made clear that it supports the Merida Initiative against the cartels, but it does not support a blank check for the Mexican military," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). "A portion of our aid is conditioned on respect for human rights."

Another way of saying this is that the U.S. would continue funding Mexico's war on drugs even if the government made no pretense of caring about human rights. With a little lip service but very little action, it can earn the entire $1.4 billion allocated by Congress.

Los Angeles, a city with by all accounts the largest number and concentration of existing medical pot dispensaries, will likely see a hard cap on them after its City Council passes a new set of regulations on the medical marijuana business, which could happen as early as tomorrow.

More details and news clip links from my California news and politics blog "City of Angles," and you can check out the proposes ordinance, amendment, and actions on it at the L.A. City Council's web page.

CNN had a nice segment last Friday on the Atlantic Yards eminent domain fight, featuring lead plaintiff (and Reason contributor) Daniel Goldstein explaining why New York’s highest court should put a stop to this shameless case of eminent domain abuse: