Lynchburg lawyer's work releases Mississippi man on death row

Last weekend, Lynchburg lawyer Abe Pafford got to see something uncommon in the American justice system.

When Pafford signed on to Cory Maye’s legal team six years ago, Maye was sitting on Mississippi’s death row. On July 18, he was released from prison, not through a DNA exoneration as is the case so often, but through dogged legal work.

Pafford flew to central Mississippi on Friday to join in the homecoming.

Pafford’s name may not be well known among Central Virginia legal circles. Originally from New Jersey, the 38-year-old came to Liberty University in the early 1990s. After a few years in school, his parents and siblings joined him here – his father seeking greener pastures after the homebuilding market slumped in their home state.

He graduated in 1996, and left the area again to attend law school at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. For most of the last decade, Pafford has worked in large firms in the capital city. Still, he kept in touch with debate team buddies from LU and last winter they decided to quit their jobs and return to the Hill City to open a new firm, Pafford, Lawrence & Ross, on Commerce Street.

It was just a few months into his last big-firm job in December 2005 that he came across a story on the National Review Online about Maye. He clicked through a few links on the Internet, he said, and found a transcript of Maye’s 2004 trial.

“For several days, I just couldn’t sleep properly at night,” Pafford said. “I was restless about the fact that this guy was out there and was never going to see his little girl again.”

The day after Christmas 2001, a 21-year-old Maye was living in a duplex with his daughter and the child’s mother. A local sheriff’s deputy had gotten a search warrant that day for the home after an informant told him about a drug buy he had made from Maye’s neighbor. His lawyers, Pafford included, contend the deputy didn’t realize the home was a duplex until just before the raid. Instead of calling off the drug raid that night, Pafford said, the police kicked down the doors to both homes.

Just inside the door Prentiss police officer Ron Jones Jr. kicked in was Maye’s 14-month-old daughter sleeping. Maye, believing his home was being broken into, was armed with a .380-caliber pistol. He shot the officer as Jones rushed into the room, killing him.

Police testimony at the trial was inconsistent as to whether Jones announced he was a police officer as he crashed through the door, or whether the announcement could have been heard inside the house. Evidence showed he was dressed in combat fatigues and had no badge visible or police markings on the front of his clothing.

The problems with the trial were manifold, Pafford said. The medical examiner offered speculative testimony that shouldn’t have been allowed and was misrepresenting himself as a board-certified pathologist. The jury wasn’t properly instructed about Maye’s right to self-defense, he said, and the trial was wrongly moved out of the county where he lived.

But most disturbing of all, his daughter was the same age as Maye’s. The idea of being separated from his daughter for trying to protect her was too much, Pafford said.

In 2006, the trial judge agreed there had been problems with the case and set aside the death-penalty sentence, leaving Maye with a life sentence with no chance for parole. Three years later, the state appeals court agreed Maye should get a new trial because the case was moved out of his home county. Prosecutors appealed, but the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled last year that because of the problems with instructions about his right to self defense, he should get a new trial.

Pafford and the other attorneys from his former firm, as well as Mississippi attorney Bob Evans, were preparing for trial when they reached an agreement with prosecutors earlier this month. Rather than sit in jail for another trial, Maye agreed to plead guilty to negligent homicide in order to be released on time served.

The experience has left him a critic of no-knock military-style raids. While they’re appropriate in some cases, he said, the majority of the time, busting someone’s door down with the same techniques Special Forces soldiers are using in Afghanistan aren’t necessary.

“They say it gives them the extra 30 seconds to keep someone from rushing into the bathroom to get rid of the drugs, but how about giving the people inside those extra seconds to wake up, realize the police are coming in and do what you want them to do, which is to put their hands up and comply,” he said.

The outcome also bolstered his faith in the legal system.

“It reinforced for me that if you put time and the work in, even if the odds are against you, you can prevail,” Pafford said Thursday. “If you have the truth on your side and you work hard, over time, you will get results.”