Cory Maye -- in case you haven't been following Radley Balko -- is a black man with no criminal record condemned to death in Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi, for shooting a police officer who broke down his door in the middle of the night looking for a drug stash that wasn't there. Battlepanda has an index of blogospheric reaction: as far as I can tell, it's unanimous in thinking that Cory Maye doesn't deserve to die. That, and three bucks, will get him a latte grande.
This case is an interesting test of the power of the Blogosphere. Though the apparent injustice is two years old, it seems to have attracted exactly zero attention in the mainstream media, at least according to a Google News search for "Cory Maye." A blogger-organized letter-writing campaign to Haley Barbour seems grossly unlikely to make any difference whatever. The same goes for rallying the Hollywood celebs bereft by the death of Tookie Williams.
Unless bloggers can somehow attract the attention of mainstream media outlets, or of the politicians whose statements the mainstream media will treat as news (Wesley Clark? Mark Warner? Hillary Clinton? Bill Clinton? Barak Obama? John McCain?) then the story is going to die, and so, probably, is Cory Maye.
So how about it? Are there any actual journalists left in the country, people willing to do some actual reporting rather than taking dictation from anonymous sources? Any politicians willing to take a stand before taking a poll? If not, all the blogging in the world isn't going to do Cory Maye any good.