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A Buena Vista man is planning to appeal his conviction on three felony counts of drug possession in a case that was heard earlier this month.
In the two-hour trial in Buena Vista Circuit Court, the guilty verdict for 36-year-old Allan Mays hinged on the testimony of two officers and a police informant about what happened on July 21, 2008.
Testimony during the March 6 trial was also heard from the vice-mayor of Buena Vista, who is Mays’ father, as well as from Allan Mays himself.
Mays said he plans to appeal after his sentencing hearing in June.
Both the officers’ testimony and the judge’s ruling relied in part on the word of Allan Mays’ sister-in-law, Deeana Watts. Watts is under advisement after a conviction for methamphetamine possession two years ago. She is now a confidential informant, working with the police to reduce her sentence.
In her testimony, Watts said it was about 4 p.m. when she stopped by the house where Allan Mays was living to drop off some DVDs. According to Watts’ testimony, Mays was in the living room, crushing up pills. Mays had been living in his deceased grandparents’ house for a couple of weeks, he said during his testimony, after his wife, Sheena Mays, kicked him out of their home during divorce proceedings.
Watts said that Mays was sitting across the room from Ashley Shafer – a co-worker whom he has said he was “kind of dating” at the time – talking about where they could get some more of the drug Percocet, a prescription pain-killer.
But according to the testimony of Mays’ father, Sam Mays, both his son and Shafer were working at that time that day.
The time cards at Mays’ Grocery show that Allan Mays, who is the store manager, started at 6 a.m. and did not get off until Rebecca Davis, a new hire, came in at 6 p.m. Shafer came in at 3:30 p.m. and worked until Sam Mays came to close the store at around 10:30 p.m., according to both the time cards and Sam Mays’ testimony.
“Ashley came in the damn store at 3 [p.m.],” said Sam Mays, who owns the grocery. “Becky didn’t come in until 6 [p.m.], so Allan couldn’t have been at the house before 6 [p.m.].”
Allan Mays’ attorney, Tommy Simons, argued that Watts did not arrive at the house where Mays was staying until 11 p.m. . Simons suggested that Watts decided to go to Mays’ residence after she found out the police were at her sister Sheena’s house. Sheena Mays had gone to Mays’ Grocery around 7 p.m. and taken a few bags of groceries without paying, according to Cpl. John Snider’s and Sam Mays’ testimony.
Simons suggested that Watts decided to go to Mays’ residence after she saw a police car in front of her sister Sheena’s house. Sheena Mays had gone to Mays’ Grocery around 7 p.m. and taken a few bags of groceries without paying for them, according to Cpl. John Snider’s and Sam Mays’ testimony.
Sam Mays said he was not planning to press charges in the matter of the groceries. He said he used to let Sheena Mays come by and get what she needed as a way to help out the family. But he asked Snider to tell her she needed to come back and pay for the groceries.
Watts testified that Allan Mays had told Sheena Mays she could take whatever she needed for the kids. But according to her testimony, Allan might have been “too tore up” from the pills he was doing to remember it.
Acting on information from Watts, Snider obtained a warrant to search Allan Mays’ house. Snider and a fellow officer, Terry Martin, served the warrant around midnight, a time when Allan Mays said he was sleeping in the living room. Snider testified that he was “slow, but steady” on his feet.
The officers testified that they found two bottles of pills and a mortar and pestle that Watts said Allan Mays had been using to crush up the pills.
Snider and Martin also said that while they were taking an inventory of drug-related items in the house, they found Allan Mays’ grandparents’ “pill bible” - a book detailing the names and common uses of various prescription pills.
Allan Mays testified that he recognized morphine and Klonopin among the pills that Snider and Martin discovered, and that he was trying to help the officers by identifying them. He said he knew the pills by sight because Sheena Mays has a prescription for morphine and he has a prescription for Klonopin.
But the officers said they did not recall him mentioning his wife at all.
Judge Irvine pointed to that when explaining how he arrived at his decision. He also noted that the law is clear on the possession of drugs; that Mays identified the drugs on sight, and that the drugs were found in his house.
Speaking for the defense, Sam Mays testified that after he closed Mays’ Grocery that night he drove by his parents’ house – the way he has done, he said, for 30 or 35 years. He said there was a car he did not recognize out front. He slowed down and saw Watts leaving the house.
“I knew it was Dee Dee [Watts],” Sam Mays testified. “I looked her right in the face.”
His version of the night’s events supported Allan Mays’. The younger Mays said he received a text message from Watts between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., saying that she was “no longer neutral in this,” which he said was a reference to the situation between him and his wife – Watts’ sister – Sheena Mays.
On the witness stand, Mays said that Watts came to his grandparents’ house about an hour after he received the message. “She was pissed off,” Mays said.
Watts was there for only about 15 minutes, according to Mays’ testimony. Mays said he was fixing the toilet, and did not see her at all, just heard her yelling. He suggested Watts could have planted the drugs during that time.
After she left, Mays said, he fell asleep on the couch watching TV, making an early night of it because he had to work at 6 a.m.
During the trial, it was noted that no fingerprints were taken from the pill bottles or the mortar and pestle. Chris Russell, the Commonwealth’s attorney for the city of Buena Vista, later said that such a protocol is common in cases where an identity is in question. The mortar and pestle also were not tested for residue. The Mays’ Grocery time cards were never taken as evidence, although Sam Mays later said he had offered them.
Mays said he is looking to appeal because he “likes his voting rights” – which, under current law, are lost to anyone convicted of a felony.
And as he talked about his plan to appeal, Allan Mays maintained his innocence.
“I don’t agree with someone getting out of charges by setting someone else up,” he said. “There’s a lot of innocent people sitting in jail because of this nonsense, and I’m one of them.”
“I have no doubt that [Deeana] was out to get [Allan] Mays,” Judge Irvine commented, in issuing the verdict. “I have no doubt she wanted to bust him.”
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