After weeks of wrangling between the mayor and the judiciary over reform of Baltimore's courts, a plan to revamp the justice system may emerge this week.
A group studying the issue hopes to meet Mayor Martin O'Malley's goal of handling many minor cases within 24 hours of arrest. If the plan being developed by the city's Criminal Justice Coordinating Council gains the consensus of involved parties, from judges to jail officers, at a meeting Wednesday, it would be a major breakthrough in a turbulent battle over the future of the city courts.
At the end of last week, however, major differences remained about how the justice system could be improved, despite the mayor's assertion that it was stick-figure simple.
While O'Malley believes that speedier justice for minor cases will allow more time to prosecute violent criminals, judges remain concerned about a proposal that could leave them less than two minutes on average to adjudicate each case in a courtroom at the jail.
Also, the debate involves more parties than O'Malley and the judges.
"I just want to move beyond any simplistic notion that this is not a complicated problem. The impression that this is something that one person can achieve and one person is obstructing is not the case," said Del. Howard P. Rawlings, a Baltimore Democrat and O'Malley supporter who heads a powerful budget committee. "This doesn't succeed by one person's energy. This succeeds by all of the stakeholders agreeing to move this project forward."
O'Malley and state judges, principally Chief Judge of the District Court Martha F. Rasin, have been locked in a vitriolic debate for weeks -- he called her an "obstructionist," she said he threw "a tantrum" -- about O'Malley's desire to turn the courtroom at the Central Booking and Intake Center into a clearinghouse for minor cases.
The debate has consumed the General Assembly, City Hall and the court system. Legislators, tired of the bickering and eager for a resolution, last week directed the matter to the coordinating council, the oversight committee steering reform of the city's courts.
Council's origins
Judges and other officials formed the council last year after murder and armed robbery suspects were set free because their trials didn't occur within 180 days, as the law requires. The council consists of members of all city justice agencies, from prosecutors to probation agents. It will meet Wednesday in Courthouse East on Calvert Street.
