State corrections officers mistakenly released a North Baltimore man from jail a day after he was convicted of attempted murder - an error officials say highlights the perils of a decades-old system in which prisoner release and detention instructions are delivered in handwritten notes.
A city jury convicted Calvin Boswell, 23, of several charges April 21 but found him not guilty of others. He was returned to the Baltimore City Detention Center, where he was supposed to remain until sentencing June 23. Officials didn't realize until then that he had been released in April.
According to court and law enforcement sources, the paper release order on file with the city-run court doesn't match the one on file with the state-run detention center. It's unclear when or why the document - which resembles a receipt - was altered, or by whom. It went through various hands between the court and the jail, but the result was that Boswell was released the day after his conviction.
Rick Binetti, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said that multiple errors in the case demonstrate the need for release and commitment records to be transmitted electronically, rather than on paper. Currently, the court's and the detention center's computers aren't compatible, he said.
"We're investing in a case-management system now that in the future will allow our systems to be able to talk to other systems, which could help prevent errors like this one," Binetti said.
State and Baltimore police are still searching for Boswell, of the 520 block of Walker Ave., and state corrections officials are investigating what went wrong.
A document on file with the jail contains a Circuit Court seal and three case numbers - erroneously reporting Boswell as "not guilty" in the attempted murder case. The copy in the court file lacks the seal and has only two case numbers, those of the cases in which he was actually found not guilty.
The courtroom clerk is responsible for completing the release forms, which then pass through multiple hands before an inmate is released.
Yet another error appears to have aided Boswell's release. For unknown reasons, the Corrections Department did not have any paperwork on a fourth case, in which the jury found Boswell guilty of attempted robbery with a deadly weapon.
