A gaffe, as writer Michael Kinsley so aptly defined it, is when a politician gets caught telling the truth.
And that's what landed Baltimore's (relatively) new top prosecutor, Gregg Bernstein, on the front page the other day. The state's attorney wrote a postmortem on a recent case that was apparently intended for his staff's eyes only but, whoops, one of our reporters managed to obtain it.
The case Bernstein wrote rather frankly about was the one in which police officers picked up a teenager and dumped him, shoeless and without a phone, in a park in Howard County a couple years ago. The trial involving this bizarre and still not fully explained incident ended last month with one officer acquitted and two officers convicted only of misdemeanor misconduct charges.
Bernstein's post-trial memo highlighted what he archly called some "issues" with the case, from a less-than-stellar performance by an investigating detective to what he considered an "inexplicable" ruling by the judge.
It made for some revelatory reading — maybe too revelatory, in that I doubt Bernstein is happy to have the detective or judge, whom he otherwise praised, learn what he had to say about them via The Baltimore Sun. But I must say, as a veritable gaffe machine myself, I sometimes wonder if "accidental" truth-telling can subconsciously be intentional.
What really struck me about the memo, though, was its echoes of last year's campaign. Bernstein won, in part, by characterizing the incumbent, Patricia Jessamy, as too quick to blame bad police work for failing to get a conviction, or for why she opted not to take a case to trial at all.
Now in office himself, he finds himself with a case in which — surprise — the police work is wanting and the conviction less than he hoped for. A single case, of course, doesn't mean his campaign pitch was all wrong, or that he'll be no more successful than he thought Jessamy was in getting convictions. But perhaps this was an eye-opening experience nonetheless.
In any event, I can't think that taking the time after a case to assess what happened is a bad thing, even if it gained a wider audience than intended. I don't know what the ultimate fallout of this leaked email will be; the Sun article did quote a couple of lawyers who raised the specter of Bernstein's memo coming back to haunt him in an appeal.
But I don't see this as hurting Bernstein in the long run, at least among citizens who are watching to see how the new guy does.
For one thing, the memo provides a real-life view of the criminal justice system for those whose only experience with it is the tidiness of "Law and Order" episodes, where messes get sorted out in the space of an hour.
For another, it helps Bernstein establish his independence from the Police Department, which many worried he was too close to — having won the official endorsement of the police union and an all-but-official one from the police commissioner during the campaign. Maybe it wasn't that hard a call on his part, to put himself opposite officers who he suggested had previously misbehaved but only this time got caught, but there may be those who now may feel better about Bernstein's relationship with the police.
In the end, I'm guessing many will enjoy Bernstein's wry approach, whether he was just putting a breezy face on his less than slam-dunk victory or, as he told the Sun, he was affecting a tongue-in-cheek tone as a way of building staff camaraderie.
It reminded me that, in many ways, every workplace is essentially the same, filled with daily frustrations and stuff you can't, or didn't, control.
Maybe you're not stuck with witnesses who contradict themselves, or a detective who repeatedly refused, as Bernstein wrote, "to read her friggin' file." But surely you have your own head-slapping moments, those times when as you relate what happened to your colleagues, you have to insert as Bernstein did, "I am not making this up."
Life is filled with gaffes. And the inadvertent revelations that come with them? I think we can handle the truth.
