NEWS
September 9, 1999
MUCH OF the paralysis of Baltimore's criminal-justice system is a result of its technological backwardness. Not only are various agencies trapped in a virtual Stone Age, but Police Department computers cannot communicate with parole and probation, or with the state's attorney's office.District and circuit court computers cannot talk with one another.This situation is particularly deplorable because it would be relatively inexpensive to link the various computer systems. The agencies involved need just $20,000 worth of routers and high-speed Internet connections.
TOPIC
By David Cole | May 16, 1999
THANKS TO the New York police force, Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo have become household names. Thanks to state police in New Jersey, Maryland and elsewhere, "Driving While Black" has entered the general lexicon. For the moment, the nation seems to be taking seriously the issue of racial bias in the criminal justice system. It's about time.The issue is not new. Were it not for some of its dated rhetoric, the 1968 Kerner Commission Report, which discussed the causes of the urban riots of the mid- and late 1960s, could well be a description of many of our cities today.
NEWS
April 15, 1999
NOT CONTENT with stop-gap measures, the Maryland General Assembly wants to revamp Baltimore's malfunctioning criminal-justice system. Legislators have frozen $17.8 million until they are satisfied that comprehensive reform is under way. To free that money, Court of Appeals Chief Judge Robert M. Bell must submit by Oct. 1 a blueprint to overhaul the city's problematic prosecution and court practices."
NEWS
By Michael Olesker | August 17, 1999
WELL, it's unanimous. All of the candidates for mayor of Baltimore have bravely declared they are against crime (even, presumably, those candidates with arrest records of their own). The question is: Does anybody with a serious chance of election have a plan that might actually work?Patricia C. Jessamy isn't so sure. She is the beleaguered state's attorney of Baltimore who chose not to run for mayor, owing mainly to the tide of humanity that washes each day through the city's courts and threatens to drown not just her office but the city itself.
NEWS
By MICHAEL OLESKER | March 4, 1999
THE CAR STOPS on Springhill Avenue, and the eyeballs begin to ache. The deep thinkers in the criminal justice system of Baltimore, having heard of grand-scale narcotics trafficking in a grocery store on this block, wish to demolish the store. They think this will transform the whole neighborhood. It begs the question: What substance have these people been smoking?The car enters Springhill off Reisterstown Road, about six blocks above Park Circle. At the corner of Springhill and Reisterstown, as though issuing a warning of things to come, sit the charred remains of a burned-out house, which ought to bear Dante's warning at the gates of hell: All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
NEWS
February 20, 1999
Police commissioner, prosecutor are not feuding over procedure; Getting away with MurderWe were highly concerned when reading the editorial "Governor must lead repair of justice system" (Feb. 17). The editorial mentioned two points that were grossly inaccurate.The first being the alleged "active feuding" between the State's Attorney's Office and the Police Department. To suggest that we actively feud with one another couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, we have met many times recently regarding effective management strategies and solutions pertaining to violent crime prevention, enforcement and prosecution in the city of Baltimore.
NEWS
By Caitlin Francke | January 4, 1999
Identical twins James and Charles Bolner have spent four years in the Baltimore City Detention Center waiting for their trial on drug distribution charges - and they couldn't be more pleased.They like the jail. They like being together. They also say prosecutors have ironclad cases against them, and the longer they stay in the jail, the shorter their eventual sentences will be in a harsher state prison.And Baltimore's criminal justice system has willingly accommodated them. In the past four years, the courts have postponed their cases 13 times.
NEWS
By GREGORY KANE | May 8, 1999
MARK MAUER, associate director of the Sentencing Project, is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal with a dyed-in-the-wool liberal approach to crime. Take, for example, how he thinks judges should handle a drug offender who disdains treatment after being sentenced to it instead of jail time."
NEWS
By John M. Glynn | February 25, 1999
RECENT news reports, culminating in an unusual two-page editorial in The Sun on Feb. 14 about the city's homicide rate, have underscored problems in Baltimore's criminal justice system.Even Court of Appeals Chief Judge Robert M. Bell has agreed that "systemic changes" are in order, though we remain in the dark about exactly what these changes would be.Problems in the criminal justice system did not arise suddenly, or occur in a vacuum.It's time for those of us in the criminal justice system to tell the public the truth.
NEWS
By Gerard Shields | March 15, 1999
Shortly after becoming Baltimore mayor in 1971, William Donald Schaefer created the Mayor's Coordinating Council of Criminal Justice to bring judges, police, jailers and prosecutors together on a regular basis.Schaefer's goal was to ensure that all city law enforcement agencies were on the same page when it came to fighting crime.But shortly after his election more than a decade ago, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke removed the council's "coordinating" function, saying that he lacked the authority to tell noncity agencies such as the state district courts what to do.Baltimore court administrators trying to end the bottleneck in city courts want Schmoke to resume the coordinating powers of the justice council, which during the past decade has become a vehicle to obtain grant funding and advise on crime prevention.