Criminal Justice System

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Wrong for city leader to undercut prosecutor It may well be that Mayor Sheila Dixon will eventually be acquitted of all 12 criminal charges against her ("Evidence, sympathies could vie in Dixon case," Jan. 13). However, Ms. Dixon's essential defense seems to be to blatantly attempt to undermine the credibility and integrity of the state prosecutor. At a time when the city is doubling efforts to renew confidence in the integrity and even-handedness of our criminal justice system, Ms. Dixon is communicating this message: "You can't trust the prosecutors."

Mayor Sheila Dixon voiced renewed outrage yesterday over a videotape that shows a man wounded by gunfire and lying on the floor of a Northeast Baltimore Chinese carryout while customers laugh and step over him to get their food. The surveillance video, which city prosecutors are using in their case against two suspects, gained attention Wednesday at a public monthly meeting of Baltimore law enforcement officials. Dixon talked about the disturbing scenes while pressing her case for changes in the criminal justice system.

In several speeches, Sen. Barack Obama has used an easy, if imprecise, formulation to express his despair over the high incarceration rate of young black men. "I don't want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college," he said at a rally last year, repeating, more or less, a line used frequently by critics of the criminal justice system. But it's not accurate. There are far more young black men in college (about 530,000, ages 18 to 24)

Crime and drugs go hand-in-hand in Baltimore, and both problems are exacerbated by the inability of some city judges to properly evaluate a defendant's drug problem and the lack of sufficient treatment options, particularly for those who commit crimes to support their habit. That reality is reinforced by local judges who vented their frustration about how the criminal justice system handles low-level, nonviolent drug offenders in a new study by a Washington-based think tank. Fixing the problem could save lives.

Dulaney High School student Nicholas Browning is charged with a heinous crime, the murders of his parents and two younger brothers. His 16th birthday is tomorrow, but he has been charged as an adult in the shooting deaths of his family because under the law he can be. It may be legal, but teenagers who enter the adult criminal justice system are often lost to it. In recent years in Baltimore County, that has certainly been the case. Now that the Browning teenager has a lawyer, all efforts should be made to move his case to juvenile court.

An open letter to Marvin L. "Doc" Cheatham, president of the Baltimore NAACP chapter: Dear Mr. Cheatham: This letter is in response to the e-mail you sent to Baltimore news media outlets Nov. 16. You chided us for not covering the march on the U.S. Department of Justice that same day. Several civil rights groups -- including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -- and many individuals marched to protest what they perceive as...

David Evans and James Curtis Giles don't know each other. But their personal nightmares hinged on the very same thing - an accusation of gang rape. Their nightmares ended last week in two different cities, each man affirmed in his innocence and wronged by a miscarriage of justice. Race, class and money were at play in their individual cases, powerful forces that can free or imprison the truth. Last year, Mr. Evans and two other Duke University lacrosse players, all white, were charged with sexually assaulting a black dancer at a team party.

When the future of Brandon Grimes was in the hands of Baltimore Circuit Judge M. Brooke Murdock nearly two years ago, he had two previous criminal convictions - both for nonviolent offenses - on his record. And the new charges before the judge were also for nonviolent offenses committed while he was on probation. So Murdock - like other city judges routinely dealing with towering caseloads - accepted a guilty plea from Grimes for theft and multiple probation violats, giving him four concurrent six-month prison sentences.

NEW ORLEANS -- After months of chaos in the criminal justice system here, Mayor C. Ray Nagin announced the first steps yesterday to replace the city's missing prosecutors, public defenders and police officers, along with its ruined courtrooms. A neighboring parish is lending prosecutors to New Orleans to help its overburdened district attorney's office deal with a significant backlog of cases, Nagin said. Pro bono assistance for poor defendants is on the way from the state's bar association, which is also paying for a new system to coordinate and track cases.

Testifying at a congressional field hearing to address Baltimore's pervasive witness intimidation problem, Mayor Martin O'Malley said yesterday that reforming the criminal justice system would be the best way to help people who cooperate with police feel safe. The mayor called recent state and federal legislative efforts "a vital component" but said that "more effective prosecution and more effective law enforcement" would be a powerful deterrent to witness intimidation. O'Malley was one of the speakers at the hearing sponsored by Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, a Baltimore Democrat who was seeking local input on his proposals to pump federal dollars into fighting witness intimidation and encouraging local cooperation with authorities.