Jessamy

Patricia Jessamy's legal team is scrutinizing the results of the Baltimore state's attorney's race as challenger Gregg Bernstein's lead widened Thursday after the first round of absentee ballots were counted. Jessamy's lawyers sent letters to both state and city election officials Thursday asking for: •a complete list of the voting machines used in the primary election, a guarantee that the vote verification process will be conducted in public, the election judges' manual and copies of the written procedures for handling voting information at the polling sites as well as for transporting it to the elections board.

In the weeks leading up to Tuesday's contentious primary election for Baltimore state's attorney, Margaret T. Burns deferred questions about her boss' re-election bid to a spokeswoman hired by the campaign. Burns earns about $100,000 a year to speak on behalf of Jessamy and her prosecutors, usually about convictions and cases won in court. During the primary race, the city's top prosecutor maintained a separate Web page and Facebook page for the campaign, signals that office work and political work shouldn't mix. But on Wednesday, Burns took center stage in Jessamy's bid to retain her office.

As many as 10,000 of Baltimore's primary votes could still be missing, according to Patricia Jessamy's state's attorney campaign staff, who told her that memory cards from 27 machines in six districts were unaccounted for. If accurate, it could leave room for the election to sway back toward Jessamy, the incumbent, who's narrowly trailing challenger Gregg Bernstein. But city Board of Elections Director Armstead B.C. Jones Sr. said the figures sounded high to him, and that none of it would matter by the end of the day. "We are going to get to 100 percent" of the votes cast at polling places, he said.

Baltimore State's Attorney hopeful Gregg Bernstein maintained his lead over incumbent Patricia C. Jessamy, according to a full count of the votes cast in city polling places. Numbers released this afternoon from the Baltimore Board of Elections show that Bernstein won 49 percent of the primary votes cast at polling places to Jessamy's 47 percent -- with just 1,295 votes separating them. (A third democratic candidate received about 2,000 votes). That means Jessamy needs to make up the difference in absentee ballots, which will be counted starting Thursday morning, or Baltimore has a new state's attorney.

When the question came during the debate — and how could it not, given the Canton locale — Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy started her answer on the defensive. Without "blaming anyone else," an audience member asked, what happened in the Zach Sowers case? Sowers was a newlywed in 2007 when teenagers attacked and robbed him — one boy beating him into a coma steps from his Patterson Park home. He died 10 months later, the case saddening and then infuriating the neighborhood.

Standing before television cameras and reporters on 26th Street on a steamy summer day, Gregg Bernstein displays a strong command of campaign skills in his first bid for elected office. He was a late entry in the contest against Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy, who has held the job for 15 years. But he's got the art of the news conference down. The checklist: slick suit, media handlers and provocative statements. He has called everyone there to blame Jessamy for one of the city's senseless murders, the high-profile killing of a young Johns Hopkins researcher, Stephen Pitcairn, allegedly at the hands of a career criminal.

Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy is saying her primary opponent would "set us back 60 years" if elected, a claim her critics contend is stoking fears about whether challenger Gregg Bernstein's anti-crime policies would target black residents. The Democratic contest pits Jessamy, an incumbent who fought for civil rights in the South, against a white lawyer promising to get tougher on crime. Jessamy has been promoting and defending her efforts to weave intervention and treatment into her office's traditional role of prosecuting criminals.

I've been following the Gregg Bernstein-Patricia Jessamy state's attorney race, and I am appalled at the lack of leadership over the past 15 years in the state's attorney shop headed up by Ms. Jessamy. Our community and her staff, in order to be effective, need a role model. Ms. Jessamy is no role model. She's hasn't even tried a legal case in 15 years. We need new leadership and a real trial lawyer who understands how to argue a case in order to win convictions. Quite frankly, I don't know how Ms. Jessamy has been able to get the respect of judges, police or even victims when she refuses to try a case just because it has only one witness.