Police Misconduct

I was dismayed to learn that a suspected DUI offender's case was thrown out of court without due process ("Judge throws out DUI case, citing quotas," Jan. 6). District Court Judge Sue-Ellen Hantman should have allowed the case to go to trial, where any issue of police misconduct could have been adjudicated. The driver's alcohol blood content of .17, which is twice the legal limit, was a serious matter involving public safety, which is why we have a judicial system that is subject to appeals.

Prince George's County State's Attorney Angela D. Alsobrooks was right to bring criminal charges this week against two county police officers accused of savagely beating University of Maryland student John McKenna last year, but it appears she hasn't yet gotten to the bottom of this case. There's reason to believe that many others beyond the two indicted officers may have been involved in the incident and its aftermath, and Ms. Alsobrooks, who took office in January, needs to bring all of those responsible to account if she is to convince the public that serious police misconduct will not be tolerated on her watch.

Does Baltimore City State's Attorney Gregg Bernstein think that a 15-year sentence with perhaps the possibility of parole in five years is a tough enough sentence for a policeman who shot an unarmed man to death? Mr. Bernstein won't seek to prosecute the policemen who shot one of their own 20 times. How can the police in Baltimore City fight crime when they cannot even control themselves? Joe Heming

A plainclothes officer is pummeled with 42 bullets by fellow officers outside a Baltimore nightclub. An off-duty police officer puts over a dozen bullets into a former Marine, who is unarmed and pleads for his life before the officer riddles him with gunfire. His body drops to the asphalt, lifeless. Later that same evening, the same off-duty officer boasts to a fellow officer about the "hot chicks" he was observing at the nightclub he had attended. Compassion? Nary a sign of it by the cop. Another officer is accused of dealing heroin, one time brazenly supporting his "side business" on the district parking lot after a shift meeting.

Baltimore State's Attorney Gregg Bernstein will try his first case as the city's top prosecutor this week when three city officers go on trial for misconduct allegations, his office confirmed. Officers Tyrone S. Francis, Milton G. Smith III and Gregory Hellen are accused of picking up a teenager in West Baltimore in May 2009 and dropping him off in Patapsco Valley State Park in Howard County, without shoes or a cellphone. The officers were indicted last March on charges of kidnapping, false imprisonment, second-degree assault and misconduct in office, among other counts.

Private defense attorney Janice Bledsoe will leave her firm to join the Baltimore prosecutor's office as head of the new police integrity unit, State's Attorney Gregg L. Bernstein announced Thursday. The division replaces a police misconduct unit created a decade ago under his predecessor, Patricia C. Jessamy, and is the result of a "comprehensive review and reorganization," according to a statement. "It is vital to maintaining public trust in our criminal justice system that the state's attorney's office acts vigilantly to ensure that allegations of police misconduct are thoroughly investigated and, where appropriate, prosecuted," Bernstein said in the statement.

Baltimore City State's Attorney Gregg Bernstein campaigned for office largely on the strength of his promise to forge better working relationships between his prosecutors and the police department. That needed to happen; relations between the two had become so dysfunctional that neither could focus properly on the job of fighting crime. But now that Mr. Bernstein is in a position to make good on his pledge, his latest moves toward reconciliation have raised new causes for concern. Not only do his initiatives seem spectacularly ill-timed, but Mr. Bernstein has refused to even talk about the issues they raise.

As the Baltimore Police Department faces one of the largest corruption scandals in its history, the city's new state's attorney is revamping the way prosecutors deal with police wrongdoing as part of a comprehensive office overhaul. Gregg Bernstein, who took office in January, is considering eliminating a decade-old division that is devoted to police misconduct cases. And he has abolished a controversial list kept by his predecessor that banned certain officers from testifying at trial.

A man who said a Baltimore police officer strip-searched him on a public street and used a Taser on him twice while he was in handcuffs has agreed to settle a civil suit he filed against the city and is being offered $95,000. The settlement awaits approval by the Board of Estimates, the city's spending panel, which scheduled the item for Wednesday. The amount is listed in court records and on the Board of Estimates' agenda. Donte T. Harris sued Officer Babatunda Orlsadelle after he was arrested in April 2007 while walking to a store on Woodbine Avenue in West Baltimore.

Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy questioned the "integrity and credibility" of the city's police commissioner Tuesday afternoon, calling for an independent investigation into whether Frederick H. Bealefeld III has solicited votes for her opponent in the Democratic primary while on duty. At a news conference in North Baltimore, Jessamy alleged that an interaction between one of her supporters and Bealefeld last month was an "overt action on the part of the police commissioner" to help elect "a rubber stamp of the police department.