Earlier this week, Baltimore State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy talked about that letter she sent to Abell Foundation’s Robert Embry back in March.
The angry missive was about a study — yet to be released publicly — commissioned by the foundation that recommended a “regional jury pool” for Baltimore City, the better to weed out those city jurors supposedly too cognitively challenged to convict defendants at the rate defendants are convicted in Baltimore, Howard and Anne Arundel counties.
Shawn Flower of Choice Research Associates did the study in which she concluded that for the fiscal year ending in 2006, 53 percent of verdicts in Anne Arundel County were convictions. The percentage was 41 percent for Howard County and 40 percent for Baltimore County.
The figure for Baltimore City was 23 percent.
The probability of a defendant being convicted of the most serious charge was 63 percent in the counties studied versus only 2 percent for Baltimore. It was Flower’s methodology that raised Jessamy’s hackles: The researcher used data from all trials in the three counties but only a sample from Baltimore City.
Jessamy said regional jury pools might violate the Sixth Amendment (they would) and had another bone to pick with Flower: the part of the report where the researcher wrote that jurors in Baltimore, Anne Arundel and Howard counties are not only “better educated, are wealthier and are more likely to own their own homes” but also “are … less likely to suffer from the structural disadvantage which often results in the higher incidence of crime and victimization from crime.”
Jurors in those three counties, Flower concluded, “are likely to be more pro-social, and thus would be commensurately more likely to convict defendants than in Baltimore City.”
I’ll put aside for the moment Flower’s sounding a clarion call for our criminal justice system to stack the deck against defendants. And having served enough jury duty to make it my virtual part-time job, I’ll even overlook the fact that most of the fellow jurors I’ve served with fit the profile of county jurors.
The fact is, Flower and her Choice Research Associates compadres chose to study the wrong people. Flower is right that many Baltimoreans don’t trust Baltimore City cops. What Flower ignores — Jessamy said Flower “glossed over” this matter — is the question of why.
True story: About nine years ago a city cop stopped me for running a stop sign I didn’t run. Of course, I went to traffic court. I’d been to traffic court a couple of times before, when defendants swore before the judge that the officer testifying against them in court wasn’t the one who stopped them.
The district court judges hearing the cases dismissed the testimony of the defendants — even the one who said it was a black female officer who stopped him, not the white male officer testifying — and found them guilty. For my running-the-stop-sign case, I noticed the mustached officer set to testify against me was at least four inches taller and 40 pounds heavier than the clean-shaven guy who had stopped me.
I left court that day shaking my head. I had no idea why some Baltimore City cops found it necessary to lie about simple traffic violations, but I knew it would come back on us, and come back on us in a bad way.
And come back it has. I’d heard, even before Flower’s report prematurely hit the press, that some Baltimore juries were cutting loose some stone-cold criminals. But those traffic defendants district court judges so cavalierly dismissed might have been called on to serve on circuit court juries. And they’d ask themselves this question: If cops will lie about penny-ante traffic violations, what will they do when the cases involve drugs or murder?
Jessamy said there are about a dozen or so officers whose testimonies her assistant state’s attorneys can’t use because they’ve been known to give either false testimony or write false reports. The state’s attorney also implied, in her letter, that Flower had insulted Baltimore jurors.
Flower insulted those in Baltimore, Howard and Anne Arundel counties as well. She said, in essence, that jurors in those localities are so sappy they’ll believe any tall tale spun by a cop, even one from a force where the culture of mendacity is ingrained.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Maryland and Baltimore for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
