Baltimore City State?s Attorney Patricia Jessamy on Wednesday said she was set up at a City Council subcommittee meeting last month with what she called inaccurate information supplied by the police department about her office?s performance.
Jessamy said at a meeting of the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council that the police department in March supplied City Council members a “rogue database” of the 2004 conviction rates for her office.
Jessamy said the data, which a police department official said was gathered using information available on a public judicial Web site, was inaccurate and incomplete.
According to numbers supplied by the police department, 39 percent of the 460 cases reviewed where the lead charge was murder, attempted murder, manslaughter or conspiracy to commit murder
were dismissed.
City Council members asked the police department for the numbers, said Kristen Mahoney, a police department official who represents the mayor at CJCC meetings, knowing the department would have a full list of the defendants in question and knowing they track what happens to those cases as they move through the judicial system.
Jessamy said the department wrongly called some of the cases dismissed and left other cases out of the data.
Mahoney defended how she collected the list of cases and determined what the outcome was in each, calling the numbers “a raw dataset” and saying Jessamy wanted to contextualize them with “justifications.”
Officials from agencies around the city and the state come together monthly at the CJCC meeting to discuss criminal justice issues. Much of the conflagration Wednesday stemmed from politicization, the council chairman said.
