It’s a commonly held belief in Baltimore’s courtrooms that postponements hurt conviction rates. Witnesses get annoyed at the delays and refuse to return. Their memories fade. Suspects end up avoiding jail time.
But a new report from the Baltimore City Criminal Justice Coordinating Council says that’s not necessarily true.
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According to the report, postponements have little effect on conviction rates. In criminal cases with fewer than five postponements, prosecutors had a 44 percent conviction rate over the first nine months of 2008. During the same time period, prosecutors had a 41 percent conviction rate in cases with five to 10 postponements.
Baltimore City Circuit Judge Brooke Murdock, one of two authors of the report, cautioned that it does not factor in suspects who plead to a “lesser included” crime, such as pleading guilty to an assault instead of a murder.
“Statistics are a dangerous thing,” Murdock said Wednesday. “It is true that the numbers don’t reflect everything about a plea deal. Whether it’s a murder or an assault, it still shows a guilty finding. It may be that, anecdotally, it’s still correct that time does undermine prosecutions.”
Defense attorneys are responsible for many postponements — and prosecutors to a lesser degree. A lack of available courtrooms, missing witnesses, and a failure to bring the suspects from jail also contribute to the problem.
Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld said he wanted to see a report detailing how many suspects committed crimes while their cases were postponed.
“For a defendant it would be very smart to postpone a case as long as you can postpone it,” said Baltimore City Court Clerk Frank Conaway, who, with Murdock, co-authored the report. “Most of the defendants are out on bail. … Are they committing other crimes?”
Murdock said a switch in 2007 to a different system of organizing cases — reception court — has eliminated many situations in which cases were postponed dozens of times. A 2006 committee report showed 51 defendants in Circuit Court had their cases postponed more than 10 times. One man’s case has been postponed 34 times.
