Day in and day out, Baltimore City prosecutors drop charges at a faster rate compared to surrounding counties.
Baltimore City prosecutors dropped more than half of the criminal charges filed last year in District Court, according to records obtained by The Examiner.
By comparison, Howard County prosecutors dropped 31 percent of cases; Baltimore County didn?t prosecute 26 percent; Anne Arundel dropped 21 percent; and Carroll and Harford counties declined to pursue 15 percent of cases.
City prosecutors say citizens and politicians should not be critical of their performance and point the reasons for the dropped cases in other directions; dubious cases from the police department, a city government that provides no financial incentive against overloading Central Booking, and a blistering workload.
“There are people that have been highly critical of our performance,” said Margaret Burns, spokeswoman for Baltimore City State?s Attorney?s Office. “But so many of our cases are affected by causes beyond our control. If you look at District Court and Circuit Court statistics, we have 4,000 cases we had to drop [last year] because police officers did not show up. Is that outrageous? Yes, it is outrageous.”
Burns said many times city police bring cases that present serious constitutional problems or are petty arrests.
“Too many people get arrested for frivolous crimes,” she said.
Other counties have a financial incentive not to overburden their detention centers with people arrested on frivolous charges, Burns said, adding that the city is the only jurisdiction in the area that does not fund its own jail.
In a special report, The Examiner on Monday highlighted several cases of misdemeanor city arrests that prosecutors declined to pursue.
Police said that the arrests represent only a fraction of total calls officers make annually and that citizens want an increased police presence.
Prosecutors also must deal with witness intimidation to an extent that surrounding counties hardly see, Burns said. More than 5,000 city cases were dropped due to witnesses not showing up at trial, records indicate.
Harford County State?s Attorney Joseph Cassilly, who drops the fewest cases of any top prosecutor in the Baltimore area, said his office sometimes receives weak cases from police, but he has assigned an approximately 10-lawyer unit to review those cases.
“Some of the cases we get aren?t great either,” he said. “We have attorneys who spend a lot of time fixing up what the police give us. But Baltimore City, they get the number of cases in a month that we get probably in a year.”
Anne Arundel County Deputy State?s Attorney Gerald Anders said he doesn?t encounter situations where police bring him a case so weak he cannot pursue it.
“I can?t remember ever looking at a case that the police bring us that is just garbage,” he said. “But we also have the luxury of not being overwhelmed by our dockets.”
