On Halloween night in 2005, Alex Thompson became a statistic.
Baltimore police arrested Thompson, 24, a University of Maryland law school student, in Fells Point, but never told him what he did wrong.
Like 23,505 other people in Baltimore that year, he was released hours later from Baltimore?s Central Booking and Intake Center without ever being charged with a crime.
Now, Thompson and his law school class, called the Access to Justice Clinic, have teamed with a Baltimore law firm that is suing the District Court systems of Maryland and Baltimore City over the treatment in Central Booking of people who are not provided attorneys when their bail is set.
“Without access to lawyer at any time while I was there, I had no idea what was going to happen to me,” Thompson said.
Filed in Baltimore City Circuit Court on Monday, the suit challenges procedures at Central Booking and District Courts that cause poor defendants to go without a lawyer during bail hearings.
“When we have a system like the one in Baltimore City, it calls out for immediate change,” said University of Maryland Law School professor Doug Colbert, who teaches the Access to Justice Clinic, in which students work with poor defendants in Baltimore.
Baltimore attorney Michael Schatzow said the input from the students caused him to file the suit.
“Together with the students, we are going to enforce those rights for these people who are too poor to afford their own attorneys,” he said.
The suit states that citizens who do not have access to an attorney while in Central Booking have been denied their “constitutional right to counsel.”
The suit was filed on behalf of a dozen poor defendants, who requested an attorney at the bail hearing, but were denied by the commissioner, according to the suit.
