I was perusing the newspapers this morning and in the headlines of the Baltimore Sun was this:  “Black Guerrilla Family: Federal Grand Jury Indicts 15 in Connection with Gang”  If you are of the law and order mindset, this will come as wonderful news because really, isn’t cleaning up the streets what it’s all about, especially the streets of Baltimore City where crime rules the day?

If only it were that simple.  Allow me, dear reader, to give you some statistics and background on Baltimore and some insight on how I ended up there. This is my tale of two cities.

If you think of Baltimore, you may think of the inner harbor, crabcakes, and the Wire.  The City (as opposed to the County) is an independent municipality, with about 640,000 residents, the majority of whom are black. Baltimore City has the third highest homicide rate for cities with populations over 250,000.  It had 238 homicides in 2009, up 4 from 2008.  When I practiced in Baltimore, the murder rate was higher, nearing 300.  Maybe four more dead people doesn’t seem like that many, and in fact, even 40 more might not, but that’s four or forty more people who aren’t on this earth anymore. Four or forty more fathers, brothers and sons who have vanished.  And, most of these people are young black men.  (But, that’s a post for another day.) 

The Baltimore City Paper does a regular column called “Murder Ink“.  They also have regular features on the homicide rates in Baltimore and follow and report on trends.  There is a popular blog called  Baltimore Crime that keeps tabs on the homicides and updates on criminal activity in Baltimore. The City will probably have just about 200 or so murders this year, which will be a marked decrease from prior years.  Remember there was the show “Homicide, Life on the Street”?  That took place in Baltimore and is actually based on a book written by a Baltimore Sun journalist who spent a year with the Baltimore City police.  The characters in the show are real, I’ve met some of them (the people on whom they are based, not the actors).  The show is pretty accurate in portraying life in Baltimore City, and if you’ve ever watched the Wire, well it was sometimes hard to separate fact from fiction, as I’ve written about before.

So, why on Earth would a girl from upstate New York’s cow country move to a city like Baltimore?  Well, you want the truth or the doctored up version?  Listen, I like to move.  That’s the truth.  If I ever apply for a job and an employer reads this blog they may question my ability to be loyal to their firm, and I wouldn’t really blame them.  I am a rolling stone and have been my entire life.  We moved 23 times before I was 14.  We’ve had a few moves since marriage and luckily, Drue has been game and has kept up.  We had a great life in Albany.  I had very good work, we made good money and our friends were a wildly diverse (yes, you heard that, Albany is diverse) smart and fun group. I had a clique of criminal defense attorney girlfriends and when I sat in the well while waiting for cases to be called I never felt alone.  We were going to build a giant house on a couple of acres of land in Averill Park (with a pond in the backyard, despite Drue’s cautionary tales of it turning into a cesspool).  We were going to send our girls to Emma Willard and our boys to Albany Academy.  Life was all planned out.

Life didn’t like my plans.

And, it was just time to go.

My family lives in Northern VA.  Drue wouldn’t move to the ‘burbs of D.C. (which is where we live now) He’d been a ‘burbs kid his whole life and was ready for a change.  So, one weekend we went to Baltimore for my best friend’s wedding.  It was a beautiful July day and the liquid love was flowing.  I think it was ArtFest and we were hanging out in Charles Village. Our flight back to Albany was delayed so we had a couple more at the airport.  I turned to Drue and said “I don’t want to die in Averill Park” and he said “Let’s move to Baltimore”.  And that’s what happened.  I didn’t work for a while, just kind of hung out and got to know the neighborhood.  I did some contract work in D.C.  I took the out-of-state attorney exam and applied for jobs. I got a ton of offers from all types of firms, but settled on one that did criminal defense and turned down all the bankruptcy and other litigation type stuff.  I wasn’t happy at the firm, but the work was intense.  There are few better places to practice criminal law than Baltimore City.

Why?  You ask?  What’s so great about being a criminal defense lawyer in Baltimore City?  Well, as I’ve already told you, the cops are not all that great.  The jurors don’t live in lala land so they know first hand that the cops trample on people’s rights regularly.  The court system is over burdened, lawyers don’t regularly file motions because they don’t think they have to, and it frequently is a circus.  In New York, we had night court in some smaller jurisdictions.  Some of these places had judges who weren’t lawyers.  We called these courts CPL free zones (Criminal Procedure Law)  Most of Baltimore City is a CPL free zone. So, you can win cases.  Which is our job.  So people, our clients, got used to winning.  Repeat offenders still won. It’s not as if the cops got better at doing their job with more practice.  It was a lot of catch and release, and not just of the low level quality of life stuff.  But we felt good because we fought the good fight and won because people, jurors, got it.  They knew how life was for black men in Baltimore City.

Baltimore city gave me a false sense of how good I was at lawyering.  It also gave you a false sense of how willing people were to believe that cops lie.  In Albany, I had cases tossed based on untruths from police officers, but I had to give the judge something else to hang his hat on in order to get the suppression, the dismissal.  And jurors never believed that a police officer fabricated testimony.  They lived in a different world from the folks who stood before the bar.  A jury of your peers.  Laugh.  Not so in Baltimore City.  The jury would most likely be black people from the neighborhood who had seen those very same cops rough other young guys up.

In upstate New York we had a judge who was called Maximum Clyne.  I never practiced in front of him since he had retired before I came of age, but his theory was if you were convicted of a crime in his jurisdiction, he would give you the maximum sentence allowed under the law.  We had the Rockefeller Drug laws, we had all white juries.  We were not too much more afraid of the feds (who never trampled on the State’s jurisdiction anyway) because our own courts were frightening enough.  You were frequently punished for going to trial, if you were offered five to life (as was Elaine Bartlett who is quoted in the story linked above) and don’t take it, you will get 20-life after trial (which is what happened to Ms. Bartlett, a first time offender who was granted clemency after serving 16 years in prison).  We did not take everything to trial.  We made deals.  We mitigated.  We fought when and where we could, but we didn’t have an overinflated sense of ourselves as lawyers.  We didn’t have judges called “Maximum” anymore, but we would frequently have drinks after a long day in court and when asked “what did the judge do?” we’d respond “he maxed him.”  We didn’t have stets or nolle pros’s, there was no such thing as expunging a record as a matter of course, cases weren’t dismissed just because victims didn’t show up to court.  Oh, victims showed up.  If they didn’t come willingly, there would be material witness orders and they’d show up in shackles. 

What does this have to do with the article in this morning’s paper?  Well, Baltimore City has handed over its prosecutorial function to the federal government.  Instead of letting the judges and juries of Baltimore City wade through their own mess, they’ve given the honors to Rod Rosenstein, the US Attorney for the Great State of Maryland.  In upstate New York, having a federal case meant having a federal case, not a state case that the state couldn’t handle and had to hand over to the feds.  But then again, our juries in federal court were similar to those in the state, we had horrible sentencing ranges for relatively minor drug crimes, so our fear in both places was on a similar plane.

Not so in Maryland.  Federal juries in the District of Maryland are not the same as Baltimore City juries.  First of all, they are usually white since they are made up of citizens from outlying communities (communities which don’t have the same distrust of police officers that city folks do) Second, federal sentences, as we all know, are astronomical.  And finally, as the Sun pointed out this morning, Maryland doesn’t have a state racketeering law, so they can’t charge guilt by association.  In order to prove that someone is guilty of a crime, they have to prove that the person committed a crime, as opposed to proving that they associated with people who committed a crime, which is what the RICO laws do.  People get caught up in a giant net and really, everyone gets eaten.  As Mr. Rosenstein pointed out “This is the most powerful tool we have in our federal toolbox to prosecute” criminal organizations.  And, now, the Feds are going to use it to clean up Baltimore City.

What I found most interesting about the article in the Sun was the summary of the dastardly deeds done by the Black Guerrilla Family.  Now, I’m not saying they are a litter of pussy cats doing nothing but empowering black families, but take a look at some of the activities outlined in the indictment:

The 23-page indictment unsealed Tuesday supersedes last year’s version and builds on it. It describes the BGF as a sophisticated paramilitary operation that kept a “treasury,” made motivational T-shirts (slogan: “Revolution is the Only Solution”), held meetings in Druid Hill Park, developed a gang manual, conducted counter-surveillance on law-enforcement agents and paid off prison workers like Simmons with cash and debit cards.

 I think I own that t-shirt, the handbook is entitled “Empower Black Families”, if you’ve ever been to Druid Hill Park then you know, you must have gang affiliations, and we are fully aware that the Maryland PD is camera shy.  And this, my friends, is the type of information they will use to prove the more nefarious stuff like drug trafficking. 

I don’t think the way things worked in Albany was all that great.  In fact, when I go through the archives of that local paper my heart sinks at some of the stories of injustice that I just missed since I was so busy plugging away at what I was doing – defending people.  I don’t think Baltimore city functions too much better, but at least we are able to protect the constitution to some extent, at least in the Court system.  If the cops fuck up, our guys can get released, or at least get some semblance of a decent outcome.  But that is only because the citizens have had enough and they vote in the jury box.  Bringing these crimes over to the federal system just invites more of the same, more ivory tower justice, which isn’t really justice at all.

There are days when I regret the move.  I miss Albany so much it hurts.  I am nostalgic for the friendships, the cold lakes of the Adirondacks and the low cost of living.  I wonder if I could have been a better crusader for justice and made changes to the status quo, the way I intend to do here, now.

But enough wondering for today.  There are many battles yet to fight.  The war is still waging, just on a different battlefield.