Panel to vote on Baltimore court reform
plan this week
Major differences remain among group's members
__________________________________________________
By Caitlin Francke
Sun Staff
After weeks of wrangling between the mayor and the judiciary over
reform of Baltimore's courts, a plan to revamp the justice system may
emerge this week.
A group studying the issue hopes to meet Mayor Martin O'Malley's
goal of handling many minor cases within 24 hours of arrest. If the
plan being developed by the city's Criminal Justice Coordinating
Council gains the consensus of involved parties, from judges to jail
officers, at a meeting Wednesday, it would be a major breakthrough
in a turbulent battle over the future of the city courts.
At the end of last week, however, major differences remained about
how the justice system could be improved, despite the mayor's
assertion that it was stick-figure simple.
While O'Malley believes that speedier justice for minor cases will
allow more time to prosecute violent criminals, judges remain
concerned about a proposal that could leave them less than two
minutes on average to adjudicate each case in a courtroom at the jail.
Also, the debate involves more parties than O'Malley and the judges.
"I just want to move beyond any simplistic notion that this is not a
complicated problem. The impression that this is something that one
person can achieve and one person is obstructing is not the case,"
said Del. Howard P. Rawlings, a Baltimore Democrat and O'Malley
supporter who heads a powerful budget committee. "This doesn't
succeed by one person's energy. This succeeds by all of the
stakeholders agreeing to move this project forward."
O'Malley and state judges, principally Chief Judge of the District
Court Martha F. Rasin, have been locked in a vitriolic debate for
weeks about O'Malley's desire to turn the courtroom at the Central
Booking and Intake Center into a clearinghouse for minor cases.
The debate has consumed the General Assembly, City Hall and the
court system. Legislators, tired of the bickering and eager for a
resolution, last week directed the matter to the coordinating council,
the committee steering reform of the city's courts.
Judges and other officials formed the council last year after murder
and armed robbery suspects were set free because their trials didn't
occur within 180 days, as the law requires. The council consists of
members of all city justice agencies, from prosecutors to probation
agents. It will meet Wednesday in Courthouse East on Calvert
Street.
John H. Lewin Jr., chairman of the council, said the group has been
working for a year on how to better use the courtroom in the jail,
currently used part-time. Lewin said the council plan will aim to meet
O'Malley's goal of ridding the system of many cases within 24 hours
of arrest. Exactly how many remains unclear, he said.
O'Malley, who made justice issues the cornerstone of his mayoral
campaign last year, wants half of the approximately 250 daily arrests
in the city to be adjudicated within 24 hours. The former prosecutor
and criminal defense attorney says minor cases clog the justice
system, depriving the courts and prosecutors of vital time to handle
violent offenders.
His theory is based on the fact that the majority of minor cases are
eventually dropped but consume man-hours and court time in the
process.
If cases were handled more rapidly, the mayor says, the city would
save millions of dollars in overtime paid to police who go to court
repeatedly to testify, only to see many of the cases dropped.
"If [case dispositions] happened up front, it would create a lot more
room in our courtrooms for prosecutors to seek minimum mandatory
sentences on gun cases," O'Malley said. "And it will get us much
further down the road to those 900 serious prosecutions of violent
gun offenders that are going make this city a safer place and save a
heck of a lot of lives."
Under his plan, all people arrested would first go to the courtroom,
where many would be offered a plea bargain. If they chose to accept
it, they could be sentenced or released that day. If not, they would
await trial.
But judges and other members of city justice agencies, principally
those who run the city jail, say such an approach poses serious
problems.
Moving that many inmates to and from the courtroom would be "a
nightmare," one jail official said.
Public safety officials told state legislators last week that it would
cost
the state a minimum of $1.3 million a year for 34 extra officers and
additional funds to revamp the courtroom area to accommodate the
mayor's plan.
The 20-by-40-foot courtroom in the jail can seat about 25 inmates at
a time and is located in a nonsecure area -- at the other end of the
jail from where the inmates are housed.
A holding cell would have to be constructed where inmate visits now
take place, with a door leading to the courtroom built into what is
now a concrete wall.
The jail's elevators can hold about 15 inmates at a time. That means
jail officers would have to constantly transport inmates throughout the
jail in small groups, through a series of locked security doors.
They foresee bringing the inmates in two main shifts -- 125
defendants for the morning docket and 125 for the afternoon.
If a judge works only eight hours a day, each case would have to be
handled in about two minutes.
Jail officials say it would be next to impossible to handle all those
cases without building another courtroom and having another judge
preside there. If not, defendants would likely wait two days -- not 24
hours -- to see a judge.
In addition, there would be little or no public access to the
courtroom. People would have to watch the proceedings on
television from one of 48 plastic seats at the jail's entrance.
Rasin, who oversees the judges who would preside in the jail, has
additional concerns. She worries that rushing cases through the
system might trample constitutional rights.
Some might feel coerced to plead guilty just so they can get out, she
said.
"When you're a judge, you are seeing the person in front of you who
is going to have a criminal record who may not have even sobered
up yet," Rasin said.
Though she is willing to place a judge at the jail five days a week,
Rasin indicated she first wants to ensure that the plan is a sound one.
She is worried that the number of cases could lead to "backlog and
overcrowding in the courts like this city has never seen."
Under state law, defendants must see a judicial officer within 24
hours.
"I do not want to participate in a plan that has very little hope of
achieving its goal or which violates the rights of citizens," Rasin said.
Despite such concerns by Rasin and jail officials, O'Malley claimed
victory in the court reform war Wednesday.
When legislators released $9 million they had withheld for a year
from city justice agencies to force change in the court system, the
mayor announced that he had succeeded in getting Rasin to agree to
staff the courtroom five days a week.
"This is commendable and significant progress toward creating a
higher standard of justice in Baltimore City," O'Malley said in a news
release.
But Rasin saw it differently. She said she had always been willing to
place a judge in the jail five days a week but had not yet agreed to
specifics.
Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals Robert M. Bell informed
Rawlings of Rasin's position on Thursday: "The only specific
agreement that the judiciary has made was to accept legislative
budget language which would take the mayor's plan to the interested
parties."
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Originally published on Mar 5 2000