Jessamy's One-Sided, Never-Ending Feud

Police Commissioner Fred Bealefeld puts a "Gregg Bernstein for State's Attorney" campaign sign in his yard. Incumbent State's Attorney Pat Jessamy calls the sign "divisive."

And the Sun provides this assessment: "The two top law enforcement officials--Jessamy is elected and Bealefeld is appointed--have feuded for years over policing strategies, quality of arrests and investigations, and whether prosecutors are aggressive enough in pursuing cases and jailing offenders."

Wrong, so wrong, and it's high time the Sun quit repeating it. Bealefeld hasn't feuded with anybody. He's been nothing but publicly respectful and privately as cooperative as it is possible to be with Jessamy over the years.

Jessamy feuded with Mayor Martin O'Malley. She expressed herself by attacking his three police commissioners prior to Bealefeld. Remember 2006, when Jessamy shouted at a raucous public meeting how she wasn't going to let the police "trample on the Constitution"?

But when O'Malley left for Annapolis, the incoming Dixon administration tried very hard to work with Jessamy. This included not only Bealefeld when he became police commissioner but also Sheryl Goldstein, director of the Mayor's Office on Criminal Justice.

When Goldstein was first hired, a third party suggested that Goldstein and I have lunch. I didn't know Goldstein, but I was asked to give her some perspective on Baltimore's criminal justice system.

I gave her my honest, gloomy assessment. Goldstein asked for the solution.

"We need a new state's attorney," I told her.

Goldstein didn't buy it. Off she went, full of energy, enthusiasm and optimism about her ability to work with Jessamy and effect change. The way I once felt.

But after three years, Goldstein's experience with Jessamy led her to the same conclusion I had reached: we need a new state's attorney. Goldstein's husband, Gregg Bernstein, an eminently qualified candidate, filed to run against Jessamy, and Goldstein took a leave of absence to help.

Jessamy's campaign boils down to this: Crime has gone down and she is the "only constant." And she will protect us citizens from the police. (That is not a misprint. She talks more about how she will stop the police than about how she will stop criminals.)

But her real slogan should be this: "A decade of attacking four police commissioners and the only constant has been me."

No good prosecutor rubber stamps police actions. The question is how do they handle their differences: behind the scenes, with mutual respect and a desire to keep improving? Or the Jessamy way, by publicly blaming the other?

Jessamy has posted articles on her website about cases dropped because of police failure to appear. (She doesn't mention how many cases she drops due to prosecutor failure to try.)

When an innocent teenager was kept in jail for months, Jessamy blamed the police by saying that they, and not she, have "charging rights." Except that she has charging rights and she charged the case.

She even trotted out the "lack of charging rights" excuse to absolve herself of any blame for unfounded rape reports...even though she had to know there was a problem and should have gone to Bealefeld about it.

She uses the term "legal insufficiency" to make people think that police aren't making good cases. I wrote an entire article about how Jessamy lies about "legally insufficient" cases. Here's just one example to illustrate: I once dropped a case because it was minor and documented my reason. But because the defendant was high-profile, and Jessamy wanted to embarrass the police, she told the media the case was "legally insufficient."

"Uncooperative witnesses" is another favorite Jessamy excuse, one that's especially tough to evaluate objectively. But it was exposed by the background of John Wagner, the man accused of stabbing Stephen Pitcairn to death. For Jessamy, a witness saying he doesn't want to come to court is a good reason to drop a robbery case without further effort.

At first the "uncooperative witness" excuse may not seem like police-blaming, but wait: Jessamy excused herself from not forcing the witness to court by blaming the police for not getting a taped statement from him. It's astonishing, since one has nothing to do with the other. And Jessamy didn't care that police had a VIDEOTAPE of the robbery, far better than any recorded witness statement.

These are just a few examples. Over and over, Jessamy has publicly blamed the police or planted media stories to make them look bad. When Jessamy did it to O'Malley's police commissioners, it was part of her feud with O'Malley.

But when she does it to Bealefeld now, it's to cover her own failures. Bealefeld, Goldstein, Mayor Sheila Dixon, and now Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake--none of them engaged Jessamy in a feud, and all kept their own disagreements private.

But now there's a chance to change things. Now there's an opportunity to bring positive leadership and new energy to this city's criminal justice system. Goldstein and her husband Gregg Bernstein have created that opportunity. And with the stakes so high, Bealefeld refuses to stand completely on the sidelines.

When Jessamy calls Bealefeld's campaign sign "divisive" she is reaping what she sowed,the consequences of her own blame game. But Bealefeld didn't put up that sign to fuel a feud. It's much more fundamental than that.

Because anyone with inside experience with Jessamy--including Goldstein and Bealefeld--know what I know: that however hard they try, Jessamy won't work with them. She won't change her prosecutorial practices, won't eliminate her excuses, won't stop grabbing credit without the work, and won't show leadership.

And if re-elected, she promises more of the same.

The Man Without Principles

When Baltimore city councilman Martin O’Malley first began making a name for himself in the late 1990s by criticizing the police department and advocating “zero tolerance” on crime, I asked a co-worker who knew him what she thought of him. Did he really care or was he just an ambitious young politician?

“Martin O’Malley doesn’t have a principled bone in his body,” came her reply.

So I was perplexed to learn later that she was driving voters to the polls to vote for him as mayor. “I like his positions on the issues,” she explained.

Her particular issue was gay rights. And after O’Malley was elected mayor, his housing commissioner, Paul Graziano, made news by referring to gays as “faggots” and making other hostile remarks before being arrested for disorderly conduct in a bar. O’Malley shrugged it off as the product of alcohol.

Had Graziano used the “n” word or made his remarks about blacks, he’d have been fired on the spot. But gays? Well, they didn’t carry the same political weight.

Pick up a scorpion who needs your help, expect to get stung.

O’Malley sure stung Baltimore when he praised State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy last week. As I pointed out recently, this is the man who publicly insulted her and later gave her a fat raise to entice others to run against her.

Funny thing is, perhaps she could have been a more effective prosecutor had he stretched out the hand of partnership when first elected mayor. If he had invited her into his criminal justice policy circle, sought her opinion, and worked with her on innovative ways to end the revolving door of justice for violent criminals.

Instead, he played the part of Lone Ranger come to rescue the system and gave her the back of his hand from the get-go. He tried to bully everyone else into doing things his way, too. He insulted not just Jessamy but the chief judge of the District Court by sending her a cartoon “stick figure” drawing of his plan to reduce caseloads (so she could understand it.) And according to Jessamy, he carried around cardboard cut-outs of Jessamy and U.S. Attorney Thomas DiBiaggo to mock them for not personally coming to meetings of the city criminal justice coordinating council. (Of course, he stopped going himself once he ramped up his gubernatorial efforts.)

Though he claimed success, O'Malley largely failed in his criminal justice agenda, but that’s a whole other story. His biggest failure was in making an enemy of the state’s attorney, who learned from him how to bully her partner, lay off blame, and grab credit.

And in making her an enemy, he helped create a state's attorney who is obsessed with her image and disconnected from the realities and practices of her office. She’s a poor manager who does not want to be told bad news and surrounds herself with yes-people. And as her profile rises with each successive election her accountability diminishes accordingly, to where it's now about zero. We will never, ever hear Jessamy say what Police Commissioner Fred Bealefeld said the other day, that he was sorry he did not protect Stephen Pitcairn and the community.

I’ve spent over two years writing about issues that O’Malley as mayor knew were true. The leniency of judges and parole commissioners towards violent offenders, the unhealthy relationship between Jessamy and the police, the failure of Jessamy to change the prosecutorial culture that contributes heavily to the revolving cycle of violence.

But like a scorpion, O’Malley has turned on the city. When asked to weigh in on her performance, STING! He tells the Sun what a great job she's done. Here are some of his blatant lies:

“We have done a lot of positive things together.”

“[W]e talk every day.”

“…the higher level of functioning especially with the War Room…”

“I believe her leadership and the performance of that office has been a part of why Baltimore has been able to achieve historic reductions these last three years.”

And when asked if he was endorsing Jessamy, O’Malley said “I anticipate…yeah, stay tuned.”

It’s the Twilight Zone. I guess his close race with Ehrlich for re-election sent him spinning off into the alternative reality of politics. O’Malley praises Jessamy so he can share credit as governor for crime reduction "these last three years." And he doesn’t want to offend pro-Jessamy leadership and voters in Baltimore whom he may need for his re-election.

So he insults the intelligence of Baltimoreans instead. He’s fooling no one about his opinion of and relationship with Jessamy. And his endorsement of her or vice versa won’t have anything to do with their respective elections. He of all people has forgotten that crime is a local issue.

But he revealed that my co-worker’s assessment, made a dozen years ago, was and remains absolutely accurate. His own political ambition means more to him than anything else, including the city that launched his political career and helped carry him to Annapolis. He would give us more Pat Jessamy if it means he still gets to be governor.

STING!

Shame on Who?

“No victim, no case.”

So pronounced the spokesperson for Baltimore State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy after the robbery and murder of Stephen Pitcairn, explaining why prior charges brought against suspect John Wagner just four months before the murder had been dropped.

I practically choked on my breakfast reading that quote in the Sun. Prosecutors did have a victim. He was just giving them a hard time. So what? Victims and witnesses do that all the time in Baltimore. But it isn’t up to them to decide whether they will testify. It’s up to prosecutors, who have to protect the safety of everyone, not just the victim.

And they had surveillance video footage to corroborate the robbery for which Wagner was arrested. In fact, they were able to catch Wagner later using surveillance cameras as he boarded a bus. All they needed to do was get the victim onto the stand, however resistant he might feel.

But it gets worse. What the Sun story omitted was that the prior robbery charges were dropped only 19 days after they were brought. Prosecutors abandoned the case at a preliminary hearing in the District Court, a hearing to determine whether there was probable cause to charge Wagner with a felony.

Had a judge found probable cause, the case would have gone down to the Circuit Court, and no doubt would still be pending. And Wagner would have been in jail on July 25 rather than murdering Pitcairn because Commissioner Karen Daniels and Judge Theodore Oshrine had held Wagner without bail after his arrest on the robbery.

It’s even likely that prosecutors themselves recommended no bail, since Wagner qualified for the violent repeat offender (War Room) program. But as I have said repeatedly for over two years now, Jessamy ignored the War Room program once offenders got past the bail review stage. The prosecutor handling the hearing failed to recognize or care that Wagner—whose long arrest record began with two 1993 robberies and who was now on probation for a serious domestic assault—warranted a little extra effort.

But it's gets worse still. Because the prosecutor didn't even need the victim at the preliminary hearing. He could have asked a police detective to testify, because hearsay is admissible at preliminary hearings. And if he knew he had a rogue judge that forces victims to testify, he could have sent the police to get the victim or sought a body attachment (a warrant for witnesses.) He also could have sent the case to Circuit Court prosecutors for a grand jury subpoena to the victim and an indictment. It's not as if they didn't know where the victim lived.

All the prosecutor did instead was go to court and ask meekly for a one-week postponement. He wanted to combine Wagner's case with his co-defendant's case and get the victim to court for both, promising to drop the cases if the victim didn't show up. He acquiesced weakly when Judge Yvonne Holt-Stone, showing as much indifference as the prosecutor, denied the postponement.

And Pat Jessamy stands by it.

Remember the kidnapping and robberies in the Guilford neighborhood, when the suspect was on probation for committing a robbery in the same area? In that prior case prosecutors did have a cooperative victim yet failed to ask for jail time. Jessamy’s explanation? The uncorroborated victim testimony was "minimal" evidence, something her office never bothered to tell the victim.

So Jessamy can’t prove cases with cooperating witnesses without corroboration. And she can’t prove cases with resistant witnesses despite corroboration from a video.

But then, she has dissed surveillance cameras since they first came out, using them to attack the police for wasting money. And no doubt this dropped robbery case is part of the statistics she uses to show that surveillance cameras don't lead to convictions.

Jessamy doesn’t even try. That’s all the public wants. Try.

But Jessamy prefers to accuse those who criticize her of “politicizing” a tragedy, specifically Gregg Bernstein, her challenger this election who called the murder “preventable.” She says he should be “ashamed” of himself.

But if he is right, and the murder really was preventable, who should be ashamed of whom?

Bernstein is right. The April robbery case absolutely should not have been dropped at the preliminary hearing stage. The culture of the city prosecutor’s office, the one that Jessamy has directed for 16 years, led directly to Wagner’s freedom to commit murder.

And so did the culture of a judiciary that refuses to take probation violations seriously. Judge John Howard failed to incarcerate Wagner at a hearing that took place only two days before Wagner was charged with the April robbery. It was Wagner’s second probation violation, this time for stealing a car while on Howard's probation. But Howard put him back on the street. It's truly unbelievable.

And par for the course. Judge Howard isn’t alone. I wrote about the problem in 2008, right about the time that Howard was putting Wagner on probation, in The Empty Threat of Probation.

It’s all shameful.  And if the voters don’t act, the shame will keep on coming.