A former Baltimore City police officer, Stanley Cornell Reaves, was killed in the line of duty in Norfolk, VA.
Warning, depressing, disheartening tale: charges were dropped against a guy who shot murder witness Benjamin H. Paige.
Dontae Nicholas, 24, is being held without bail for first-degree murder in the death of Montrell Williams, 21.
At a hearing Friday, Timothy Hawkins, 33, pled guilty to second-degree murder. Judge Wanda K. Heard sentenced him to 22 years in prison, consecutive to a 45 year term Hawkins is currently serving. On May 11, 2003 Hawkins stabbed to death Latonia Shuler, 35, of the 400 block of South Augusta Avenue. Police discovered her body at the unit block alley, South Culver Street. A Baltimore City jury convicted Hawkins of second-degree murder on January 19, 2005 for the September 5, 2003 stabbing death of Durri Emmannuel, 27, of the 3900 block of Chatham Road. Police discovered her body in the parking lot of Windsor Mill Elementary School.
The attempted murder trial of Johnnie Hawkins started last week.
Is there a Baltimore drug connection to the shooting death of Jam Master Jay? This guy says yes, his relatives say no.
A Glen Burnie teenager shot a 17-year-old girl in the thigh at a football game.
In Annapolis, a 17-year-old drew a gun on his friends, and someone robbed Bubba the Clown.
Troy Gross, left, is the third escapee this week. How did the robbery suspect get out of Central Booking? Says a Corrections Dept. spokesman, he "apparently walked out of the facility." I guess as opposed to, say, using a rocket-propelled jet-pack.Ralph Marion Debaufre Jr. was arrested for the attempted abduction of a woman in Columbia.
Don't smoke pot in Hagerstown-- they'll make you do community service.
I was way off with the war figures. "Only" 29 Marylanders have been killed in Iraq. While we're counting, 2011 Americans have died (higher than Vietnam* three years in) and between 26,000 and 30,000 Iraqi civillians.
*Vietnam's final U.S. casualties totalled 58,209.
12 comments:
I'd love to see a summary of the drug dispositions for a month in Baltimore City.
In fairness, U.S. involvement in Vietnam for the first years was considerably smaller than it was for the first few years in Iraq.
Drug convictions are a bit... nonlinear. Most straightforward simple CDS possession charges are handled in District Court, Wabash Avenue. Cases are sort of grouped by administrative (ie. Police) district, so that most cases in, say, NW will be heard the same day of the week. You will find that judges are usually pretty lenient, sometimes because the defendant will later face a violation-of-parole/probation hearing as a result of the conviction and the VOP is commonly the operative penalty.
If the charges extend to intent to distribute, then the defense counsel may move to transfer to Circuit Court at the Old Post Office downtown.
Be prepared for a lot of cases, though, particularly if you include cases which are null-prossed. The other salient question will be, how many CDS arrests went uncharged by the State's Attorney because they weren't willing to work a slightly weak case?
If anyone's up for it, a really efficacious blog would record for each judge, his/her case count by type, maximum penalty for each count, percent of penalty ordered by the judge for each count, percentage of cases dismissed, percentage null-prossed, and percentage transferred to another court. You might also record probations and PBJ totals per Judge. Then at year-end, you can compare performance records across judges and voters may evaluate them election time.
Forgot to explain, transfers to Circuit are because the defendant facing a certain level of penalty is entitled to jury trial, if he so chooses. Obviously, you cannot hold a judge accountable for the acts of the jury, but as a matter of statistics, those jury trials must be recognized as a subset of his/her caseload, although I wouldn't ordinarily expect a bias in terms of circuit court outcomes by assigning judge.
FYI, the guy charged with shooting death of Nae Chun Pak was previously sent to prison for murder and was released about a year ago. Clearly cold-blooded and premeditated, this incident demonstrates that he is one of those who never should have been let out.
Galt, you should start a judge blog!
Yes, the Pak killing is so, so sad. I mean, they're all sad, but when kids are left behind (or like Jamal St. Clair, a pregnant girlfriend) it really gets to me. Talking to Kim made me stop and think-- 300 muders a year, there are literally thousands of citizens with a murdered family member.
When I was a kid in the suburbs, sooner or later each of the kids would disappear for a few days and show up with an arm or leg cast to show for some unfortunate but entirely 'normal' incident.
Here, now, I routinely have the same experience as customers and friends in my rather more hardcore Baltimore neighborhood wistfully inform me that some close relative was either a) killed or b) imprisoned for murder with about the same sense of normalcy.
The strangest feature is that while my suburban counterparts would ascribe a greater emotional urgency to the 'wronged' party, most of these neighbors tend to view the murder in more or less the same terms as the imprisonment. I think that's indicative of a general perception that justice is irrelevent here.
I can't say I disagree. After a local hood broke into my house last month, I apprehended him and filed charges resulting in his ban from my neighborhood for 3 years due to my testimony. He's been in continuous violation of it from the very next morning and just (an hour ago) told an officer that I was going to die. The shift sargeant tells me he doesn't have enough manpower to babysit people like him. The Commissioner tells me otherwise, but the Commissioner isn't here. I wonder why people don't testify. I wonder.
Fear of retaliation and fear of the truth. The only known witness to my brother's murder is his girlfriend, who has in the past several months given several accounts of what happened. I know that for the neighborhood we are in, even at 230am there are many people outside who saw/know something. But it's like this in lots of neighborhoods.
What I don't understand is that how could you possibly feel safer sitting idly by waiting on the murderers and assaulters and rapists to do the same to you. Do people really think it's safer to live in fear. Maybe it's just me , I have the attitude that when someone has something bad or wrong happen to them it needs to be made right. There have been unfortunate events of witnesses being harmed or even murdered, but I think that if I saw someone being raped assaulted or even murdered my conscience would make me speak up because I would know that if I didn't there was nothing to keep me from being that person's next victim.
It's all about self-interest. A couple of months ago, I was robbed and stabbed just outside my store by a small gang of punks hanging on the sidewalk in front of a carryout as I passed by them. After I slowed the bloodflow, I grabbed a crowbar from inside my place and went looking for the hoods, who had run off by then.
A guy came out of the carryout and told me that he felt bad about not interceding since I was outnumbered, but explained that he was on probation and couldn't risk being in an altercation, for fear of violation.
There's a Baltimore A and a Baltimore B. Even doing the right thing isn't simple in Baltimore B.
As for police, whozat? When they finally responded to my 911 call, it was 45 minutes later and their response was quite academic and irrelevent by that time. Explanation: "We're understaffed."
O'Malley's office promotes:
Baltimore Alive.
Baltimore Believe.
the reality:
Baltimore A: Live.
Baltimore B: Leave.
Ah, tales of dismissive police take me back to when I first moved to the city, and the first time my car got broken into, the look on the cop's face when I said, "aren't you going to fingerprint?" It was something like the chortle I got from the sanitation department when I called to ask them to come remove a dead rat.
The police here in this neighborhood have priorities mixed up. My husband was locked up for littering... he dropped a cup{he has a cyst in his wrist and 4 fingers from an accident} so sometimes his grip will slip without warning. Before we could pick the cup up, officer J.Smith of northern district whips across rush hour traffic on 25th st and says "put your hAnds behind your back" Not that littering isn't bad, but risk numerous accidents after you passed 2 corners known for drug trafficking to stop littering. Not only that he refused to tell me what the charge was, and when I called a Sgt he told me they don't have to tell you what your being charged with. I have to say that in this neighborhood the police are not much help as they usually park on 26th st and hide the duration of their shifts.
dontae nichols u need to die for shootng montrell williams i hope brun in hell
Post a Comment