Wednesday, August 12, 2009

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Unidentified 20-year-old, N. Lakewood and East Oliver, a few blocks from the Honey Hole & a half-mile from the BBQ shoot-up weekeend before last. No arrests...

Lamont Davis' lawyer says closed-circuit camera footage exonerates his client in the shooting of Raven Wyatt.

Meanwhile, in Cherry Hill, 59-year-old Shirley Foulks' living-room evening repose was disturbed by a stray bullet that came through her front window and struck her in the shoulder.

Baltimoriest subhead ever: "Shawn Michael Green pleads not guilty to new charges; his mother appeals her sentence"

The unfortunately-named Marlow Humbert was cleared by DNA in a Charles Village rape case. (How was the victim able to ID a masked attacker in a lineup in the first place?)

7 comments:

Cham said...

Marlow Humbert was probably somewhere else minding his own business during this alleged rape. Not only has this man been traumatized by being falsely accused and dragged through the preparation for a criminal trial, but now his name is all over the Internet as the guy who was charged with a rape. How do you ID a masked attacker in a line-up? Do you have him put on a mask and say, um, yeah, that's the guy?

I guess we can be thankful that Mr. Humbert didn't spend any time in prison and we didn't have to pay for his incarceration. But if the police have a rape kit don't you think there should be a positive DNA match-ups before charges are drawn up and fingers are pointed????

Idiots.

Cham said...

The Baltimore Sun article discussing the police video camera that caught the murder of Raven Wyatt said this of the GPS device:

Police have said that Davis, who had been arrested 15 times as a juvenile, was wearing a juvenile GPS monitoring device on his ankle that police cut off when he was arrested. The device had apparently not been tracking his whereabouts during the time of the shooting because of a technological quirk.

Ah, we pay millions of dollars for GPS tracking and it doesn't work due to a "technological quirk". It's official, I'm jumping into the GPS tracking business. I am going to make little black ankle bracelets with plastic cases and rent them to Department of Juvenile Justice for $10/day. Since nobody is going to confirm or deny whether these things actually function there is no time like the present to earn an extra payday. Now how many monitoring devices the Department need? I've got my sewing machine ready.

BTW, Lamont's defense attorney claims that Lamont was wearing white socks on the camera and therefore wasn't wearing the GPS device. My friend was on home monitoring and she disguised her device with thick white socks. Does this guy think we all fell off the turnip truck yesterday?

ppatin said...

"But if the police have a rape kit don't you think there should be a positive DNA match-ups before charges are drawn up and fingers are pointed????"

I was thinking the same thing. Why did they wait so long to do a DNA test, they should've been able to clear this guy within a few weeks of the rape.

buzoncrime said...

Obviously, there's an inherent inconsistency in the sloppy reporting (non-reporting) on JZ. We actually don't know enough information to find out exactly what the probable cause was in charging Mr. Humbert. Too bad the Sun doesn't have enough reporters to ferret this out.

I'm not sure about the specifics in this case, but the lack of funding for DNA processing for rape kits is a national scandal across the country. DNA is collected from crime scenes and sits and sits and sits. Mostly because there isn't the money or political will to spend the money on sufficient labs or technicians to process the DNA and compare it to offenders already on file. {Anybody want a fund-raiser to get money for the DNA testing labs or to hire more lab technicians? Ooops, we only raise money for critically ill dogs, and pretty horses!}

I suspect the Baltimore Police Sex Offense Unit is overwhelmed with rape reports, and the lab is certainly overwhelmed, as is evidence control. My guess also is that nobody checked on the evidence until, oh-oh, jeez, the case is next week--again because of the staffing and overwhelmed investigative staff. [Oh, and everybody has to take their turn working festivals, the Inner Harbor, the Belvedere/Mt. Vernon area, and Madison East End, too.]

The last I checked there are some good detectives and supervisors in the Sex Offense Unit; and some bad, lazy, and politically-connected ones as well. Last year, a woman lieutenant who used to work for me was given supervision of the unit; don't know if she is still there, but she was very good.

Cham---can I get in on your company too? I couldn't agree with you more in your sarcasm here. Nobody seems to know what's going on with this kid. Er, thug. I especially enjoyed DJS saying something like: as soon as we found out there was no signal, we went out looking for him. Oh, really? Where did you look? Did you call his girlfriend's house? Did you give up when you didn't find him? What would you have done if you did find him? Take him to baby booking and say don't do that again, and put another device on him?

But seriously, this lack of attention to rape crime should be a big feminist issue. Domestic violence, thankfully, has gotten a lot of attention, though.

Remember, the policy priority of the city is to reduce the murders and shootings.

ppatin said...

Buz:

I understand that there's a huge backlog with DNA testing, but I'm surprised the State's Attorney's Office didn't pony up some of their own funds or light a fire under the crime lab for this case. They were pretty close to going to trial, and I bet the man-hours they wasted preparing for the trial ended up costing a lot more than a DNA test. As you said though, there's certainly more to this case but there are too few journalists to follow up. *Sigh*

buzoncrime said...

PP---My hunch is that it was the State's Attorney assigned to the case that discovered, while reviewing the file, that the DNA report was missing; then he inquired; then they "found" it. Who knows where it was or how long it had been sitting somewhere.

Of course, it's possible that the analysis just hadn't been done until the ASA made a beef. We don't know enuf facts.

Of course, if you wanna be conspiracy-minded, it's possible that they thought Mr. Humbert was bad, and just wanted to keep as our guest on Fallsway this long so he could chill, and not do other bad things.

buzoncrime said...

Even if you not count the rape charges just thrown out, Mr. Humbert has a nice little record of a bunch of nasty things. So, he may have been somewhere minding his own business, perhaps, but I am not going to invite him over for brunch.