I've been in any number of courtrooms as a reporter, watching the wheels of justice roll over everyone from drug dealers to Sheila Dixon, murderers to Martha Stewart.
A trial I sat through last month, though, was not the kind that usually draws media coverage, involving instead the non-spectacular sort of crime — a gun violation in this case — that make up the white noise of the justice system. In fact I was only there because I had to be, having been selected as a juror, rather than because it was particularly newsworthy.
But having been through that experience, I now wonder if the notorious cases that get all the press make us miss the real story of crime and punishment in the city.
Collectively, these easily ignored cases no doubt contribute to a particularly dubious distinction held by Baltimore: Of the 20 largest jail systems in the country, according to a report released last week by the Justice Policy Institute, the city locks up the highest percentage of its population.
What struck me reading the report was the same thing that struck me as I sat in the jury box — that is, how much easier it is to deal with the global than the individual, and the theoretical than the actual.
I kept hearing in my head Police Commissioner Fred Bealefeld's bad-guys-with-guns mantra — his indisputable belief that getting them off the street is the key to reducing crime in the city — and wondering how to know whether the defendant was one of them.
He was indeed a guy with a gun, according to police who testified they found him sleeping or passed out drunk in a parked car with a loaded, semiautomatic Colt resting on a half-empty bottle of vodka at his feet. The defendant admitted responsibility for the bottle and its missing contents — he'd bought it after picking up his paycheck — but said he knew nothing about a gun in the car, which he'd borrowed from a friend.
Transporting a gun in a car is a crime in Maryland, but the bigger crime was that he was a felon and thus prohibited from having a gun. (Fifteen years ago, he'd been found guilty of possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute.)
This seems much simpler in the retelling than it did playing out in court with various witnesses, exhibits and objections sustained and overruled, producing a less-than-clear narrative. Jurors of course get a highly edited version of any incident, and strict instructions to base their verdict only on what's presented in the courtroom. So even as we pondered certain mysteries, such as why the owner of the car or the person to whom the gun was registered weren't called to testify, the missing pieces could have no bearing on our decision.
As we deliberated, we had to return to the courtroom twice to be read the legal definition of possession, until we finally decided that it applied in this case and we found him guilty of being a guy with a gun. Later, the judge would sentence him to the mandatory five years for possessing a handgun after a felony conviction and three years for transporting a gun in a car.
I thought it was the right verdict, given how the law is written, but it was still excruciating to hold the fate of a total stranger in your hands. Maybe it would be easier if the guy had been caught actively committing a crime with a gun — say, robbing someone — rather than passed out in the vicinity of one. Maybe it would have been easier if he had come off as a kid with attitude who needed to be taught a lesson or two, instead of a 40-something guy with a job who thought after he'd served his prison term that he had fulfilled all the requirements of the sentence for the previous felony.
In other words, he came off as more a sad sack — drinking by himself in a car on a Friday night? — than a bad guy with a gun.
But who knows? Experts agree one of the biggest predictors of future criminal activity is previous criminal activity. Yet if we locked up everyone with a prior, well, that would require one enormous prison, not to mention the pretty bleak rejection of the notion of rehabilitation.
So the Justice Policy Institute report landed at a time when I was already turning similar issues over in my head. Its focus is more on why we have a jail population in which nine out of 10 haven't been convicted yet but are awaiting trial, and that mostly faces charges of a nonviolent nature, such as drug or property offenses or probation violations — and how it can be reduced while still keeping the public safe.
The recommendations make sense, such as diverting people with mental health and addiction problems to treatment rather than jail and screening those arrested for the low-risk ones who can be released pending trial.
Now if we can only figure out who is sick rather than criminal and who is low- rather than high-risk — which seems to me at least easier than figuring out who is a bad guy with a gun and who is just a guy with a gun.