When the question came during the debate — and how could it not, given the Canton locale — Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy started her answer on the defensive.
Without "blaming anyone else," an audience member asked, what happened in the Zach Sowers case?
Sowers was a newlywed in 2007 when teenagers attacked and robbed him — one boy beating him into a coma steps from his Patterson Park home. He died 10 months later, the case saddening and then infuriating the neighborhood.
Residents were upset when Jessamy's office cut plea deals with the attackers. And they were outraged when her spokeswoman later made insensitive remarks about the crime to a journalist, creating a backlash against Jessamy, who issued a statement at the time saying she would not discuss the heated matter. But at the August debate, in a church basement, Jessamy had to respond. She was fighting for her job.
"The individual who murdered Zach Sowers is serving 40 years in prison. He was convicted … even before Mr. Sowers died," she said plainly, and walked away from the microphone but returned to add more: "It was a horrific tragedy. That's all I can say."
She couldn't say what the audience wanted to hear — that she was wrong — because she didn't believe it. And Patricia Jessamy does not make statements just because they're expected, even during a campaign.
"She's just not cut out to be a politician. She's a lawyer," said Haven Kodeck, who has been a deputy state's attorney under Jessamy since 1995. But she knows "as an elected official that she has to go through the political process. She agonizes over it, I can tell you. This is not her."
During her 15 years in office, Jessamy has always been a somewhat reluctant public figure, though a frequent presence at community events. She says she prefers to devote her time to managing her office: battling for resources, developing crime prevention programs and fighting for tougher state laws.
Voters returned her to office three times after her 1995 appointment by the city's Circuit Court judges.
But this year, an opponent is giving Jessamy the toughest battle she's encountered.
In Tuesday's primary, Jessamy faces Gregg Bernstein, a high-profile defense attorney and fellow Democrat who seemed to come out of nowhere. He announced his candidacy late and quickly raised $289,000 in campaign funds to Jessamy's $82,000, according to finance records. (Sheryl A. Lansey, a 63-year-old attorney, is also on the primary ballot.)
And the Sowers case — along with the recent murder of Johns Hopkins researcher Stephen Pitcairn, who was allegedly killed by a man Jessamy's office previously declined to prosecute — have become touchstones for critics who say the prosecutor's office is in dire need of change.
They want tougher lawyers who drop fewer cases, pursue more violent criminals and win more convictions. And they say the state's attorney should be leading the way.
Jessamy is pushing back, taking a firm stance during debates and buying costly media ads. She made a personal loan of $100,000 to her own campaign last month in order to pay for the commercials. The one thing she won't do is back down from her point of view, supporters said, no matter how heavy the criticism or unpopular the choice.
"She does not, will not, and will never, bend to public sentiment," Kodeck said. "She does the right thing for the right reasons. She is a woman of principle."
The prosecutor and the police
Baltimore's violent crime rate has been dropping, but it's still one of the deadliest cities in the country, and Jessamy's office is scrutinized as a key component of criminal justice, along with police, judges and the corrections system.
She frequently points a finger at police, who counter that they are blamed unfairly when cases are lost or not brought to trial. Police say she should take more responsibility for the shortcomings of prosecutors.
While individual officers and lawyers often get along, there remains long-standing tension between the two agencies. It came to a head this year when Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III chose to back her challenger.
The agencies are so interconnected that it's hard to tell where the efforts of one succeed and the other fails.
Bernstein has been citing figures from a juror study to claim that Jessamy's office has the lowest conviction rate in the state. Jessamy and others consider the data flawed; a small sample of cases in a handful of areas was examined.
Bernstein and his supporters also say Jessamy drops many cases too quickly. A recent review by The Baltimore Sun of city data shows that prosecutors abandoned nearly 3 in 10 of the more serious, nonfatal gun cases for unidentified reasons.
The analysis also shows that the prosecutor's office won convictions in fewer than half of those nonfatal gun cases that were resolved last year.
An independent study of a program called the War Room, created to track major offenders and their court cases from start to finish, showed that those defendants were convicted 35 percent of the time. Jessamy has said the study was faulty.
"Her record has been one disaster after another, and it's plain to see," said prominent attorney and former city judge William H. "Billy" Murphy Jr., who announced his support of Bernstein on Saturday. "The statistics on her office have been accurately quoted, and they're awful. It's time for a change."
Jessamy refuses to consider conviction rates as she evaluates her own performance, or even track numbers to make such a calculation. She says the rate is not an objective measure, because of the factors that go into individual decisions. She does not want to encourage quotas, she says.
Anton J.S. Keating, a defense attorney and former prosecutor who ran against Jessamy in 2002, says that numbers aside, it's simply time for a fresh vision in the office.
Jessamy has "had it for a long period of time, and people, I think, have lost confidence in her," he said. She can no longer "inspire the troops."
Proud of her programs
Sitting at her kitchen table during a recent interview, Jessamy looked back over her 15 years in office with pride and outlined her hopes for the future.
She, and a long list of supporters, including former congressman and NAACP head Kweisi Mfume, Rep. Elijah Cummings and Baltimore City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young, say her work is not done.
Her achievements over the years include a technology overhaul that brought the office in line with other regions, though it has since fallen behind again. The e-mail system is frequently clogged, few staff members have voicemail, and the assistant prosecutors pay for their own BlackBerrys if they carry them. The resources for those things have gone elsewhere, Jessamy said.
She spearheaded a program to prosecute gun cases in 1994, which was later folded into today's Project Exile partnership between local law enforcement and the U.S. attorney's office.
And, in 1997, she won a federal grant to create a firearms unit in her office focused on nonfatal shootings and repeat handgun offenders. So far, the unit has obtained more than 1,800 mandatory five-year, no-parole sentences against felons found with guns, she said.
A partnership with federal prosecutors has also led to roughly 170 federal and 70 state indictments in the past four years.
She fought to get salary parity for her staff compared with other Maryland jurisdictions, and now lists as a top goal the filling of vacant positions to restore the office to full strength.
The city has "turbulent waters," she said. "You don't want a captain with no experience piloting a ship during turbulent waters. You need somebody who knows what they're doing."
A student of civil rights
Patricia Coats Jessamy was born July 26, 1948, in western Mississippi's cotton country, not far from the Arkansas border. She was the seventh of eight children, a talkative child who developed a sweet, Southern drawl before her first birthday.
On their 120-acre family farm, the Coatses grew soybeans and cotton, which collected in tufts along the roadways dividing the land.
When she reached school age, Jessamy was sent to her grandparents a few miles away in Hollandale, where the principal at the all-black school kept order with a strap and a stern look in the hallways.
By high school, Jessamy was breaking senseless rules to further civil rights. She purposely sat in areas cordoned off for whites at local businesses, and she testified in federal court in a desegregation lawsuit filed by her parents and others in their children's names. She was 16.
The experience set her on a path toward law.
Jessamy attended Jackson State University, where she was a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority and was named "Campus Sweetheart." She was a senior there in 1970, when police opened fire during a campus protest, striking a dozen black students, and killing two young people, including a teenage passer-by.
By then, she had an infant daughter named Erika. Jessamy had become pregnant in college, going against her Baptist upbringing. She chose not to marry the child's father.
Her family pitched in to help care for the girl while Jessamy finished college and then went on to law school, graduating from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1974.
In her last year there, she met Howard Jessamy at a church service. The young hospital administrator soon began courting her, and they were married in 1977.
"She was smart, she was attractive and she was a good cook," said Howard Jessamy, who at 62 is the same age as his wife.
Jessamy pays close attention to fairness and equity, her husband said, concerns that developed from her experiences as a black woman growing up in the racially turbulent 1950s, '60s and '70s.
In the mid-1970s, as a new lawyer working for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Jessamy filed a lawsuit against Grenada, Miss., for violating the Voting Rights Act by annexing white neighborhoods and not black ones. The lawsuit forced the city to redistrict and better represent African-Americans.
She said she was the only woman in the county practicing law at the time, and one of only two black women in private practice in the state.
Her young family moved several times as Howard Jessamy's job opportunities grew, first to Flint, Mich., where Jessamy worked as a county prosecutor, then Kansas City, Mo., where she was a staff attorney at an appeals office within the Social Security Administration.
Her husband became president of Baltimore's former Provident Hospital in 1983, moving the family for the last time to Maryland and into their Tudor-style Original Northwood home, which they have now filled with lithographs by black artists.
"I've had occasion to see and experience all different kinds of people and things and that helps me to put things into perspective," Jessamy said. "It is a good gauge of how things operate and how the world functions."
In Baltimore
She joined the Baltimore state's attorney's office as a prosecutor in the economic crimes unit in 1985 under State's Attorney Kurt L. Schmoke and became a division chief shortly thereafter. She earned a reputation as a methodical trial attorney able to explain complicated concepts to jurors with ease.
When Schmoke became mayor in 1987, Stuart O. Simms was appointed state's attorney position, and he named Jessamy one of his two deputies.
Simms, now in private practice in Baltimore, said he chose Jessamy because he wanted the position filled by someone who "cut across issues of political process and budget." She was known as a "real blood and guts prosecutor" with experience in several states.
She is "a very forceful lawyer and prosecutor, who has a tremendous respect for the criminal justice system and has been a tremendous public servant," said Simms, adding that he unequivocally supports her bid for another term.
In 1995, she was appointed to the state's attorney's job — over Gov. Martin O'Malley, then a young city councilman — when Simms resigned to become secretary of the state's Department of Juvenile Justice. She won the position three more times through city elections over the next 15 years, and has had a rocky relationship with O'Malley for much of the time since.
Jessamy said that O'Malley was good to her office despite their differences, however, and the governor recently said that the relationship between her office and the state is good.
"He funded our offices better than any mayor we've ever had," she said, adding that some discord among agencies is normal. "You shouldn't always agree. … Even with your family you have disagreements."
Jessamy turns particularly assertive when resources or legislation are at issue, supporters say.
She recently threatened legal action against the mayor and City Council over funding for her office. And she makes frequent trips to the General Assembly to ask for tougher laws and enhanced penalties for crimes such as witness intimidation and certain gang-related offenses.
She's also creative, fans said, working with the community to create crime prevention programs that should make her job easier in the long run.
"That's what everyone kind of likes about her. She just keeps trying different approaches," said Larry Gibson, a former political strategist who teaches election law at the University of Maryland School of Law.
She recently joined with faith-based leaders to create a "violence to virtue" program to shape children into productive people through city churches.
Her detractors say she is too focused on such prevention programs, however, and not enough on prosecuting violent criminals.
It's a balancing act, said William R. Buie III, a criminal defense attorney who contributed to Jessamy's campaign.
Prevention is an "important part of the discussion," he said, as is rehabilitation. "Realistically with the resources that the criminal justice system has … you have to try to rehabilitate some of the offenders."
For Jessamy, that's the only way of looking at law enforcement without turning the clock back. She refers to herself as a straightforward, honest visionary. And she approaches her campaign in the same way she does court cases.
"Winning the right way," she said, "is the only way."
Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton contributed to this article.
Patricia C. Jessamy
Age: 62
Resides: Original Northwood
Party affiliation: Democrat
Education: Jackson State University, B.A., 1970; University of Mississippi School of Law, 1974
Experience: Attorney in Mississippi, Missouri and Michigan, 1974-1983; Baltimore Assistant State's Attorney 1985-1987; Baltimore Deputy State's Attorney 1987-1995; Baltimore State's Attorney, 1995 to today.