The courtroom is the busiest felony court in Baltimore. One judge calls it "organized bedlam."
Defendants shuffle forward in groups, their hands cuffed behind their backs and their leg shackles clinking. Mothers and girlfriends -- sometimes cradling crying babies -- await a glimpse of loved ones. And lawyers haggle over prospective pleas.
Here, amid a persistent din, up to 60 defendants a day appear before Judge Kenneth Lavon Johnson, who presides over felony arraignment court -- Part 17 of Baltimore Circuit Court.
Everyone charged with a major crime in Baltimore comes here to enter a plea. And, with drug cases flooding the court system, the felony arraignment process has become a fast-forward assembly line producing plea bargains: a reduced charge, often coupled with a suspended sentence, in exchange for a guilty plea.
On a typical day in court, an assistant public defender calls out the name of a defendant he has never met. Moments later, the defendant is being represented by that same lawyer.
One morning last month, a group of eight defendants was escorted in. "How many of you have an attorney?" asked a public defender. No one did. "I'll be your attorney."
Public defenders admit that most times their knowledge of a case is limited to what's in the police reports. Occasionally, a law clerk or investigator has met with the client.
The handcuffs come off and the plea offer is made. The defendant thinks it over a few minutes. Discussion is rare.
In Johnson's courtroom, the lure is the suspended sentence with probation, defense lawyers and prosecutors say. The defendants get to go home after spending months in jail. Usually the deal is irresistible.
Many times the defendants won't listen to their lawyers. "They lose all their rational powers," a defense lawyer says. "The idea of getting out is so attractive it impairs their judgment."
Most defendants do not know what they're getting into. Their ignorance is brought out by the questions they ask.
The case of 19-year-old James Thomas, of North Mount Street, is typical. He was arrested while possessing 40 Zip-lock bags of crack cocaine and a bag of marijuana. Thomas, charged with marijuana possession and possession of cocaine with intent to distribute, faced a maximum 21-year prison term if convicted at trial.
An assistant public defender relays an offer: 15 years suspended and five years' probation. And Johnson, as he does with most school dropouts, orders Thomas to get his GED as a condition of probation. There's no discussion between the lawyer and his client. "I'll take it," Thomas says quickly.
"I'm going home!" Thomas, wearing faded jeans and high-top sneakers with the laces untied, says to someone seated in court. But, midway through the plea, Thomas inquires about what he's bargaining for. "Your honor," he says, "if I get caught again will I be doing 15 years suspended or five years' probation?"
The courtroom erupts in laughter.
"I know how many [years] I'm going to give you," the judge replies amid more laughter. "Fifteen years. It's not what might happen. It's what will happen."
"You're only 19 years old and if you can't stop drug dealing you're going to end in jail or dead," says Johnson, staring down at the short defendant.
Before such deals are closed, Johnson, elected to the bench in 1982, gives his usual warning: "These are very good bargains I'm giving you today. You're dealin' with Judge Johnson, who wants to help you very bad. If you're good, it's a good deal. If you're not, it's a bad deal and I'm going to put you in jail long enough to do society some good. You can back out now."
Thomas does not.
"Don't you come back now," the judge says. "You hear?"
One prosecutor, commenting on the practice of giving long, suspended sentences, likens it to buying trouble on credit.
Defense lawyers and prosecutors say Johnson takes an active role in plea negotiations. Often he will suggest a longer sentence than prosecutors are asking, but within the sentencing guidelines, and suspend all of it.
A report last December by the city bar association says 40 percent of Baltimore's probationers violate probation within the first year, mainly because of drug-related offenses. Observers say most of Johnson's probationers have not started to reappear in court yet.
"If it were my son or my daughter I'd say don't take the goddamn plea," says a veteran of the public defender's felony trial unit. "But most of the time you're dealing with someone in jail for 60 days, who has no money for bail, who hasn't seen their family. What would you do?"
Is that justice?
"No!" he says. "Is it expeditious? Yes. Is it legally proper and correct? I'm not so sure. Wait. I better not say that."
About 90 percent of the men and women who appear before Johnson are drug defendants, accused mostly of street-level distribution, according to Circuit Court officials.
Prosecutors and public defenders say that enormous caseloads and shrinking resources force them to step up their deal-making to dispose of cases.
Greater numbers of cases are being plea-bargained at arraignment time, statistics show. And the deal-making goes on in other courtrooms, too; bargains are approved by other judges when cases come up for trial.
Johnson is in a position to approve the most plea bargains because he oversees arraignment court. And he is far more comfortable with bargaining than was his predecessor in that court, Judge Edward J. Angeletti. Johnson says a court system besieged with drug defendants cannot afford to try most of its cases. Moreover, he is a strong believer in giving the offender a chance to shape up outside of prison.
But in Johnson's courtroom, defendants must make momentous decisions in a hurry, and critics say this fast-forwarding of justice raises troubling questions.
"It's a machine that cranks out cases," a longtime city judge says of arraignment court. "It's putting off for tomorrow what should be done today," says the judge, who did not want to be identified.
The Circuit Court's administrative judge, Joseph H. H. Kaplan, defends Johnson's handling of arraignments but concedes that the court seems chaotic.
"I wouldn't say it's an assembly line," Kaplan says. "An assembly line is too organized. But it gets done well despite the appearance of total disorder. In all of that milling about, they're working out the problems.
"It looks like bedlam," he adds, "but it really isn't. It's organized bedlam."
In this "organized bedlam," wholesale plea bargaining goes on. In February, for instance, Johnson generated an unusually high number of guilty pleas. That month, 215 -- or 49 percent -- of the 433 arraignments resulted in guilty pleas, according to figures released by the court.
Johnson got the felony arraignment assignment last November, replacing Angeletti, who was juggling too many responsibilities, according to Kaplan. Angeletti also supervised the felony docket and handled "move court," where postponement requests are reviewed.
Angeletti had come under fire from the defense bar and even some prosecutors because he wasn't taking enough guilty pleas. The rate for such pleas had plummeted to 4.7 percent the month before the switch.
Historically, up to 20 percent of the felony cases have been resolved by guilty pleas in arraignment court, according to court administrators.
Johnson, a nine-year veteran of the Circuit Court bench, has plea-bargained close to 40 percent of his arraignments since last fall, statistics show.
But some critics say that arraignment time is too early in the process to plead out that many cases.
Steven H. Goldblatt, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, says that plea bargaining, if used properly, is a legitimate and time-honored way to dispose of many cases efficiently.
But, he adds, there are problems with wholesale plea bargaining by overworked public defenders at arraignment time and the use of inducements such as suspended sentences to encourage guilty pleas.
"It's troublesome when you're lining defendants up seven deep and in a few minutes they have to make a decision," says Goldblatt, a former prosecutor in Philadelphia. "What you're saying to somebody is, if you plead guilty you can go home today. If you don't plead guilty you're going to sit in jail and wait for trial. That's a very powerful inducement.
"You wind up with some people pleading guilty not because they're really admitting their guilt but because it's the best of very bad alternatives," he says. "And when you have defendants meeting their lawyer for the first time . . . it raises some very serious questions about effective assistance of counsel."
Nationwide, plea bargaining has become a way of life. Nine out of 10 felony convictions are the result of guilty pleas. Last year in Baltimore Circuit Court, a total of 829 trials -- jury trials and ones held before a judge only -- were conducted in felony and misdemeanor cases. By comparison, 7,141 cases were decided by guilty pleas, according to court administrators.
"If one out of a thousand defendants falls through the cracks, sure that's a real possibility," says Kaplan, the administrative judge. "If you ask me if any large number are falling through the cracks, that's not a possibility. The people that are pleading guilty are pleading guilty because they're guilty. There aren't any babes in the woods in our shop."
Johnson, who grew up on a farm in southern Mississippi and once headed the Justice Department's civil rights division in Georgia, says plea bargaining is necessary because of the huge volume of cases and the expense of going to trial. The cost to the state of conducting a trial can reach $8,000 a day, he says.
Is there too much plea bargaining?
"We have to live with it under the circumstances," Johnson says. "It's the only way to proceed. There is no option."
Currently, about 50,000 Baltimoreans are under some form of court-ordered supervision or probation, according to the bar association study.
"The linchpin is the enforcement of probation by the judge," says Johnson, whose reputation for punishing probation violators is well known. He says the long, suspended sentence with probation serves as a deterrent. The judge does not believe in short jail terms.
Johnson brushes off any suggestion that the operation of arraignment court is perceived by some as being unfair.
"All the defendants get fair warnings," he says. "But the general criminal population had not heard about me sending them to jail for a long time if they violate [probation]. Some did not believe it. Now it's my guess that all of the criminal population has heard about it and they do believe. And it's true."
NEXT: Pressures on public defenders.