Anne Arundel County prosecutors have ordered three suspected crack houses destroyed during the last two years and watched yesterday as Annapolis public works crews boarded up a fourth near the western boundary of the city.
They say their use of the "drug nuisance abatement law" has brought peace to some county neighborhoods, but defense lawyers and civil libertarians wonder if their methods aren't overkill.
"I have a problem with draconian laws that sort of apply the nuclear bomb effect to enforcement of drug laws," said Richard A. Finci, a Prince George's County defense lawyer and a member of the board of directors of the Maryland Criminal Defense Attorneys Association. "I don't believe it is an effective deterrent in the war on drugs."
Anne Arundel is the only jurisdiction in Maryland to have destroyed houses.
The law, which allows homes to be demolished without the homeowner having been convicted of a drug-related crime, "is a shortcut around the criminal justice system, and that's never a good thing," said Stuart Comstock-Gay, executive director of American Civil Liberties Union chapter in Maryland. "It's kind of half a step short of seizure and a whole step easier."
Such concerns matter little to the people living near the houses, however. They say there are genuine benefits, even if the change is only temporary.
Two years ago, Anne Arundel County State's Attorney Frank R. Weathersbee ordered a reputed crack and prostitution house on Spring Road in Bacontown, near Laurel, destroyed. Sharron Newman, who lives in the area, is glad county officials took action.
"Drug traffic still goes on, but not as much," she said.
"Clearly, there was" a drop in drug activity, said Capt. Timothy Bowman, commander of Anne Arundel's Western Police District. The house itself was a gathering place for users of illicit narcotics."
The law, which went into effect in July 1991, was designed to give community groups a way to fight drug activity in their neighborhoods.
"It allows community associations the right to go into court, which in Maryland usually they can't," said Michael Sarbanes, a lawyer with the Community Law Center, a nonprofit organization that offers legal advice to community groups.
The center has joined with the Baltimore City state's attorney's office and the Community Anti-drug Assistance Project to help associations in seven city neighborhoods use the law.
Baltimore uses law
Baltimore has invoked the law in 200 cases. Most were settled with the property owners before trial. Community associations in Baltimore also have succeeded in getting the city to board up abandoned rowhouses that had become crack dens.
The nuisance abatement law is different from drug forfeiture laws in Maryland because prosecutors don't have to prove the real estate was acquired through drug profits and don't have to win a conviction against the homeowner.
"You need to be able to show, by a preponderance of evidence that the house is being used for drug activity," Mr. Sarbanes said. "And that's fairly widely defined in the statute."
The law also doesn't explicitly mention demolition as an available remedy, but it allows plenty of room for interpretation.
"There is one section that says 'the court can issue an injunction or order other equitable relief.' It's those two words -- 'injunction' and 'equitable' -- that give the court its sweeping power," said Trevor A. Kiessling Jr., the assistant prosecutors who heads Anne Arundel County's forfeiture unit.
"Demolition is one of those actions the court can order when demolition best solves the problem," Mr. Kiessling said.
But demolition of the house that prosecutors took over yesterday, which had been declared a common nuisance, would not best solve the problem, Mr. Weathersbee said.
"This house can still be used," he explained. "The first three houses had health and code violations so dramatic we felt we had to start all over again. Our intent has never been to destroy a house but to eliminate a nuisance."
The city of Annapolis lent the owner, Elmira Parker of Hyattsville, more than $21,000 to rehabilitate the building. Now the house can be sold and the city can recover its money, Mr. Weathersbee said.
'Constitutionally sound'
The statute stands on two principles grounded in the Constitution, legal experts say. The principle that underlies eminent domain holds that all property ultimately belongs to the state and that police powers allow the state to remove any threat to the public health, welfare and safety.
"Constitutionally, it's a sound approach," said Royal Shannonhouse, a retired University of Baltimore law professor who specialized in property law.
In Anne Arundel, two homeowners agreed to demolition because they risked forfeiture and could have lost their entire interest in the property. The owners were required to sell the land or never return to it. In each case, the county charged the owner for the demolition.
Mr. Weathersbee said the houses that were torn down were little more than shacks and weren't worth renovating. The one torn down two weeks ago in West River had no running water or electricity. Tenants used a 5-gallon bucket as a toilet.
"The ones we've been involved in, there's nothing else we can do with the houses," he said.
Some of Mr. Weathersbee's colleagues around the state say that tearing down houses might be a good idea in certain cases. Dorchester County State's Attorney Michael C. Maloney hasn't knocked down any crack houses, but he said he likes the law and would consider using it.
But John R. Greiber Jr., Mr. Weathersbee's Republican opponent in the Nov. 8 election, questioned the prosecutor's motives. The first house was razed in Bacontown in July 1992. No others were destroyed until last August, when a house in Lothian was torn down. Then came the demolition two weeks ago and the house boarded up yesterday.
"My question is, why so long?" Mr. Greiber said. "Why four weeks before the election? Why eight weeks before the election? The principle is sound, the timing is election driven."
Mr. Weathersbee said that he doesn't mind the publicity but that he is not trying to get his name and face in newspapers and on television. He said he wants to let communities know they can do something about drug dealers.
'Like capital punishment'
"The more that people see that it is possible, I think the more we will have the opportunity to eliminate them, whether bulldozing or not," he said.
Certainly bulldozing a house is a dramatic gesture, but is it effective?
"It's like the capital punishment of places," said Lawrence W. Sherman, a University of Maryland criminologist. "But it may make more sense to rehabilitate than to execute for the long-term wealth of society."
He conceded that if authorities don't have a "reason to try to preserve the house . . . then it's probably a better technique to control drug dealing to tear it down instead of boarding it up."
But Dr. Sherman said wholesale demolition could lead to more problems.
"The problem you face is ending up with urban wastelands," he said. "Large parts of Detroit have had the prairie growing back because so many buildings have been torn down."
And the question of what happens after the bulldozers, news cameras and reporters have left remains.
"The issue is whether it displaces the drug activity to another place in the community," said Charles Wellford, chairman of the University of Maryland criminology and criminal justice department. "But for the people in that community, it has a short-term and maybe longer term beneficial effect."
Despite the questions, Mr. Weathersbee doesn't plan to stop using the law. His office already has filed drug abatement petitions against three other houses.