Mayor Sheila Dixon requested that a convicted felon with pending handgun charges be allowed to leave jail to attend his son's funeral yesterday -- offering to have city police officers escort him to it.
Charles Murel, 20, has three firearms charges in a case scheduled for trial this month in Baltimore Circuit Court and was convicted in 2005 of carjacking, court records show.
He is being held on a $150,000 bail at Baltimore's Central Booking and Intake Facility.
Murel's son, Charles Murel III, 3, was killed June 30 when two cars collided and ricocheted into him and a woman in the 1900 block of W. Lanvale St.
Saying Murel was too dangerous, a judge denied Thursday his request to attend the funeral. But Dixon's chief of staff, Otis Rolley III, continued to work for the temporary release.
Ultimately, Murel stayed behind bars.
Rolley said the mayor reached out to the child's mother to offer her condolence and assistance, and the mother asked Dixon to see about the father attending the funeral.
"It was a mother reaching out to another mother who had just lost her child," Rolley said.
Had Murel been allowed to attend, Rolley said, he would have been in handcuffs and leg shackles and flanked by police officers.
Two months ago, Dixon -- who is up for election this fall -- announced a new move by city police to target gun crime and illegal handguns.
"We're going to have to curb the violence in this city by going after these illegal guns," she said at a May news conference announcing the initiative. "I don't know how more plain and simple I can make it."
Margaret T. Burns, a spokeswoman for the city state's attorney's office, said Dixon's attempted intervention in Murel's case is "inconsistent with the reforms and policies she has encouraged among all of the criminal justice partners."
Rolley said that this "wasn't about the father, it was about the mother."
"She is tough on crime and tough on criminals," Rolley said of Dixon. "But there are countless people in Baltimore whose sons, fathers, uncles and brothers are paying the price for the bad choices they've made. [The boy's mother] was not a criminal. She's a grieving mother, and the mayor wanted to do everything in her power to assist that human being."
Bail hearing
At a bail reduction hearing Thursday for Murel, attorney Jerome Bivens asked Circuit Judge John M. Glynn to sign an order permitting the temporary release from Central Booking.
Bivens wrote in his motion that Murel should be able to attend the funeral, from 11 a.m. to noon at Unity United Methodist Church on Edmondson Avenue, because "nature and evidence ... warrants pretrial release and, in fact, warrant home detention."
Bivens could not be reached yesterday.
Glynn declined to sign the order.
"I wasn't comfortable it could be done in a safe and secure way because of the defendant's record," the judge said in an interview yesterday.
Glynn said he was asked again yesterday morning to approve Murel's release. He would not disclose who made the second request, but Rolley said in an interview that he called the judge.
Glynn again refused the release.
Practice abandoned
Benjamin Brown, assistant commissioner for the Maryland Division of Pretrial Detention and Services, which operates Central Booking, said the practice of allowing detainees to attend funerals of close family members was abandoned years ago out of safety concerns and because of the high costs of providing security details.
Brown said the mayor's office offered to have city police officers instead of correctional officers escort Murel. But, because a judge hadn't signed a writ authorizing his release, Murel was not permitted to leave.
"At the end of the day, the outcome was he stayed right here," Brown said.
Murel was arrested Dec. 13, 2005, near a Safeway grocery store in the 1200 block of W. Pratt St.
According to charging documents, Safeway security had called the police to report two armed men in the store. When officers approached a man that they identified as Murel, they found a black Glock 9 mm handgun, the documents state.
Court records show the case has been postponed numerous times, and that a trial is scheduled for July 23.
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