By Jason Policastro
Page Croyder is a former Assistant State’s Attorney for the State Attorney’s Office in Baltimore City. She spent 21 years working in the SAO, and retired in January 2008.
Under State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy, Croyder spent four of those years dedicated to the “War Room,” a task force designed to end the revolving door system that was sending violent criminals back out onto the streets.
Investigative Voice caught up with Croyder recently to talk about the problems in Baltimore's criminal justice system. We asked her about some new issues that have surfaced recently and gained insight into stories that have plagued the city for many years. Croyder offered some revealing information on the inner workings of the State Attorney’s office, criticized judges whom she believes have been lenient when it was not appropriate, and discussed some recent successes in the city’s constant battle against violent crime.
I.V.: Homicide detectives often complain that assistant state’s attorneys are too lazy or too reluctant to prosecute tough-to-win cases, including those with only one eyewitness. Having been inside the office as a supervisor, what is your impression of the work ethic of the prosecutors?
P.C.: I think the work ethic is wholly dependent upon the individual. The SAO has some wonderful prosecutors. They work hard, they’re bright, they’re dedicated, they work after hours, they work weekends, and they burn themselves out. That’s the kind of job that it is. Then you’re going to have prosecutors who don’t have a work ethic. Then you’ll have the ones who work hard, but it’s just not their thing, if you know what I mean. It’s not where their talent is best used. It’s like any place of business.
I’d like to see greater talent in the leadership. I think that would spot some issues earlier.
I.V.: When you say leadership, do you mean at the top?
P.C.: Well, that’s where it starts. The top needs to recognize who the leaders should be. Being a good trial prosecutor doesn’t always make you a good manager of people. The front office needs to recognize who does have that ability and who has right drive for justice, and who isn’t taking the easy way out.
Here’s a good example that shows these two types of mentalities. When I was a prosecutor in the district courts in the beginning, these were not very serious cases. I had a case where there was an alcohol violation. The defense attorney’s position was that I couldn’t introduce the can of beer as evidence, but I needed to have a chemical analysis. The judge wanted us to go back and write memorandums about the chemical analysis to prove that it was beer. That took a lot of work on my part. I researched it. One of my colleagues said to me, why are you doing that? I said, what other choice do I have? He said, you can null pross the case. (‘Null pross’ is Latin for ‘choose not to prosecute’, and the option is used often by the State Attorney’s office when they determine that there is not enough evidence to try a case. So often in fact, that when the term is searched via Google, the fourth and fifth entries that appear are Baltimore City crime stories.)
There in a nutshell, is the difference in mentalities. I think there were a lot of people who would have null prossed the case, and there are some people who wouldn’t have.”
I.V.: Do you think that is the prevailing mentality in the State Attorney’s Office in Baltimore City?
P.C.: I had not been in the trial divisions for a while when I left, but I will say this: the office became much less experience over the years. Some of the very dedicated people left, and I did not have confidence that those who remained and moved up were of that mentality to do something extra, or do something creative to handle our volume and focus our efforts.”
I.V.: That leads to my next question. Do you think Patricia Jessamy is an effective State’s Attorney?
P.C.: Let me preface this by saying, I like her as a person. She has a good heart, and she cares about people.
As a manager, she was not effective. She was not an effective State’s Attorney. She did not encourage creative thinking. She is the type of person who would surround herself with people who would tell her what she wanted to hear. If you attempted to tell her about an area where perhaps we weren’t doing that well, she doesn’t like to hear that. It was hard to approach her with things like that. When a manager surrounds themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear, and the first criteria is a personal loyalty, that stifles people who might have new creative ways of thinking.
The best example I can think of is the creation of the War Room. When I worked at Central Booking, I was there for a number of programs, and some were politically motivated. Like the early disposition court with Martin O’Malley. When he was elected mayor he was going to solve the whole problem of crowded courts. It was just a political thing; he decided it would work, it got implemented and it didn’t work, and people in the know could have told him it wasn’t going to work.
The War Room opened my eyes. It became very, very clear to me that we were not sufficiently aware of how the whole system worked, and that we were playing right into this revolving door of criminals coming in and criminals coming out. For that I don’t blame Ms. Jessamy or anybody else, what I blame is the volume. The judges, the pre-trial release, the probation agents, the prosecutors, and the defense attorneys, we’re just overwhelmed with the volume.
It was a bad culture to have become, and while I was there we had the opportunity to show this to people, to say "Look, this is what we’re learning about this system, this is how it’s all working together, this is why people are revolving through and committing greater crimes. " She [Jessamy] essentially suppressed it. She didn’t apply the principles, the lessons learned at any level in our office. She didn’t report it out. Even if she didn’t want to publicly do it, she never even met in-house with her own division chiefs to say ‘"This is what’s happening, and we need to change the way we do business."
An annual report was required [for the War Room]. In the first two annual reports, I wrote about some of these issues. What was particularly eye-opening to me was something I call package deals, when [a defendant] is on probation on a case, comes in with a new one, and they put it all together, and usually you got less than you could have gotten on the probation violation alone. Just completely opened my eyes.
It was also clear to me how felony narcotics defendants were all pretty much treated the same, without the ability to say, "These are the players in the game, these are not." That’s how you assign your resources. The addicts who are selling should be treated wholly different from these guys with the guns and the attempted murder charges that they beat.
This was included, it was sent to the governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention, and it went down to the legislature. The next year [2005] I wrote a similar, very frank report. They were both heavily edited, but there was enough in them that if someone was looking into it you could see there were issues.”
I.V.: What was removed from the reports?
P.C.: Information that could be interpreted as criticism of the judges, including specific examples of "package deals." We even made that part anonymous, where we made the defendant and the judge anonymous in all the examples of the ‘package deals’, so you could see the new charge, this is what they were on probation for, this is their prior record, and this is what they got. Somebody could read this and go ‘oh my gosh, this is how the system works? You just do nothing to them, over and over again?’ That was all edited out.”
I.V.: You’ve been critical of certain judges in Baltimore City for being allegedly too soft on criminals. Who do you think is the worst judge in the city and why?
P.C.: Let me say first that my issue is not "soft on criminals," because that paints with a broad brush. What I’ve learned, and what I was hoping the judges would learn with us, is that you’ve got to focus. You’ve got to perceive who is dangerous, and who is not going to kill, shoot, or rob somebody if you let them back on the street. They still may sell drugs, or they still may use them in public, or they still may break into cars, and that is a terrible problem for neighborhoods. But, you’ve got a limited number of resources. My issue is the ability to focus on people that are violent.
When I was doing the War Room and looking everyday at probation results, the judge that seemed the most clueless in terms of this issue was Albert Matricciani. He has since been promoted to the Court of Special Appeals. I suppose you could say that is a good thing for Baltimore City. He would put a lot of people, particularly drug dealers, on unsupervised probation, which in a practical sense is not putting them on any probation at all. When the War Room would try to get them revoked, and we would have to file more paperwork.
There is one story that is just an absolute disaster. He had a guy on probation for selling drugs who was seen by a police officer beating a guy into unconsciousness. It was probably one of those enforcement type situations. Even when the cops rolled up on him, he looked at the cop, and gave one last kick to the head of this person, ran off, but they got him. The case was null prossed at the district court because the victim did not show up. We in the War Room thought, so what, the cop saw him do it so we’re going to take the case to the probation judge. So we filed a motion with Judge Matricciani, and he issued a warrant for him, then he made bail, and didn’t show up for court. So the case was postponed and a warrant was issued. His defense attorney asked them to recall the warrant, brought him into court without the War Room being there, and Judge Matricciani dismissed the case. Probation expired and we couldn’t do anything about it.
These are the kinds of stories that just absolutely drove me crazy.”
I.V.: You’ve been highly critical of Jessamy’s spokeswoman, Marty Burns. Why focus so much energy on someone who’s just a spokeswoman and has no real impact on criminal justice in the courtroom?
P.C.: “I remember when I was talking to a publication about Burns and they said ‘She’s just a flack.’ My response is, she’s not just a flack, she is, in effect, the number two person in the State Attorney’s Office. The Deputy State’s Attorneys know this, but they’ll never say it publicly because the reason they are there is because they are loyal to Jessamy. But everybody in the front office knows it.
She sits there and makes policy. She edits the War Room reports. She’s the one who decides what goes to the legislature and what doesn’t on substantive matters. She represents Ms. Jessamy at GunStat, talking on substantive cases. (According to the mayor’s Web site, GunStat closely tracks gun arrests and seizures, monitors the time it takes to analyze guns used in crimes, and provides information on the prosecution and sentencing of gun crimes in Baltimore.)
So when the question is posed to me that she has no impact on events that happen in the courtroom, if she is, for example, suppressing War Room information so that we, the State Attorney’s Office were not focusing our efforts on the right offenders, she was having a direct impact on what happens in the courtroom. If she was simply a spokesperson, mouthing what Jessamy had to say and having nothing to do with policy, I never would have mentioned her name.
Burns is not a lawyer, not a prosecutor, she hasn’t taken an oath. She doesn’t just spin, she lies. When those people are involved in policy decisions, that’s not a good idea.”
I.V.: Can you give me an example of a time when you felt that Burns had lied in an important or meaningful way?
P.C.: I remember I had a meeting with the Deputy State’s Attorney Kim Morton and Burns. Morton was new in the position. We were having a conversation about the relationship between my division in Central Booking and the public affairs department. I was explaining to Kim that Burns would take our documents and release them to the press in violation of prosecutorial ethics. And Burns sat there and insisted that she did not do that, [suggesting] that other people could have done it.
I gave her an example of a document that got to the press and made it into the paper, and Burns said "Well, the police could have released it." I said "No, we [the SAO] had hand-written a new charge that was not in possession of the police."She didn’t say anything, because there was no way to respond to that. We had her.
Not long after that meeting, she called down to Central Booking on an arrest that was apparently about to make the news. I got a call from one of my prosecutors who said that Burns was on the phone and wanted her to fax the charging documents. These hadn’t seen the commissioner yet, which means they were not yet public record. Burns wanted them faxed to a certain number. I said, ‘By all means, fax to that number, just let me know what number you fax it to.’ When I got in the next day, I looked it up. It was the number for the Baltimore Sun city desk. She was consistently and persistently denying that she did that, and she knew it was wrong. There were many instances that we knew she was lying, but that was right there in black and white.
I.V.: What are the implications of that? What are the greater costs to the public of Baltimore City when that process is violated?
P.C.: First of all, it’s the credibility of the State Attorney’s office. The journalists are the beneficiaries of this. They get to put this out into the paper; they don’t have to work very hard. Burns will make it easy for them, they don’t have to go to the courthouse, and they don’t have to wait for anything. She makes their job easy.
But what does that do in terms of how they perceive what she has to say? Does it mean that they suspect she is unethical? If they do, what do they do about it? Does easy street dry up at that point? I think it compromises the press. I think it compromises their independence, and their ability to evaluate the job that the SAO is doing.
I’ve seen very little criticism of how Jessamy handles cases or what she’s doing. Plenty of criticism of the police department. How does that come about? When you have someone who is unethically co-opting the press and the press knows it. I talked to a reporter, saying "You know it’s prosecutorially unethical for us to release documents, particularly those that have not reached the public record yet, even though there is a holding that says we’re not supposed to do it at all." The response was "I know, but what are we going to do? Our stories dry up." That, I think, is a very unfortunate thing. The [Baltimore] Sun has shrunk to such a point that I don’t know that they can investigate anything anymore. Nevertheless, when you have a spokesperson who is willing to cross ethical boundaries to get good press, what other ethical boundaries is the office crossing? And that’s a legitimate question.
I also say one of the harmful things [for the community] was their fight with O’Malley, and how they worked deliberately to create the perception that the cases declined by the SAO were all illegal arrests. I had more than one discussion with them [Burns and Jessamy] about the fact that they were allowing the press, and groups including the ACLU and the NAACP to call these illegal arrests. I repeatedly said we decline for two reasons. One is we cannot prove [guilt] beyond a reasonable doubt, which is a different standard from what the police have for an arrest. Or we’ve abated it by arrest, which means there was probable cause for an arrest. That doesn’t mean there were illegal arrests. Many times we had probable cause, and the SAO still declined the cases. [Burns and Jessamy] deliberately didn’t make that clear. Whenever they wanted the police to be embarrassed, they’d simply call it "legally insufficient," as if that meant the police’s arrest was legally insufficient, not making that clear.
I.V.: During the O’Malley administration, the Baltimore Police Department arrested around 100,000 people a year. As you mentioned, Jessamy was critical of this mass number of arrests. As the former head of the War Room, do you believe this high number of arrests was good or bad for the city?
P.C.: I think the effect was bad. I know that O’Malley had pushed "zero tolerance" before he became mayor. I think he brought [former police commissioner Ed] Norris down [here] because of New York’s success. I think this is something that people do, and they don’t recognize different cities, different dynamics, and different cultures. I don’t know that Norris did the worst of it. I think after he left and [former police commissioner Kevin] Clark came in, I don’t know what standards were employed.
The end result was, people were getting locked up right and left, and it was counter-productive. It was, as I mentioned before, a lack of focus.The idea was you lock up people; find out if they have warrants on them. I remember in 2001, I was training police officers to have good arrests, be truthful in their statements of probably cause, and so forth. I remember during the class, one of the officers came up to me and said, "We’ve been told that when we stop a car, not only do we run the driver for warrants, we have to run all the passengers." I said, "I don’t see what the legal authority for that is.’ He said, "You know what? I was thinking the same thing.’"
I will say sometimes that the command staff will issue a command, and it gets misinterpreted down the line. As it filters down to street level, like playing Telephone, it became "try to arrest everyone."
It was counterproductive, no question about it. On the other hand, to say all of our problems and the fact that juries don’t convict, to put it on those arrests is baloney. We had the same dynamics going on before O’Malley was mayor. Did it exacerbate it? Probably. Did it create it? No.
I.V.: The trial for the murder of Carl Lackl is set to begin soon. Lackl was the witness to a murder who was set to testify in that case days after he was shot to death in his front yard. There are countless other examples of witness intimidation here. How can we expect to effectively prosecute violent offenders when the city can’t protect the few willing witnesses it gets?
P.C.: Any time you hear about another person getting killed, that’s going to chill innumerable more witnesses. Even if you do get them to testify or are able to use their statements, they can back up, or appear to back up. Judge Gail Raisen just threw out a murder case in which a jury actually convicted someone. One of the reasons was that in a pre-trial motion, one of the witnesses was reluctant to identify him. I wrote in my blog how I thought she was dead wrong and she had no business throwing it out, you can see how it infects testimony all the time.
You not only have to overcome your high burden with the facts, you also have to explain your witnesses to juries as to why they are changing their story, or why they should believe the first story they told to police, if you’re even lucky enough to get them to talk in the first place.
It is a very serious problem. It’s not like on TV when you get into the federal witness protection program. There are witness programs here, but a lot of the witnesses don’t want to participate.
Passing more laws like witness intimidation bills, I guess that works for a threat, but when they carry it out, then you’re back to your homicide laws.
I.V.: What do you think is the single most important thing we can do in Baltimore to improve public safety?
P.C.: What’s apparent to me is that there’s no overall plan.There’s nothing that says ‘here are the goals, here are who we perceive to be the problem. And I’m not saying it’s all law enforcement. You’re not going to enforce your way out of certain cultural problems. If you have idle young men who are uneducated and aren’t working, law enforcement isn’t going to fix the problem. You’ve got to be looking at young people, identifying at-risk youth and do something meaningful, which we’re not doing now.
When they become criminals, if they are of the violent type, you’ve got to think of the plan. If you’re going to put them on probation, it has to be something extremely structured. It can’t be what we have now which is put them back on the street and hope they don’t do anything else. You’ve got to focus, identify your resources, and we all have to work together. You’ve got to have a plan.
I.V.: Would you ever consider running for Jessamy’s job in the next election?
P.C.: No. My blog shows I’m no politician.
Page Croyder writes a blog for the Center for Emerging Media: www.centerforemergingmedia.org/topics/criminal-justice
Jason Policastro is a freelance writer.
