Murder
Charges
Against
Four
in
Baltimore
Dismissed
for
Lack
of
Court
Space
1/8/99
The backlog that exists in Baltimore's Circuit Courts, due mainly to thousands of drug cases, resulted in the dismissal of murder charges against four individuals this week (1/6) who had waited more than 13 months for a trial. Felony trials are supposed to begin no later than six months following arraignment, but the city has neither enough judges, courtrooms, nor prosecutors nor public defenders to handle the caseload. Michael N. Gambrill, District Public Defender for Baltimore told The Week Online that more than 80% of the cases in the district court are drug cases. "The police might arrest one junkie for passing a small amount of something to another junkie. Now, technically, they're distributing, but the reality is that it's just people who are addicted who are feeding their habits," Gambrill said. But they're being brought into the system as felonies, which is overloading the system." The by-product, says Gambrill, is a lack of justice. "It's not uncommon for people to sit in jail for six to eight months, and sometimes longer before trial. These people haven't been found guilty of anything. They lose their homes, they lose their jobs, they lose contact with their families and loved ones based simply on the fact that they have been charged. That is not justice." In the case of the dropped murder charges, the four defendants had been waiting more than three years for a trial. In that case, the normal delays were compounded by the difficulties of finding dates on which the four separate defense attorneys (none of those defendants were represented by the public defender), the prosecutor, the judge and a courtroom were all available.
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