Unbelievable: Maryland may prosecute O’Keefe for shooting ACORN video

Heh, this is just what went on in the communist block during the 50′s & 60′s – I just the USSA is just warming up.

izoneguy on September 11, 2009 at 11:26 PM

This is who you are dealing with:

Baltimore City State’s Attorney Patricia Jessamy can be reached at mail@stattorney.org or (410) 396-4001.

http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/mdmanual/36loc/bcity/html/msa14094.html

PATRICIA COATS JESSAMY, State’s Attorney (Democrat)

The Cost of Failed Teamwork

http://www.steinershow.org/featured-topics/criminal-justice/cost-failed-teamwork

The public should not expect to get the truth out of this. The media needs to be careful about what it publishes.

But one fact it never published about the Jones case was how the State’s Attorney’s Office sabotaged any chance of success. On December 27, 2005, a prostitute alleged that Jones had raped her at the Southwestern police station after he had arrested her that day. When police investigators shared this allegation with the State’s Attorneys Office, prosecutors—not the police—secured an indictment from the Grand Jury on January 5, 2006, merely nine days after the allegation was made. That practically amounted to prosecutorial malpractice.

It’s notoriously difficult to convince juries of rape no matter who the victim and the defendant may be. For prosecutors to prove that a cop raped a prostitute? Only a careful investigation piecing together enough evidence to significantly support the victim’s story would give them a fighting chance.

When the story broke, police told Sun reporters that they had not yet investigated the case. Warren Brown, retained by Jones, claimed that the State’s Attorney’s Office was trying to embarrass the police department.

Right on both counts. The State’s Attorney’s Office, who could and should have assisted police investigators in putting together a solid case, instead halted any meaningful investigation by charging the case and then leaking what police documents they had to the media. When Jones’s trial attorney ridiculed the police investigation, prosecutor JoAnne Stanton could only respond with an irony lost on the jury, “Would I have liked a better investigated case? Absolutely.”

She absolutely had the chance to make that happen. She didn’t. Jones was acquitted, the criminal cases against two other officers dropped, and they all looked like victims.

So was it Stanton’s fault? I don’t think so. The fiasco had the fingerprints of Margaret T. Burns, spokesperson for State’s Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy, all over it. The interference with operational matters, the premature rush to charge a case that would embarrass the police department, the immediate and unethical leaking of documents– that was the Burns M.O. The harmful effects are still being felt by all of those involved.

If all of this was in the past, I wouldn’t bother to bring it up. But Burns and Jessamy are still at the helm of the prosecutor’s office. And they are still doing their thing. It’s quieter now, more subtle, because Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld and Sheryl Goldstein, who directs the Mayor’s Office on Criminal Justice, are too professional to fight. The wars of the O’Malley mayoral years are over, even if the damage continues to manifest itself. But Jessamy is no more a crime-fighting partner now than she was before.

izoneguy on September 12, 2009 at 12:19 AM