– Endorsement by major media organs like The Washington Post and many “liberals” in the nation’s political establishment of the proposed “hate crimes” bill exists in strange juxtaposition with recent articles and editorials on the U.S. attorneys scandal deploring the abuse and over-centralization of federal law enforcement. But the supporters of the hate crimes bill […]
The news that the Bush administration has replaced seven U.S. attorneys, none charged with or guilty of wrongdoing, with people fairly describable as Washington apparatchiks should give pause to all those concerned with America’s working Constitution. This was made possible by a provision of the Patriot Act allowing the president to make interim appointments of […]
A Short Attention Span Ten years ago, a City Council Committee, under a Chairman who shall go nameless (his name starts with “O’” and is neither German nor Ukrainian), took a look at the Baltimore City criminal justice system. Its central focus was Baltimore’s notorious Central Booking Facility, a state-financed facility whose operation has important […]
PDF BALTIMORE – The recent opinion by an especially distinguished panel of the Court of Special Appeals in Clark v. O’Malley allowing a fired police commissioner’s suit to go forward should have come as a surprise to nobody. An 1860 statute dictating that the police commissioner of Baltimore City can be discharged only for just […]
A lawsuit seeks to accord civil litigants a constitutional right to state-paid lawyers like that guaranteed criminal defendants by the famous case of Gideon v. Wainwright. The test case is Frase v. Barnhart, a child custody matter which the Court of Appeals is to hear this October. Not one Marylander in a hundred knows about […]
MR. GEORGE W. LIEBMANN: This is a symposium on the criminal justice system in Baltimore City that is jointly sponsored by three organizations: The Bar Association of Baltimore City, Maryland Business for Responsive Government, and the Calvert Institute for Policy Research. We are honored to have with us this evening four distinguished judges, Judge Charles […]
The late Spiro Agnew, no great statesman, once referred disgustedly to “the pop issues-acid, amnesty and abortion.” The first two are no longer with us as political issues, having now been replaced by ‘gun control’. Agnew’s point, however, remains valid: when candidates talk about abortion and gun control, it suggests that they have few serious […]
Despite recent self-congratulation due to Maryland’s declining crime rate over 1997, the fact remains that this state compares most unfavorably. According to FBI violent crime data taken from the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1996, in 1990 Marylanders experienced 919 violent crimes per 100,000 state residents. This made the Free State […]
About the Authors Robert M. McCarthy, J.D. Robert M. McCarthy is the named principal of a general-practice law firm located in Bethesda, Maryland. His particular concentration is in juvenile cases; he has handled approximately 5,000 such cases in the last 15 years. Previously, he was a contract attorney with the Maryland state Public Defender’s Office […]
With surging juvenile crime rates and limited budgets, state governments have been hard pressed to handle the increasing demands on the juvenile-justice system. This strain has led to increased privatization of juvenile-corrections services. Once found only on the outer fringes of libertarianism, advocates of privatized corrections are new viewed as being well within the mainstream. […]