Crime: Looking For A Few Good Snitches

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Patricia Jessamy, the state's attorney in Baltimore, saw an opportunity in the controversy over the Stop Snitching craze. For years, she says, she lobbied unsuccessfully for more tools to fight witness intimidation. She told lawmakers that 90% of the murder cases her office handles involve some form of witness coercion and that 25% of her shooting trials were dismissed because a witness didn't show. But the Stop Snitching DVD argued her case better than any statistics could. She immediately made more than 400 copies and gave one to each state legislator. "That DVD showed them what is really going on here," she says. "The blinders came off, and the lights went on." Last year Maryland passed one of the toughest laws of its kind in the country, making witness intimidation in certain cases a felony punishable by up to 20 years' imprisonment.

Arguments will begin next month in the first trial to test the new law. When a teenager told police he had seen two men shoot Paige Boyd last June, the accused men's friends and family stepped into action. Police say one defendant's girlfriend, with her toddler in tow, went to the teenager's house and told his father that the boy would "get it" for "snitching on my family." The next day, according to the police, a co-defendant's brother cornered the father at a store and said his teenager would "be dead before [the trial]". The girlfriend and the brother were both charged under the new law. Rather than face 20 years for witness intimidation, the brother struck a deal with prosecutors last week to testify against the girlfriend and plead guilty to a lesser charge.

Still, Jessamy is dissatisfied with the law. She wants it amended so that if witnesses are killed or intimidated into not showing up in court, their stories could still be introduced--even if they had never made a written or sworn statement--by having others testify about what the original witnesses had said about a case. "As it is now, a defendant knows that if he kills the witness, he kills the case," says Jessamy.

The Maryland legislature will consider the change this week but is unlikely to adopt it. The amendment may never emerge from the judiciary committee, given that the body is run by a former defense attorney. Many defense attorneys argue that the constitutional right to confront one's accuser in court is too important to discard. And, says city of Baltimore public defender Elizabeth Julian, "it's too hard to prove exactly why a witness didn't come to court."

Jessamy replies that the city is facing an epidemic of intimidation. She and her lieutenants in the state's attorney's office rattle off a list of examples: the hit that was nearly carried out on an 11-year-old witness; the two cut-rate attackers, paid just $50 each to rough up a witness before trial, who proved so inept that one of them collapsed and died after the witness gained the upper hand and started beating them up; the row of thugs who lined the marble steps of the courthouse so they could stare down witnesses and jurors entering a trial; the hoodlums who sent a sequestered witness text messages from their cell phone; the jurors in a case who, one by one, refused to read a guilty verdict aloud, convinced that they would become targets of retaliation.