Margaret Burns always defends her boss, State's Attorney Jessamy, by blaming the police for not presenting the SA with a perfect case. Here Christine Dolde was obviously an excellent witness, whose eyewitness identification would have weighed heavily with any trier of fact.

Let me share a telling experience of mine, as a juror in a recent Baltimore City Circuit Court case that hinged on eyewitness identification.

The defendant was the street chief of a drug crew in Park Heights. His accuser was one of his street servers, whom the crew chief blamed for losing his money and his drugs. The accuser said in court that the defendant took him and other members of the crew back to the defendant's house. They were told to wait outside. The defendant came out of the house blazing, and shot the accuser three times. Here was a victim who was an admitted drug dealer. Another eyewitness, who was another member of the crew, had identified the crew chief as the shooter to the police. But when he was hauled into court--the police had to go and find him--this witness tried to recant. My point is that everything depended on the credibililty of the victim drug dealer. Our jury, made up of five black women, three white women, two black men, and two white men, had no difficulty believing the victim. We convicted the crew chief of attempted second-degree murder and related charges. He will be sentenced by Judge Martin Welch on January 26. The young female prosecutor was up against Maureen Rowland, a wily and experienced public defender. In my judgment, as a spectator at many a trial in Circuit Court, this was a much tougher case to try to a jury than the Christine Dolde victimization would have been. So Ms. Burns is not simply protecting Mrs. Jessamy's reputation by blaming the police; Ms. Burns is also not giving junior prosecutors in her office the credit they deserve for having the courage to try the case.

OK. So, a couple of months back, Mr. Hermann writes an article about how he wouldn't convict a drug dealer based solely on the eyewitness testimony of an officer because there were no fingerprints. And that is coming from someone who supposedly "knows" the system as opposed to your everyday juror. And you are surprised that a prosecutor thinks that he or she cannot get a robbery conviction based solely on eyewitness testimony. To borrow a word from my teen years...DUH.

Yes, it is sad that defense attorneys have influenced the media so much that Jessamy's office is afraid to try cases. She is a horrible State's Attorney. She never does anything proactively. She needs to part of the solution to the crime problem. Her failure to act makes her part of the problem.