After an almost two month wait, a supervisor in the State’s Attorney’s Office in Baltimore City “allowed” a seasoned prosecutor to enter a Nolle Prosequi to the case where my client aced the fields and there was no breath test, and no bad driving. The trial prosecutor calmed down after the Motions Hearing and knew she had nothing.
But because the regime in the SAO trusts no one, especially the people they have hired, and is constantly worried about the office statistics, it took two months for a decision to be made on a case that a 1st day law student in a coma would have won. It is no wonder that each week the published docket shows each misdemeanor trial judge with over a hundred cases per week to dispose of. The felony courts where there are 10 trial judges have at least 10-20 priority cases a week. Priority means the case is not supposed to be postponed. Now they have adopted a system to try to use retired judges to deal with some of these cases where people are sitting in jail and have been there for a year or more. When you have a State’s Attorney’s Office that is statistically driven, has a mandatory policy for certain types of cases, meaning they do no individual evaluation, you cannot prioritize and the citizens of the City are screwed.