Looking For A Few Good Snitches

By Nathan Thornburgh / Baltimore

Alvin Chalmers, handcuffed in the backseat of an undercover cop car, closes his eyes and lets out a small moan. "I'm being treated like a criminal for being a victim," he says. "What kind of system is this?" Chalmers, a former municipal worker with a full beard and sad eyes who admits having been a drug addict, has just been plucked off rough-and-tumble Whitelock Street in the Reservoir Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, Md. His crime? Being too scared to testify in court against a paroled murderer who robbed him at gunpoint last April. Chalmers began missing court dates three months before he was picked up. So the state of Maryland plans to incarcerate him until it's his time to testify. His biggest mistake, Chalmers says on the way to the same facility where his alleged attacker is being jailed, is ever having told the police the name of the man who robbed him. "That man is a killer," he says. "And now they're putting me in the same building as him. This is so wrong."

This is the treacherous moral ground of inner-city America, where communities from Boston to Milwaukee are looking for ways to combat a rising culture of witness intimidation. Despite a dip in 2004, national homicide rates have increased since 2000, and in some towns it is as difficult as ever to prosecute shootings and murders. Prosecutors say that the nationwide popularity of Stop Snitching T shirts is proof positive that thugs in some parts of the country continue to control the streets. Whether out of fear or a deep allegiance to the code of silence, witnesses simply aren't talking, and cities are increasingly exerting their own pressure on no-show witnesses.

Few cities have it quite as bad as Baltimore. The city's highest-crime areas tend to be close-knit, insular communities where everybody knows everybody else's business, including who's talking to the police. Mix in a high-stakes drug trade and a flood of handguns, and you have a recipe for a pitiless war on witnesses. Baltimore's problems first made national news in 2002 when a family of seven were killed in an arson attack after they helped police identify drug dealers in their neighborhood.

The climate of fear has only worsened since then. In 2004 it even got a slogan--Stop Snitching--with the appearance of an underground DVD with that title. The video, which gained attention around the country in part because of a cameo by homegrown NBA superstar Carmelo Anthony, is both a celebration of thug life and an orgy of threats and denunciations against crime witnesses who cooperate with police. Since the DVD appeared, Stop Snitching T shirts, visors and other apparel have become a fashion phenom in inner-city America. The apparel has been banned from Massachusetts courthouses as of January. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has pressured store owners to stop selling the merchandise, at one point threatening to send city officials into shops to seize the shirts, provoking the American Civil Liberties Union to complain that he was stepping on the freedom of expression.

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.

Julian and other public defenders say the intimidation threat is overhyped, that the real reason witnesses don't testify is that the citizens of Baltimore have lost faith in the city's justice system, particularly the scandal-racked police force. A special rapid-reaction unit called a flex squad in the southwestern district was disbanded in December after one of its officers was accused of raping a detained woman before setting her free. A search of the precinct building turned up stashed narcotics and counterfeit DVDs. The charges came after years of rumored misconduct, and critics in the media say police brass let the unit continue to function primarily because the department's code of silence is not that much different from the one on the streets. "How will the department look now when any of its spokesmen speak out against things like the Stop Snitching DVDs, T shirts and caps?" wrote Baltimore Sun columnist Gregory Kane.

Some prosecutors acknowledge that the deep suspicion of the city's criminal-justice system is a major stumbling block. "Building trust at the grass-roots level would go a long way toward solving these witness issues," says homicide prosecutor Lisa Goldberg. But, prosecutors say, they simply don't have the luxury of waiting for that bond with the community to develop before trying to convict criminals. In the absence of trust, sometimes the only solution is to put as much pressure on witnesses as the thugs do.

That's where Sam Bowden, 34, and Byron Conaway, 30, come in. The former undercover narcotics detectives were assigned to the state's attorney's office full time in September 2004. Since then they have been assigned to serve more than 300 summonses and body attachments (special incarceration warrants for witnesses who don't want to be found). It can be a maddening chase at times. Wearing baggy street clothes with Kevlar vests underneath, the two troll the city's grim row houses looking for witnesses who are, as often as not, "in the game" themselves, part of the same shadowy and dangerous criminal class as the defendants. Even thugs are often afraid of what will happen if they are forced to testify, so Bowden and Conaway try to handle all their witnesses as gently as possible. "You do feel bad sometimes," says Bowden. "But these are important witnesses. These trials need to happen."

Nearly all states have a statute that allows judges to jail material witnesses to major crimes. "Somewhere in the deep core of American law is the notion that judges have a right to aggressively enforce court orders," says Stanford University law professor Robert Weisberg. "Witnesses are, in that sense, like defendants. People may think that one is the good guy and the other is the bad guy, but they both need to be in court for the legal system to work." Even if the jailed witness changes testimony on the stand--and prosecutor Goldberg says she can't remember a murder trial in which someone hasn't backtracked on his or her story--the witness's mere presence in court allows the prosecutors to admit earlier statements pointing toward the defendant's guilt.

Still, John Glynn, the circuit-court judge who signs many of the city's body attachments, says the system works better when witnesses testify voluntarily instead of being coerced by the court. "It's a battle of who can control the witness--the state or the street," he says. "And justice suffers when that happens." Baltimore, like many state and local governments, lacks the resources to protect witnesses after they have testified. The Baltimore witness-assistance program used to be called witness protection, but with a shoestring budget and local motels doubling as witness safe houses, officials realized they couldn't always live up to the protection promise. Unlike the federal witness-protection program for turncoat mobsters and cocaine kingpins, there is no reconstructive surgery, no house with a pool in suburban Phoenix. Baltimore authorities had to stretch their $400,000 annual budget in 2005 to accommodate 184 families in hiding--a few with as many as 11 members. Although some are relocated near family as far away as California, most are loath to leave Maryland and wind up languishing in motels just outside the city limits. "I wish we could just make our witnesses more comfortable," says Goldberg. "We need a lot more money."

U.S. Senator Charles Schumer of New York reintroduced a bill this month that would help. It would provide nearly $100 million in federal funding to help local and state governments protect witnesses. Inspired by the murder of a crime witness in Brooklyn in 2002, the bill foundered when it was first submitted three years ago, but Schumer says the issue is too important to give up on. "Every day, witnesses who are willing to stand up in court and testify about a violent crime in their community put their lives on the line for the sake of justice," said Schumer. "The very least we can do is protect them."

That promise is too distant for the very present danger Alvin Chalmers faces. His pleading with detectives Conaway and Bowden in the car on the way to central booking has fallen on deaf ears, so Chalmers takes a new tack, rehearsing what he will probably say on the stand. "I was high when it happened," he says over and over. "I don't remember anything."