BALTIMORE (AP) - Baltimore’s public defenders have asked a judge to help them get a list of city police officers who the city’s top prosecutor says have credibility issues.
In recent court filings, prosecutors and public defenders have battled over State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s public comments about a list of more than 300 officers with potential integrity issues, The Baltimore Sun reported on Tuesday.
Mosby presented the list in December to a state policing commission formed to identify department issues that fostered a corrupt police unit.
“The Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office’s practice of prosecuting people without disclosure of its secret compromised integrity list constitutes malicious, bad faith prosecution,” wrote public defenders Sarah Gottlieb and Deborah Levi.
In a Feb. 7 reply, Assistant State’s Attorney Matthew Pillion wrote that defense attorneys are entitled to view materials of individual officers if they are pertinent to a defendant’s case. They aren’t entitled to a list of all officers flagged, Pillion wrote.
“Defendant fails to explain even remotely how a list of several hundred officers with no nexus to his case would make it less likely that he committed the crime of which he is accused or change the punishment he would receive upon conviction,” Pillion wrote.
The dispute is set for a hearing on Feb. 20 in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City.
Mosby has said her office had identified 305 officers “with integrity issues and or allegations of integrity issues that would in essence put them in jeopardy from testifying.” The office has since clarified that it is not, however, a list of officers who the prosecutors’ office will not call, but rather officers for whom disclosures must be made to defense attorneys.
New deputy commissioner Brian Nadeau, a retired FBI supervisory agent, said that he believed that only 22 officers among the hundreds flagged should be precluded from testifying. Of the others, Nadeau said: “Nobody on that list that I wouldn’t have working on the street, making cases.”
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