The Dispatch Podcast - Crimes of the Present

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

Thiru Vignarajah, former deputy attorney general of Maryland, joins Sarah to talk about all things Baltimore: violent crime, reforming police practices, and the Baltimore City state’s attorney race. Plus: What might help bring down gun violence in major cities?   Show Notes: -Justiceforbaltimore.com -French Press: Against Gun Idolatry -The Dispatch: Can We Make Red Flag Laws Work? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isker, and we're joined by Theru Vignaraja. He is running for Baltimore City State's attorney, basically the district attorney of Baltimore. We're going to talk violent crime, the political issue within the Democratic Party, and also a little bit about Theru and maybe some of the more interesting cases that he's had over the years. Let's dive right in through. I feel like we need to start with our cute just to give people an idea of the tone, perhaps, of this podcast and a relationship that we have that goes back to the spring, early spring, late winter of 2008. We met outside the Supreme Court. This is the cutest and most nerdy first meetup story ever. Yeah, so you had just finished clerking at the Supreme Court for Justice Stephen Breyer. You'd been president of the Harvard Law Review, et cetera, et cetera. And you decided to camp outside the court with the peasants before the Supreme Court argument for Heller, the gun case.

And I was a law student who decided that I wanted the experience of being able to see an oral argument and to camp outside the Supreme Court. and there were roughly 100 people or so camping in a straight line, and we were next to each other in campsites and struck up a conversation in which I find out that you just finished clerking at the court. You're a former employee, you don't have to camp. You could just ask for a ticket. And I was very curious why someone would choose. I mean, this was March.

It was cold. I got to tell you, looking back, I don't know if the story is like reflects my better angels, reflects very poor judgment. It was raining. It was cold. You were freezing. And we also weren't guaranteed a seat. You know, the limited number of seats in the room meant that only about the first, what, 20 or so people were probably going to get seats and everyone else might get to file in for five minutes. I'd like to believe that I have this sort of enduring commitment to these deep principles that I had. But I just looked at the court. A number of my former colleagues had contacted

their chambers, contacted their justices, asked for an opportunity to view it, and then got seats inside. I had this view that after you've had this very special year, clerking at the court, that if you wanted to go watch an argument, you should approach it the same way a citizen of the country would. I mean, these cases matter to the whole nation. If you have a very specific professional interest in the case, right, you are an antitrust lawyer and there's an antitrust case coming for the Supreme Court, then perhaps it's appropriate. But if your interest in the case is no different than a law student's interest, then you ought to try to approach it. So I said, if I'm going to go watch this case, which I did think was profoundly important for the nation,

that I should try to get a seat, just like everyone else. So I'm sitting next to this guy, and I ask him that question, and that's his answer. And I was like, all right, we're going to be lifelong friends. And lo and behold, here we are. And you went on to be an assistant U.S. attorney, a federal prosecutor, deputy attorney general for the state of Maryland. You've spent your whole life, really, in criminal prosecutions. I really have. I mean, this is for Baltimore, where I have spent my career, the defining issue.

Unfortunately, what people know of Baltimore is not all of the great things that make it such an important American city. What they know about it is the wire. They know about it is the latest HBO series, we own this city, which shows these two of twin terribles about Baltimore. It's the violent crime and the gangs and the murders with the highest per capita homicide rate in the country year after year. after year after year. We also have perhaps the worst policing scandal in American history that just unfolded in the last few years, which David Simon dramatized in this series. We own the city. It has become how the world knows Baltimore. If you visit London, if you visit Africa, if you go to Asia and you say you're from Baltimore, they say either, oh, that's where Johns Hopkins Hospital is, which is a very cool part of Baltimore's backdrop, or, oh, that's where the wires. I love that show.

Is it that terrible? But it feels like for most of your career, violent crime was at an all-time low in the country, especially if you compare it to, you know, the 70s, 80s, early 90s. And it had really dropped off the political radar for most people. Republicans were still at times trying to run on a law and order message. But for the most part, that didn't resonate with most people outside of Baltimore, for instance. And now it feels like the rest of the country is feeling like Baltimore is happening. to them. I'm curious how you see those statistics around the country compared to Baltimore. Baltimore

seeing the same. It's a tide that's rising. That's exactly right. I mean, the renaissance of the American city happened, you know, after this terrible scourge in the 80s and 90s where crime was out of control. You had gangs. You had heroin and the crack epidemic driving it. But cities started to figure it out. And all across the nation, violent crimes started going down. There were increasingly responsible strategies that were being used. It was working virtually. everywhere. It was not working as well in Baltimore, but we had murders in Baltimore to below 200 in 2011, 2012. I was actually, I'd left the U.S. Attorney's Office. I was a prosecutor in the city. I'd ran a division. We did all the wiretaps. We did all the high-profile homicide cases,

below 200. And then eight years ago, in 2015, when the earthquake of Freddie Gray struck Baltimore, the violence skyrocketed. And what you are seeing all across the country, L.A. in Chicago, in New York, San Francisco, you saw first in Baltimore. You saw it in 2015. Okay. So what is your then diagnosis for why crime went down in the 90s and why it started to go up after Freddie Gray? I mean, you have Jim Comey talking about the Ferguson effect, for instance. You know, obviously I worked at the Department of Justice for Jeff Sessions, and he used to tell prosecutors as he traveled the country, crime is not like the task. It does not just go up and down.

We, we are the ones who lower crime. An excellent accent. You know, Rod Rosenstein, who is the U.S. attorney in Maryland who hired me, would say a very similar thing. He said, crime is not like the weather. He said, we have control over the impact or rise or fall of crime. But it doesn't feel like that. It feels more like a tide.

You know, I got to be honest, in those early years when crime was going down, we were doing very specific things. They came at terrible costs, right? the sort of zero tolerance approach that Rudy Giuliani took in New York, you can't... Broken windows. You can't pretend it didn't have an impact.

It did. It just came at profound costs. At some point, we started figuring out that you could actually reduce the number of arrests and also reduce the number of shootings and homicides and carjackings by just being a little bit smarter, right?

This was sort of the smart on crime wave. So we would target the gangs, the violent repeat offenders. We would triage our resources to focus not on every corner boy, but on the lieutenants, the generals, the suppliers, those strategies, which were increasingly sophisticated, were working, and murders were going down, so were the number of arrests. That was the strategy that was working, that was being deployed effectively all across

the nation. What happened in 2015 in Baltimore, which has happened in so many cities in more recent years, is the combination of essentially three things. One is the number of cops overall is down. In Baltimore City, the net loss of police officers over the last 20 years is 1,000 officers. This is a department that used to have 3,200 officers. It now is down to 2,200. In the last eight years since Freddie Gray, the net loss is 500 officers.

And if you don't have enough officers to do community policing, to be out on the streets, both as a deterrent and as a resource for the community, if you don't have enough detectives to solve the more serious cases, inevitably that spiral is going to get worse. That's factor one. Factor two is prosecutors stopped prosecuting cases. We start prosecuting low-level offenses, driven in many instances by sort of political theater and political agenda. We stopped prosecuting serious cases effectively. There were fewer cases that were being made. Our prosecutors, at least in Baltimore,

were getting increasingly inexperienced. So the prosecution piece was not coming. And then the third piece, and this is the piece that people do not understand, Criminals pay attention. Criminals have gotten emboldened. They don't read the stat cards. They don't look at the trend data. They don't read the Brookings reports. They hear it from the streets.

They see it from their colleagues. Their friend is still wandering around. They know that that guy shot and killed someone two weeks ago and shot and killed another person last week, and he's still walking the streets. They know that they got arrested for robbery, and then the case got dropped three months later. You get it. They are getting emboldened, and there are some really lucid examples of that. Can I give you one?

In Baltimore, we have the highest fatality rate of any American city. Most American cities, even the most dangerous ones, one in five, one in six shootings will end in death. In Baltimore, it's one in three. And a reporter was like, I don't understand. We've got Johns Hopkins on the east side. We have a level one shock trauma center on the west side. Why are our shooters more lethal than other American cities? he figured it out. It turns out Baltimore had the highest percentage of headshots of any American city.

Baltimore had the highest average caliber casing at crime scenes, and Baltimore had the highest average number of casings per crime scene. So our shooters were literally using bigger bullets, more bullets, and they were finishing their victims off with headshots. So the reporter went and actually interviewed a number of them. Many of them off the record, you know, they were in jail. one of them was a cooperator in a case of mine on the record and said what's going on these trend lines are going up it wasn't always so they were very honest they said um we're getting tired of these doctors at shock trauma in hopkins we'd shoot a guy six times and they'd patch him up and he'd walk out two weeks later so we figured out if we put away our 22s we got a 40 caliber gun put a high capacity magazine and shot him 10 times and then even though he looked at we

walked over and there were people watching we put two more bullets in their head these miracle workers couldn't bring them back to life. And the risk of one of these people telling who did it and the prosecutor, the cops actually catching us and the prosecutor's actually prosecuting us was lower than the risk of the guy surviving and coming back and killing us. They had a very rational calculus for how they decided to improve their rates of killing people. Well, that is wildly disturbing, depressing, tragic, horrifying. That's awful but fascinating. And it does actually give us a roadmap for what we can do because if you last year have 300 plus murders like Baltimore did and you only make arrests in a quarter of them as Baltimore did, you can't go back and solve the 200 plus murders that were unsolved. But you could triage them. You could have a cold case unit focus on those murders that have 40 caliber casings, 10 or more casings at the crime scene and headshots because that murder was not committed by a first time offender. That one was done. by a serial assassin, literally somebody who's done this over and over and over again.

And if you solve that case, you bring that guy to justice, which you can do if you pour resources into it, you will not only bring a measure of justice for that victim's family, you will also prevent the two or three or four murders he's going to do this year. So then let's talk about some of the other reform measures that have come out of the, you know, the aughts, the 2010s, as criminal justice reform really took hold on, you know, we had sentencing disparity issues that became very famous between crack and cocaine, for instance. But there were a lot more within the progressive movement in the last five or ten years. And I'm not talking about your defund the police, but bail reform, a nonviolent drug offender, not even charging, like making

those misdemeanors, for instance. And we've, let's, I mean, I don't want to use Chesa Boudin as the stand-in for all progressive criminal justice reform, but it might be, helpful here for listeners to think of Chesa Butene in San Francisco, this recall election where the vast majority of a very liberal, leftist, and progressive city saying no, even though their crime rates were not particularly different in terms of trend lines from the rest of the country, that they found his solutions unpersuasive after just a few years. And I think this is a combination of bad policy and bad messaging. And I want to be very clear for your listeners. I'm a lifelong Democrat. You and I had a wonderful, vigorous debate

in that line and in the years to come about a range of topics. And the reason I love talking to you is because we can, you know, responsibly and respectfully agree to disagree. I think part of this is bad policy. The idea that you can just announce that certain crimes aren't criminal anymore is terrible. Of course, prosecutors have to use their common sense judgment about which cases to pursue which cases to prioritize. But to go out there and say these seven categories of crimes, even if you're doing it in front of a cop, we're not going to arrest you. We're not going to prosecute you for that. That sends a terrible message to the community that actually doesn't appreciate this, particularly disinvested communities where this happened. I think people

make a terrible mistake assuming that black and brown communities want public urination and prostitution and drug dealing outside of where their grandmother lives. He sends a terrible message to the cops because they're confused about what they can and can't do. A lot of these people went in to enforce the law. And if the law wants to change, there's ways that that can happen. If we want to legalize prostitution, let's have that conversation. But the idea that we're not going to make arrest or prosecutions on a dime because an elected official single-handedly, unilaterally decided to do it, that sends a very bizarre message to cops. And it sends a terrible message to the criminals because it basically says you can get away with crime. There's a level of lawlessness

that is going to be tolerated. And people, that stuff gives them muscle memory. They start getting accustomed with doing things that they know are illegal and getting away with it. Irrational actors, as you said. Exactly. And then they start graduating to it. So that's a huge mistake on the policy side of things.

There's also a huge mistake on the messaging side of things. I don't know if Chesa Patine is responsible single-handedly for the rising crime in San Francisco. But when crime is rising to say we're going to recommit ourselves to doing the agenda of a few years ago, it feels like political theater. It feels like you're talking to your base and it doesn't look like you're serving your constituents because your constituents are concerned about those things. There are people that are getting killed. There are people that are getting carjacked and robbed. And those violent crimes are not being the subject of the conversation.

And what I'm proud of, and part of it is that I've spent my career as a prosecutor, I'm also a proud Democrat. I work clerk for Guido Calabrese and Justice Stephen Breyer. I don't think we have to return to the days of mass incarceration. Zero tolerance was a huge mistake. But zero policing, zero prosecution, that's a big mistake, too. So I looked at San Francisco mayor's race. You have the former, newly former Republican candidate running against Karen Bass, black, progressive, Democrat. And some fascinating stuff when you look at the actual results of that.

election. Remember in California, it's just the top two finishers will go on in November. So this isn't necessarily that this candidate has won the election. But plurality winner, he ran on a law and order message. Now, mind you. He also outspent Karen Bass, 10 to 1, I think. He had celebrity endorsements. So it's hard to point out any one thing that caused this. But he won black men by 30 points. And a lot of folks watching that, race think that it's the law and order message that particularly reached black men in Los Angeles. And when we broaden that out to the Democratic Party and looking at a midterm election where inflation may be number one, gas prices, grocery store, but crime is quickly rising the

list of things that voters are concerned about and looking for candidates who have some sort of message on that that matches with their own experience. What are Democrats supposed to do when they have a progressive wing of their party that wants to be Chesa Budin and wants to say, you know, we're just going to end jails, for instance, or they are doing the more defund the police style messaging. And then you have a wing of the Democratic Party who are more classical liberals in that sense saying, no, no, no, what we want is to not have crime because that's going to affect poor and communities of color far more than rich white communities. That's what creates the food deserts where you don't have a grocery store or CVS, but we want to do it in a way

that isn't racial profiling. We don't want to have mass incarceration. How do you deal with that in a single party? Yeah, look, this debate is unfolding in every city and every state across the country. It is certainly the center of the argument in Baltimore. I'm running against Marilyn Mosby, who rose to national prominence by bringing charges against police officers after the death of Freddie Gray. All of those cases were lost. And then, ultimately dropped by her. And it started, you know, that was her sort of defining voice. And then she became, you know, one of the leaders of this movement.

In some way, she is the proto-Chesa Boudin. That's right. She was the famous progressive prosecutor back in that era, pre-violent crime spikes. Correct. Before Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, before Chesa Bidine in San Francisco, before, you know, all of these names rose to prominence, there was Marilyn Mosby in Baltimore. And it is not a coincidence that in the year before she arrived, we had around 200 murders. And in the years after she has arrived, we have averaged 333 murders.

That is not a coincidence. And one of the things that I think has happened is in this debate with Marilyn Mosby, people have misunderstood why it is that we're doing so well. Governor Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, has endorsed us. Is that helpful or harmful? It's incredibly helpful. And I'll tell you why it's incredibly helpful. We are the first Democrat he's ever endorsed. He is wildly popular across the state.

He's wildly popular among Democrats. He's more popular among Democrats than he's among Republicans. And the demographic with whom he is most popular are Black voters. And it's because he has done what I think a lot of us is appreciated, which is if you talk to Black voters in West Baltimore and East Baltimore, if you see their priorities, they don't want their kids getting jacked up by some cop for some nonsense. They don't want police brutality. But they do want more cops.

They want cops sending a message to their children and to their grandparents that they're safe. They want a message to the drug dealers and the traffickers that they are not welcome in these neighborhoods. Right. Is it too much to ask to have good, well-trained police officers and a lot of them in your neighborhood? And with all due respect, the members of my party that in many ways have held hostage this issue by sort of viciously attacking those of us who say, actually, we need more cops. Shame on them because what they have not understood is that they have abdicated their responsibility to speak up on behalf of these black and brown communities.

They have claimed that they know better for what these communities want. When if you actually talk to the voters in those neighborhoods, they say, please don't bring back mass incarceration, please don't bring back zero tolerance, but please bring more cops into my neighborhood, so I am not afraid of going out of my house. Interestingly, Baltimore is hemorrhaging people, right? The city of almost a million people is down to $585,000. It is not white flight, Sarah. It is black flight.

It is tens of thousands of middle and black, upper middle class black families that are leaving for the suburbs. And why? Because they can pay half as much in property taxes for better schools and no crime. And they want, we want all of the same things that everybody's always wanted. And how you get there, the notion that in 10 or 20 years, because we lay the seeds of addressing trauma, that crime will go down. I hope that too, but I can't wait for the thousands that will die on the streets of Baltimore, hoping and praying that that works out,

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may vary. Rates may vary. Let's talk barrenogle politics here. Base turning. out is a big part of any election. You need the people who are most on your team. And persuasion, I don't know. I'm curious about how you view your own race on the sort of base part talking to people who already super agree with you and telling them what they want, the small dollar donations. I mean, that's what's driving a lot of this takeover of the Democratic Party by the far left. It's not their median voters, especially their median voters of color, who are now at this point pretty far to the right of the median white liberal voter in the party. Look, let's be just totally frank about this.

This race two years ago, this race four years ago, would look very different. I think the pendulum is returning to a more centrist position. And we are seeing, and this is the reason we're so proud of our campaign, we have as much support among black voters as we do among white voters. Because I think our message speaks to communities of all different backgrounds. because nobody likes crime. And it was hard for people, I think, within my party to say that out loud a few years ago

because it was taught to us that if you said we want more cops that it meant you wanted more mass incarceration. It was taught to us that if you said we need to put violent criminals behind bars, you were advocating for mandatory minimums and zero times. That's just not the case.

There's a much more nuanced argument that I think is taking hold. When we entered this race, It helped that Marilyn Mosby has been federally indicted. She's pending trial. But we knew that we were sort of neck and neck. A poll came out a few weeks after we entered that had a statistical dead heat. What was really compelling about that, it was everybody knew who Marilyn Mosby was, literally virtually 100% name recognition.

We were doing pretty well. I mean, 70% of the city, you know, New Theruvig Naraja, which is a harder name, frankly, for people to recognize. But what was remarkable about her support is it was so. polarized. In some respect, she had her base and no one else. And after the federal indictment came out, her support was essentially cut in half. Will you remind voters what she was indicted before? Sure. I'm not proud of this because I feel like if you're going to commit crimes, you should commit more serious crimes than Marilyn Mosby has. She literally took money out of her, it is alleged. She took money out of her retirement fund, which

she's not permitted to do, and claimed COVID hardship when in fact her salary had gone up during COVID. Her public trial, she's actually the most well-paid elected official in the state of Maryland, and her salary went up, and she nevertheless claimed COVID hardship, along with millions of Americans who actually did experience COVID hardship. She then took that money, and she bought two luxury rental properties in Florida. And in applying for the mortgages on those, it is alleged that she committed mortgage fraud. She made false statements claiming it was a secondary home. She wrote an email that said that she'd been living there with her family in this very safe community, which, the irony of which I think was lost on her for the last

70 days. It's pretty terrible stuff, especially in a city that has had a police commissioner and had a mayor in the last few years go to federal prison for the state's attorney, the top elected law official, law enforcement official, to also be in that suit. You know, she's presumed innocent. Her trial will happen after the primary election. New Illinois. Yeah, this is not something we're proud of. And the last thing I need is, first, the wire, then we own the city, and for the next series to be about our public officials and their corruption.

But it's a part of our reality. And it frankly explains why things are going so badly. The main thing I want to emphasize to your listeners is don't make the assumption that white voters and black voters don't very much care about the same things. they have to be spoken to in a respectful way. I am a South Asian Hindu in a city that is neither South Asian nor Hindu, but we have been able to speak in common sense ways that I think have really resonated with all communities,

and it's the reason we are now leading in the polls, we've raised more money than everyone else, we've gotten the endorsement of the Republican governor, the former Attorney General of Maryland, the former Prince George County Executive, a run of politicians, but also, you know, five of Baltimore's former police commissioners and an unprecedented act came out and endorsed us. The former head of the NAACP in Baltimore City has endorsed us.

One of the leading coalitions of homeless advocates has endorsed us. We've got a lot of different voices coming together. And I really hope this is the future of the Democratic Party. But doesn't this sound a lot like the Los Angeles mayor's race in the sense that you have a single party city. And you've basically broken up the Democratic party into two parties. And you therefore are the, and I'm putting air quotes here, the Republican candidate. And Marilyn Mosby is the Democratic candidate. And so when we broaden this out to nationally where there are competitive congressional races between the two parties, doesn't this just kind of spell disaster for Democrats when there actually is a Republican running that's going to flank with a stronger law and order message on the one

hand and you've sort of reached that equilibrium where if one person's running on one thing, the other has to run on the opposite. I don't think so. And I actually would use an analogy from the Republican Party. I mean, there is a Trump wing of the Republican Party that I think has done terrible damage to your party. It's more the body of the plane at this point. I hope that is wrong. And I think what we are seeing here is that for a few years, people thought that the defund the police, that arm of the party was going to become the party. And I think, God bless our party, we're sort of reclaiming it. We're saying, no, no, no, no, you're the extremists.

You do not represent what black and brown communities want. You do not represent what democratic values are. We are absolutely against mass incarceration. We are absolutely against zero tolerance. I'm one of the biggest advocates for bail reform. I think we should abolish cash flow. There's two countries in the world that still have a cash bail system. The United States and the Philippines, when I was a federal prosecutor, we didn't have cash bail.

If you were a risk to the community or a risk of flight, you were held. If you were not, we released you in conditions of detention. There was a rational approach that did not require a for-profit bail industry. Those are all, I think, still, democratic values. But the wing of the party that has said, our top priority is going after cops of villainizing cops instead of villainizing villains. I think that we are fighting back and you're seeing victories that are going to start accruing. I really do believe that's where the party is I think cash bail is the next big criminal justice reform conversation that's waiting in the wings. I think when you saw sort of the flare up of defund the police, as you said, that's

already flared back down. It's gone. It was maybe gone before it started. The end incarceration movement, I think will continue for some time building momentum. But it's going to be a while before that conversation is going to happen at a time with rising crime. But cash bail is really interesting. And I'm wondering if we can talk just a little more about that. And steal man for a second, why we have cash bail, why that got created, and why the system thought that was a good idea in the first place. Yeah, look, there was a time when bounty hunters, bail bondsmen, were a real thing, where if you didn't show up for court, for some offense, that they would come track you down

because you owed them money in a way, right? They had a financial interest in doing that. That's not what happens anymore. You pay cash bail to a bail bonds company, and they just wait. They just, you fail it to appear, so you get an FTA warrant, and then you fail to appear again, and you fail to appear again. They're not out there hunting you down. Yeah, so originally it was sort of privatizing or outsourcing fugitive finders. That's exactly right.

And so this system gets created with like a deal between those two, the future fugitive finder and the potential future fugitive. And they were going to work it out amongst themselves. Exactly. And that way, police officers weren't taken off finding criminals to look for fugitives, basically. Correct. And just like every sophisticated industry, they figured out that they actually could put their feet up and wait. And eventually, they'd get pulled over for something else. And that's when the FDA warrant would be executed by a police officer.

So that outsourcing got turned back to police hands. Or they just write it off. It's a volume business like insurance. Correct. Exactly. And the consequence, the sort of the part that was unjust, was poor people were getting held because they couldn't make $1,000 bails, where their mom was remorgeting the house so they could have her son come home because he'd been charged with a petty offense.

And not because they were a flight risk and not because they were a danger to the community. Exactly. Which are really the only two reasons we hold people pre-trial. Correct. You're going to hurt someone else, or you're never going to show up. Exactly. So imagine that you get charged with simple possession of drugs. You're a victim of addiction.

You don't need to spend the next nine months in prison. You might want to spend the next nine months in a rehab center, but you certainly don't need to spend. But they couldn't make the $1,000 bail because they're victims of addiction. And so they get stuck at home, not being able to get any of the help that they need. And conversely, the violent offenders get posted a million dollars of bail. And if they're rich, they can post it. I literally prosecuted a guy, him Randall Martin, you can Google him. He was an executive who went to his ex-mistresses home, lit the house on fire with her and her young son.

inside. He was charged with multiple counts of first-degree attempted murder and first-degree arson. He posted a million-dollar bail and was back out on the streets three days later. And then he went and approached the witness, intimidated the witness, threatened the witness, all of those things. We eventually got him. But the idea that rich people... That guy doesn't sound super smart. You only catch the... What I will tell you is this. The fact that poor people were getting stuck languishing in prison because they couldn't post a thousand-dollar bail and a million dollar bail could be posted by a violent criminal because he was rich, that just seemed profoundly

unfair. And the federal system doesn't have it. Let me just emphasize, there is a functional federal system in this country that does not require cash bail. Okay, but the result of not having cash bail then is going to be that a whole bunch more people get held pre-trial as potential flight risks or violent, you know, could reoffend while out. Isn't that also a problem? We don't want to hold more people before their trial? I think the people that should be held should be held and the people that shouldn't be held and I know that sounds tautological, as they would say in law school, but Sarah, is there some person who is being held that you think ought to be released?

Is there some, like, because they, because they could make the $150,000 bail? I think the idea is that the flight risk people become less of a flight risk if they've got money on the line and that if you hold them, that's not doing any good for the community. The violent ones, let's set them aside. Fine, you're a danger to the community. You're right. We should hold the people we should hold and we should let go the people who aren't going to be dangerous. But there's that second one, the flight risk one.

Someone who doesn't have serious ties to the community, for instance, is considered a flight risk. And so now they're just going to get held there instead of just putting, you know, hey, if you, I'm using small numbers here, if you put $100 down, you'll get your $100 back if you show up. For a lot of people, that $100 is pretty motivating. So Randall Martin, it sounds like you would hold him because he was charged with three accounts. attempted murder and the million dollar bail is not offered to him. Correct. Okay. Then you've got some also because he's too dumb. Yeah. You've got some medium drug dealer who what, you would release him because he has $100,000 and he can come for his trial. I don't think we're seeing evidence that people are not fleeing to Mexico because they've got $150,000 in the bail system

in Baltimore. What they do is go back out and start selling drugs again. That's what they do. And so once you see that, you should start realizing that you either are going to have to make a smart judgment about the federal system or you're going to have to take a risk that people are going to recommit crimes. What I hear is the opposite worry, which is that you're releasing too many people. That's not, I think, the practical consequence in the places that have abolished cash bail. It doesn't happen in other countries. It doesn't happen in the federal system. It doesn't happen in the states everywhere from New Jersey to Kentucky. you know, red and blue states that have abolished cash bail.

This is just a place where the bail bonds industry and their lobbyists are very effective. When Maryland fought back, they flew in Paul Clement to argue for it. That is a very good illustration of how much money is at stake in that industry. That doesn't make it right. It just makes it a very effective lobby. I feel like Paul's hourly billable rate was recently published. It was, I think, 1800. I don't like saying this, but when I clerked at the court, Paul Clement was among the best advocates I'd ever seen.

Oh, absolutely. He's a very, very gifted. The best oral argument from this term was the Coach Kennedy argument where I disagree with his position. And it was so good. Yeah. There was a 30 second aside for the nerds in your audience. Paul Clement, what he did, I think, as well as any advocate I'd seen, was he could almost anticipate the issues that a justice had in their clerk's memo. Like, it was, we always say, like, did he really? Justice Kennedy's clerk's memo, because he would sort of divine from the questions that were

being asked the issue that was hanging it up. And he would come back for rebuttal and almost ignore everything that had happened and raise one issue. And it was like, we knew it. We knew that was the issue that was nagging Justice Kennedy. And he had figured out over the course of the oral argument how to do it. This is not a Paul Clement commercial. I think he's advocated for some terrible things, including cash bail, but he's very good at what he does. This is what Therun and I do. We like have a very serious conversation and then take these little cul-de-sacs, be like, oh, yeah, but also this. Calling all book lovers, the Toronto International Festival of Authors

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Okay, so what happens then to the future of criminal justice issues in this country? Are we going to start hearing conversations about just putting a lot more resources into hiring more officers, better training for officers, more money for prosecutions? I think about the conversation we've had post-Evaldi about gun reform issues and red flag laws. And part of the problem with red flag laws is they're only as good as. the resources you put into them, it's going to take a lot more money to actually be able to use red flag laws effectively, in my view. And generally, I mean, a lot of things come down to

money and where your priorities are. But we have a whole lot of things that a whole lot of people want to spend money on, especially on the Democratic side. Are Democrats really going to be able to agree or run on a lot more resources in the way that we talk about teachers? a common theme, right? We should pay teachers a lot more money. Maybe we need to start paying police officers a lot more money to incentivize people to go into this job in the first place. You know, when you listed some of the reasons that crime has increased, one, you didn't list. You said we've had fewer police officers. Yeah. But one of the reasons, and this was the Ferguson effect that Jim Comey was talking about in the wake of Michael Brown, was demoralization

within the police force. They're leaving at the very extreme. end, but even those who are staying, the idea is you're sitting in your car and you see someone doing something that doesn't look great. But if you go out and stop this person, maybe you're going to have to fill out a lot of paperwork or you're going to get accused of racism. And so you just stay in your car in a way that 10 years ago, you would have popped down and like, hey, what's going on? What are we doing? And that type of community policing that is totally up to the individual. There's nothing in a handbook that's going to tell them they must get out of the car at that moment has had it looks like to me just a huge effect across the country

and you're going to beat that back two ways. I mean, one, it'd be nice if we didn't demoralize our police officers by villainizing them all the time. But frankly, another way you're going to do it is pay them more. Yep. So let me start by saying this. I am an optimist about so many things. Everything. You are, I truly am. Everything. It's very annoying. I am not an optimist about our ability to achieve meaningful consensus gun control. legislation at the federal level. I'm not holding my breath on that one. And so if you want to see gun violence go down, you've got to put your money in something else. And I do think that in Baltimore, again, as an example, you are seeing people appreciate the fact that you don't need

to spend that much more, but you do need to be committed to spending that money. In Baltimore City a couple years ago, we spent $48 million on police overtime. We budgeted like $8 million. We spent $48 million. For $40 million, the excess, you could pay cops $100,000 each and have 400 more cops on the streets, right? Are you serious? I mean, that is how that money could be spent instead of giving, not optional, but mandatory overtime to a bunch of officers that are already dramatically overworked. At $100,000 a pop, you could recruit. That'll increase morale. Yes, it will. And you could recruit more local, more diverse, more women, more immigrants, more professionals. This is a great job. And frankly, politicians, I'll count myself, you know,

begrudgingly as among them, need to celebrate police officers. They need to remind people that these are men and women who kiss their children goodbye in the morning and go into the most dangerous places in the country and in some instances in the world. And they put a badge and a gun on and at a time when it's not particularly fashionable, they do their best to serve and protect us. And it does put them in awful positions, in very dangerous positions, in Baltimore,

either yesterday or the day before the days are starting to blend, a Comico County deputy sheriff was shot and killed by a guy who there was an open warrant on, who was on probation for an armed robbery that he had gotten a slap on the wrist for. He got a PBJ, a probation before judgment, was right back on the streets for an armed robbery using a gun of a McDonald's where he assaulted the people there, took $1,000 in the cash register, and then got sent home. Yeah, what do we think that guy's going to do next? You're literally teaching them that there are no consequences even for violent crimes.

And then when a deputy sheriff trying to arrest this guy approaches him, he turns around and guns him down. It is happening. and if you want people to take that risk to protect us, by the way, you've got to pay them appropriately. You've got to train them appropriately. You've got to respect them. You've got to celebrate them.

And by the way, in the next 48 hours, every politician in the state of Maryland will stand up and remind the world of how much they love cops because a police officer, a sheriff, was shot and killed in Comico County. But the other 364 days of the week, they will go back to talking about

whether or not cops are the problem or part of the solution. So let's talk about guns, Because you've been a prosecutor for your entire career at this point, a lot of which is going to come down to guns, illegal weapons, weapons that have been modified, ghost guns, that nature, and people who illegally possess those weapons, felons in possession, domestic violence abusers. You said you weren't optimistic about federal legislation, but set aside the possible for a second. What will actually bring down gun violence? let's start with that big picture question. But when we think about the vast majority of gun deaths in this country, they're first of all suicides.

Second, violent crime. And at the very, very bottom of the list are school shootings, even though, you know, I want your solution for school shootings. So maybe you could walk through a big picture what you think the solutions are and then break it down. Like, what would stop suicides? What would stop gun violence on the street? And is there anything that we can do to stop future Yuvaldi's? Sarah, you have already added more nuance to that conversation than people have had over the last 20 years, right? I mean, to distinguish between those three categories alone is a huge start.

The challenge with suicides is not guns per se. Although, by the way, it is much harder to kill yourself if you don't have a gun. And we have to understand that if people are at risk because of mental health, because of depression for suicide, we ought to have enormous safeguards to make sure they can't access a gun because that is how people kill themselves in this country. They kill themselves with guns. Thank goodness the other methods, which are always cries for help, don't end in death.

They end up in hospitalization. They end up in getting treatment. They don't end in death. But if you put a gun to your head and you pull the trigger, there's no coming back. But the other two categories, which really do deserve a lot of renewed attention, are very different. I remember saying on the campaign trail once, if you took the top 12, 15 mass shootings in American history,

all of them, and you put them all in one city, all in one year, you would have less murders than happen in Baltimore City every year. Columbine, Sandy Hook, all of them, put them all in one city, and it's still less murders than we have in Baltimore. and we don't have mass shootings of that variety. We do have four people getting gun down on a corner, two of them dead, two of them shot, which technically qualifies as a mass shooting.

But the kinds of things we're talking about, that's not what's driving gun violence in Baltimore. The mass shootings phenomenon in schools, in my view, it is very clear that the ban on AR-15s and assault weapons would make a difference. We see statistically what happened when the assault weapon ban was in place

at the federal level, and we've seen what has happened since. that's the one I'm not optimistic about that one's causal not correlative because I mean violent crime overall was increasing when the assault weapons ban I think the number of deaths in those cases the the volume of people that get killed the reticence of people to intercede like police officers in Uvalde they're not afraid of a guy with a barretta 40 what they're afraid of is a guy with an AR 15 because they know that they can take down the guy because they're not very good shots if they've got a single shot, a semi-automatic pistol.

These AR-15s are used in war for a reason, and a police officer, who, by the way, often is not armed with AR-15s. It's really hard to go in there and know your outgun. That is not to excuse what happened in Avaldi, which was... I still don't understand what happened in Evaldi, by the way. Like, as they keep trying to explain and re-explain and take back things they said previously, I am baffled.

So, in some ways, they don't want to talk about the specifics of it, because I don't understand. But if you are... So that is going to help. Mental health is going to have to be the focus there. But be clear, the gun violence that is the overall cause of gun deaths in this country, which is urban violence, gang violence, retaliation violence, domestic violence. Those things, we have the laws on the books that we need.

One of the reasons we know that is because we've driven murders down with no new laws. When murders were below 200, it's not because we passed a law in 2008. It's because we were using laws that were passed in the 90s. in 2000. This is the answer no one wants. We have the laws. We need more money. We need more money for the prosecutors. We need more money for the police officers. And Sarah, just to make... Money translates into cases. That's right. Money translates into closure rates. The closure rates in Chicago, by the way, are we in like single digits now? I mean, it's bad. And I want to give one really hard-hitting number on that. But before I do, that $40 million overtime example was to say, if you don't

have to add a dollar to the budget for the Baltimore Police Department and you could have 400 police being paid $100,000 each, which frankly is not what you need to recruit a college kid from Morgan State to come work in his home city, but would be more than enough to make sure that they have health care and pensions. In Baltimore County, which is the county that surrounds Baltimore City, they have 12 to 14 detectives for 30 to 40 homicides, one homicide detective for every three to four homicides. In Baltimore City, we have one homicide detective for every 10 to 12 homicides. In Baltimore County, they solve 90% of the homicides. In Baltimore City, they solve less than a quarter. It's not because the county detectives are good. They are

good. The city detectives are the best in the world because they investigate murders every day, seven days a week. It's that they don't have enough. Yeah, their per capita closure rate is the same. Exactly. And in fact, this is a really low-hanging fruit. I don't need 600 more cops. I need 25 more homicide detectives. 25 more homicide detectives in the Baltimore Police Department, and you would start seeing real impact on that murder number, which is, by the way, why I'm an optimist. No, you were born an optimist. I'm convinced it is genetically in through that everything is always just around the corner.

There is a rainbow. I can't wait to prove it. Last question. You were part of the post-conviction process. for a very famous case that if you're into podcasts, this is probably a podcast you listen to. It was really sort of in some ways the beginning of podcast. The podcast that launched them all. That's right.

This is, I'm talking about serial, the podcast about the conviction of Adnan Syed, who killed a young woman in Maryland. I'm curious what you thought of the podcast. I'm curious what you thought of the case and what it means to have that. much attention focused on a case whether it's good for people to enter their knowledge of the criminal justice system through something like that. On the one hand, you know, you have like law and order, which is fictionalized. On the other hand, you have sort of true crime shows that are maybe overly sensationalized. The one nice thing about serial is they took their time.

It was very detailed. I am mindful of talking about this case, not because of the controversy. and popularity around it, but because as a prosecutor that was involved in the case on a matter that could at any moment be the subject of active litigation, you know, I always refer to what I have said in court, and I refer people to read the documents that were filed in court, which I promise you none of the podcast listeners did, or most. I think there's a few people probably did. There were some obsessives out there with Syria for sure. That's exactly right. I'd say two things. One is the podcast as a podcast is spellbinding.

It is a terrific illustration of the power of that medium. It is a great example of really powerful storytelling. And I don't mean that like it's just a story. I mean really sequential, thoughtful storytelling. I found it compelling. When I first listened to it, to be honest, I listened to it not in my capacity as Deputy Attorney General for the State of Maryland that would handle the matter,

but rather as an alumni of the same high school, school where this happened. So this happened at Woodlawn High School, which was a tough school in Baltimore County. And so when I listened to it, it was because I knew of the murderer sort of obliquely. It was a number of years after I had graduated. But it was a very, very compelling podcast. What I say about the matter about the case, just to be clear, this was litigated through Maryland's highest court. The state ultimately prevailed. The conviction was affirmed. I said this in open court once. It is perhaps my easiest summary of it, which is what is popular is not always just. What is just is not always popular. We were certainly aware

of the fact that a lot of people thought what was happening was X, Y, or Z. But that's not what prosecutors are supposed to be guided by. What I certainly have been guided by is to do the right thing, to do the just thing, no matter what, even when it's not popular, even when it's not easy. And when we were going through the appeals, there was an amicus brief filed by states attorneys from all across the state of Maryland. Every state's attorney, except for, I believe, the ones that were the parties in interest to Baltimore City and Baltimore County, states attorneys. These were Republican and Democrats. These were people that were veterans and newcomers, people that were up for election and ones that were not up for election. And they

joined this amicus brief in unison to support the state of Maryland. and said three things. Number one, this conviction was premised on overwhelming evidence of guilt. I think they actually said something like this has more evidence than we routinely see in cases where a conviction was secured and rightly upheld on appeal. Second, Mr. Syed received more than adequate counsel from an attorney that was, you know, celebrated in her time. And third, we caution, I'm not quoting, I'm sorry,

or paraphrasing, we caution the courts and the public from allowing these cases that are the subject of such great public interest to distort the outcomes in courts that these cases should not be treated differently than any other case. And I said this to the judge when I was arguing it, which was our goal is to make sure that this case is treated the same way that any other case would be treated. And just because you have a person who has a following doesn't mean that they get a bigger bite of the apple than a person who doesn't. I think we wrote, there are victims of ineffective assistance of counsel. There are victims of the criminal justice system in Baltimore, in Maryland

across the country, and the Attorney General of Maryland, as well as the state's attorneys, routinely join efforts to free people that were wrongfully convicted. Brian Fras has, I have. This was just not an example of that. And that is what ultimately the Court of Appeals found. I do sort of wonder if we have the CSI effect from the aughts and tens, and now we have sort of the podcast effect where there are all these podcasts that dive into specific cases. And as you said, those sometimes feel like they are getting a bigger bite at the apple. Think of the staircase on HBO right now. Michael Peterson case has had a documentary podcast book, I think. And now in HBO series with Colin Firth, who is fabulous, by the way, just so good. And Sarah, I mean, you as a person in this

world, understand this, interesting podcasts are not cut and dry. So if a case is cut and dry, if you want to try to make it an interesting podcast, you better not present it in a cut and dry way. You know, the guilty guy who got found guilty, there's no famous podcast about that story. And so you have to be mindful of the fact that the storytellers, the podcasters, understandably and rightly to capture their audiences' interests, are going to try to present the grayest version of sometimes stories that are actually black and white. But you have no doubt that the right person is in jail. I have always said that a prosecutor's responsibility is first to himself to make sure that they

know in their heart of hearts that what they are doing is right. What I have said is my job is to uphold the law, to convict the guilty, and to free the innocent. That is what I believe the state of Maryland was doing in that case and in every other that I've been involved in. It doesn't do any good at the innocent guys in jail, right? Like, doesn't do you any good because it means the other guys out. 100%. So, all right.

Theroux, thank you so much for joining me today. This was a lot of fun. Your website, Justice for Baltimore.com, you're running for Baltimore City, States Attorney, which is the worst title. Maybe the first thing you can do is change that title. When is Election Day? It is coming up. It's five weeks from now. July 19th is the election.

And maybe I just end sort of one quick plug. I mean, the reality is that Marilyn Mosby and Chesa Boudin were put into office because of special interests from across the country. We are asking for support from across the country. You can text Justice for All to 801-801. If you want to make a contribution, you can go to our website, Justice for Baltimore.com. We need to be able to fight back and have the funds to make sure that this era of lawlessness, this era of prosecutors, you know, pushing to defund the police, refusing to prosecute criminals is over.

I think that's a message that, frankly, everybody should want to send Republicans, Democrats, Americans. And I am so grateful. This was so fun, and I hope we get a chance to do it again. Let's just not camp out anymore. I'm not sure we're campers

and, like, urban campers. If there's a Supreme Court case that you don't have a special interest in, you should have to camp out like the rest of us. This is brought to you by the This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. SquareSpace is the platform that helps you create a pollen

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