Machine Gun Mama Returns: Lightly sentenced machine-gun seller gets another 6 months in prison for again violating the terms of her release

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, May 8, 2015

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Jennifer Debois Dickerson’s Facebook photo from 2012.

“Leave the girl alone,” Richard Debois says to a reporter entering Maryland U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett’s courtroom on Apr. 16 to cover the violation-of-supervised-release hearing of Debois’ daughter, 35-year-old Jennifer Debois Dickerson, whose machine-gun case has drawn repeated City Paper coverage since August 2012. That’s when Bennett, despite Dickerson’s prodigious flurry of drug-related arrests in late 2011 and early 2012, gave her a surprisingly light sentence: time served for a conviction that carried a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. She’d sold a machine gun to an undercover federal agent.

Since then, Dickerson has already come before Bennett a second time, receiving a six-month sentence in 2013 for violating the terms of supervised release by testing positive for cocaine and morphine and failing to appear for court-ordered counseling. So this is her third trip before a judge who’s given her extraordinary opportunities to fly straight.

Dickerson, her long, straight hair flowing freely to the middle of her back, is wearing a yellow jumpsuit as she sits with her attorney, assistant public defender Susan Hensler. Bennett explains the alleged violations: In addition to testing positive for a variety of drugs, including cocaine, morphine, and marijuana, four times between Nov. 20, 2014 and March 12, 2015, she also left Maryland without permission on Dec. 31, 2014, failed to submit monthly supervision reports as required, failed to stay employed since her last job at Vagabond Sandwich Company in Bel Air, failed to notify authorities when she changed address, and failed to participate in required mental-health treatment.

Dickerson “has been a frustrating person to supervise,” assistant U.S. Attorney John Purcell tells Bennett, since she’s “not making whole-hearted efforts to essentially save her own life.” Still, Purcell explains, there is “an unusual way we are proceeding on this,” because, despite the fact that Dickerson’s “continued drug use” is clear, the government acknowledges the “uncertain nature of some of those tests.” So Dickerson is agreeing to plead guilty to only two violations: leaving the state without permission and failing to submit monthly reports.

Hensler says Dickerson is “struggling still with addiction,” since “she hasn’t been able to get her drug problem under control.” She adds that a recent “psychiatric diagnosis” is “the issue that has not been addressed,” and suggests to Bennett that treatment for the condition, which is not disclosed in open court, “may help Ms. Dickerson address this insidious addiction.”

Dickerson’s history of interaction with law enforcers, other than the machine-gun sale, depicts a working mother living in a nice Green Spring Valley home whose life spiraled out of control. The arrests started to mount in September 2011, when cops raided the home she shared with her husband and son and discovered a trove of pot, prescription pills, and cash. She pleaded guilty to pot possession in that case, but in January 2012, she sold 4 ounces of weed to an undercover cop in the Mondawmin Mall parking lot, and when she was later arrested, she was holding weed, heroin, and equipment for shooting it up. The same day, the cops raided her father’s Ellicott City home and turned up evidence of a high-volume pot-sales enterprise, along with some LSD, hashish, hash oil, and a handgun. Dickerson and Debois were both convicted of pot dealing in Howard County as a result.

“I apologize,” Dickerson says to Bennett, for “coming back here again” and causing “so much problems and worry” for those around her. She “made attempts” to get her act together, she continues, and when she served the six months at Federal Correctional Institution-Danbury (the facility where Piper Kerman was incarcerated, and subsequently wrote the book on which the Netflix series “Orange is the New Black” is based), “all I got was a drug-education class.” But, she tells Bennett she was drug-free while in prison, and that “I’ve had periods of abstinence,” but “outpatient programs” were “not good enough” to help her stay clean in the long haul.

“Do you know how many people stand here and have drug issues?” Bennett asks Dickerson, rhetorically. Saying she’s caused “great pain” to her father, mother, and son, who Bennett said was 9 years old in 2013, “who’s doing quite well without you,” Bennett declares that she is going to “have to go back to prison again” and adds that “we’re determined to use all the resources we can to get to the root of this problem.”

Explaining his philosophy of handling offenders still beholden to him, Bennett says, “I’m not of the mind … to just cut them free,” because “we don’t give up on people. I want to keep my thumb on them. That’s how I feel about it. I’m not going to throw in the towel on people.”

“I wish you the best of luck,” Bennett says to Dickerson, after pronouncing another six-month sentence followed by two more years of supervised release. “You just have to buckle down. It requires a certain amount of self-discipline.” Meanwhile, he adds, “your son is growing up,” and he’s “doing it without you.”

Machine-Gun Mama Goes Free: Despite multiple drug arrests, suburban mom gets time served for selling AK-style machine gun

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Sept. 5, 2012

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Jennifer Debois Dickerson’s Facebook photo from 2012.

Maryland U.S. District judge Richard Bennett on Aug. 27 gave a 32-year-old suburban Baltimore mother, who pleaded guilty to machine-gun possession, a chance to rehabilitate her drug-addled life without going to federal prison. Bennett sentenced Jennifer Debois Dickerson to the three months she’d already spent incarcerated on charges stemming from her sale, for $1,350, of an AK-style machine gun to an undercover agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) last November.

The maximum sentence faced by Dickerson was 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Bennett did not impose a fine, but put her on three years of probation, the first five months of which will be spent on home detention at Dickerson’s mother’s house in Bethany Beach, Del., where, the judge disclosed, he owns a second home.

The judge cited Dickerson’s drug-addiction problems and family situation in justifying the light sentence despite her two prior pot convictions. Though evidence in the case shows she sold a machine gun, Bennett stated that Dickerson “is not a machine-gun dealer,” adding that “the simple fact of the matter” is that she was “dragged into this by a husband that subsequently left her and her child.”

“I have looked very carefully at this case,” Bennett said to Dickerson, noting that he has a “second home within walking distance of your mother’s place” in Bethany Beach. “I was there just yesterday,” Bennett added, pointing out the irony of Dickerson’s “pain and heartache” amidst the resort community’s beachside beauty.

City Paper left a message at Bennett’s chambers, asking for comment, but did not hear back from him.

Similar machine-gun cases in Maryland federal court have had notably different outcomes. In 2010, Ernest Johnson was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to possessing the same kind of machine gun Dickerson sold. Johnson did not sell the gun, but his prior convictions lengthened his sentence.

A decade ago, Bennett himself sentenced Edgardo Nieves, Jr., to 21 months in prison for possessing a broken machine gun that he had stored in a guest house on his parent’s farm. Nieves, whose conviction was overturned on appeal, appears not to have had a prior criminal record and, like Johnson, he did not sell the machine gun—in fact, Nieves told agents where it was.

During Dickerson’s sentencing hearing, Bennett twice asked Dickerson’s retained defense attorney, Lawrence Rosenberg, and assistant U.S. attorney John Purcell, who prosecuted the case, if they’d like to seal the proceeding to shield it from public scrutiny. Each time, they declined.

Before telling Dickerson “it is ironic that you are here, but it may be a blessing,” Bennett noted that “this court sees many drug-addiction cases” in which defendants go to “prison for 15, 25, and 30 years.” Bennett added that Dickerson’s appearance before him is “perhaps the best thing that could have happened to you.”

Dickerson—who has a 9-year-old son and had, until her legal troubles mounted, a $30,000-a-year job as an office manager at her husband’s construction firm—faces an uphill battle to put her life in order. Based on court records, it appears to have fallen apart starting last September, when police executed a no-knock, predawn raid at her rented Green Spring Valley home, which she shared with her husband and son, and found pounds of marijuana, hundreds of prescription pills, about $1,300 in cash, and evidence of a cocaine party.

Dickerson and her husband, John Turner Dickerson, were arrested, as were two guests, Alan Franklin Chapman and Elizabeth Supharat McCarron. Dickerson pleaded guilty to pot possession and was sentenced to time served. Her husband received an 18-month suspended sentence and currently has an open warrant for violating probation in the case; his last known address was in Eureka, Calif., in Humboldt County. McCarron received a six-month suspended sentence and the charges against Chapman were dropped.

Chapman was present when Dickerson sold the machine gun to the undercover ATF agent, according to court records. The agent “entered a residence” in the Baltimore area “and Dickerson followed with Chapman and placed the weapon on a couch.” The agent then “asked if it was fully automatic. Chapman replied by stating, ‘I don’t know, it’s not mine,’” and Dickerson “stated, ‘It’s fully automatic.’” After counting the $1,350 the agent had handed her for the gun, Dickerson agreed to sell the agent “high grade marijuana for $4,500 per pound” and handed the agent “two loaded 50 round magazines” for the machine gun, saying, “You can’t buy the fifty ones here,” according to the records.

Dickerson’s unraveling continued in January, when she sold four ounces of weed to an undercover ATF agent for $1,300 in the parking lot of Mondawmin Mall in Baltimore City. A warrant for her arrest was issued about two weeks later, and after she was spotted leaving Brown’s Motel in Ellicott City with her husband, Dickerson was arrested. They found joints on her husband (who was charged and is currently wanted on a warrant in the case) and, on Dickerson, they found weed, heroin, a syringe, a tourniquet, and a burnt spoon.

Later that morning, police raided the home of Dickerson’s dad, at the end of Hobsons Choice Lane in the nearby Allenford development, where she had been living and where her husband’s company, JTD Building and Remodeling, was based. They found marijuana stored in labeled glass mason jars, hashish, hash oil, and LSD, along with a handgun and other evidence of a high-volume weed-selling operation. Dickerson and her father, Richard Evan Debois, were indicted in Howard County as a result. Debois was found guilty of pot-dealing at an Aug. 13 trial before a judge, and is awaiting his sentence, while Dickerson is scheduled for trial in September.

Dickerson was first charged in the machine-gun case on Feb. 16, the same day another man—Robert Taylor Holderman—was charged for selling a machine gun to an undercover ATF agent for $1,500 in the Severn area. Court records describe Holderman as Dickerson’s co-defendant, though Holderman, unlike Dickerson, has not been indicted by a grand jury. Nothing has happened in Holderman’s case since March, and he has not yet been arraigned, though he is out on conditional release while the case is pending.

During Dickerson’s sentencing in the machine-gun case, Bennett expounded in detail on U.S. Supreme Court rulings that, over the past decade, have liberated federal judges from mandatory sentences under the federal sentencing guidelines. Now they are free to depart, sometimes significantly, from the guidelines’ astringent calculus, Bennett explained, based on factors that they have great latitude in weighing.

After announcing that the guideline range for Dickerson was 21 to 27 months in prison, Bennett called a bench conference, leaving courtroom observers unable to know what was discussed. When it was over, he announced that Dickerson’s criminal history had been “overrepresented” in the prior calculation, and now her range would be “reduced considerably” to eight to 14 months in prison.

“You are here because you put yourself here,” Bennett told Dickerson, and warned her of “the cycle that is created” by addiction that “is passed to the next generation,” so if she’s not careful, “you’ll see your son up here at the age of 19 or 20 . . . I see it all the time.”

After announcing the time-served sentence, Dickerson’s mother, Cheryl Debois, wept, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “I intend to keep a thumb on this case,” Bennett said sternly to Dickerson, adding, “I’ve got loads of defendants that come before me who have children issues,” so “don’t let me down on this.”

Dickerson, reached by phone in Bethany Beach on Aug. 30, declined to comment. “I just don’t want to be in the paper,” she said, adding, “every day is a new day.”

The Rumrunner Diary: Maryland liquor stores suspected of supplying New York booze smugglers

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Sept. 26, 2012

For nearly two generations, court records show law enforcers have had evidence of large-scale illegal smuggling of Maryland-taxed booze to New York, where alcohol taxes are much higher. Only recently, though, have the revenue collectors taken to fighting it seriously, staging a raid last year on Northside Liquors in Elkton, Md., that resulted in the owner being criminally prosecuted and forfeiting to the government nearly $250,000 in seized, ill-gotten cash.

The crackdown continued this summer, according to a search-warrant affidavit filed in Maryland’s U.S. District Court on Sept. 14, before it was sealed from public scrutiny by a judge on the same day. The document reveals a series of raids on five other Maryland liquor stores, all in Cecil County, also suspected of supplying booze smugglers from New York: Happy 40 Discount Liquors in Elkton, Chesapeake Wine and Spirits in Chesapeake City, North East Liquors in North East, and Crown Liquors and Park Liquors in Perryville.

The warrant, signed July 12 by U.S. District Judge Beth P. Gesner, was written by M. Lisa Ward, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also suggests that liquor distributors, not just liquor stores, are in on the alleged smuggling scheme.

The latest round of raids were based on an investigation started last July, according to Ward’s affidavit, when law enforcers received information that liquor distributors in Maryland “have been engaged in selling liquor, knowing that it was being transferred for resale in New York, without paying New York State liquor taxes.”

Booze in Maryland is taxed at $1.50 per gallon, Ward’s affidavit explains, whereas in New York, the rate is $6.44 per gallon—plus another dollar per gallon in New York City. Thus, there is a significant margin of profit to be made in the alleged scheme—especially if, as Ward’s affidavit and other court documents claim, it has been going on for a long time, involving large volumes of alcohol.

When City Paper called James E. Smith, chairman and chief executive officer of Reliable Churchill, one of the wholesalers named in the affidavit, on Sept. 20, and started to share with him what the affidavit states, he said, “I have no comment. I don’t know anything about it,” and hung up the phone. Smith is also president of his industry’s trade group, Licensed Beverage Distributors of Maryland. Tom Cole, the New Orleans-based president of Republic National Distributing Company, the other wholesaler named in the affidavit, could not be reached for comment.

As for the law enforcers staging the investigation, ICE spokesperson Nicole Navas, in a Sept. 20 e-mail, stated “there is nothing for public release at this time,” while Marcia Murphy, spokesperson for the Maryland U.S. Attorney’s Office, also had no comment. Cary Ziter, spokesperson for the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, which Ward’s affidavit says is involved in the probe, writes in an e-mail that, while “our Criminal Investigation Division often is involved with local, state or federal officials around the country on investigations,” he won’t “comment on, or confirm, any particular investigation that might be in progress.”

Messages left with the targeted liquor stores and their attorneys were not returned by press time. Joseph Shapiro, spokesperson for the Maryland Comptroller’s Office, which court documents say has been aware of the alleged smuggling scheme, had no comment other than to say the agency “takes the illegal sales of alcohol very seriously” and is “very proud” of its “strong working relationships” with law-enforcement agencies.

According to sources cooperating with the probe, Ward’s affidavit explains, “it would be perfectly obvious to anyone with knowledge of the retail liquor business that it literally would take years to sell in retail the quantities of liquor that Republic or Reliable was delivering to Northside every couple of weeks.” (Emphasis in the original.)

Bank records, Ward’s affidavit explains, “show deposits from most Republic and Reliable customers around the state of Maryland to be under $3,000; exceptional are the Cecil County customers who routinely paid more than $15,000 and sometimes paid up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in each check.” The affidavit says, for example, that Chesapeake Wine and Spirits paid over $300,000 to Republic and $400,000 to Reliable in one 10-day period in late 2011.

Until the crackdown on Northside Liquors last year, law-enforcement attention to the problem had been spotty, according to court records. Though seven men from New York were charged federally, and five of them convicted, in a 2000 case involving Maryland liquor smuggled to Canada, Northside’s prior owner, Robert Pagliaro, was given wide latitude for years, despite much evidence of the store’s involvement in liquor smuggling.

In 1995, Pagliaro agreed to pay $5,000 to avoid criminal prosecution in connection with the alleged smuggling activities, according to court records. In 2004, when 160 cases of Northside-purchased booze were intercepted in a vehicle headed to New York, Pagliaro got another visit from authorities. In 2007, after Wilmington, Del., law enforcers seized a large amount of cash and liquor after a New York-bound vehicle was stopped, the driver said he’d been purchasing 100 cases of booze every three months from Northside. This time, when Pagliaro was visited by the authorities, he agreed to give up $5,000 in seized money and told agents he was selling the liquor store and moving to Italy.

Northside’s new owner, Tushar Patel, kept the scheme going, according to court records—and also kept Pagliaro’s son, Michael Pagliaro, in the corporate fold. Patel ended up pleading guilty to possession of untaxed alcohol in Cecil County Circuit Court and receiving probation before judgment. The federal government sued to keep nearly $250,000 in funds seized during the Northside raid, and Patel settled the matter by agreeing not to contest the money in return for the government returning nearly 600 cases of seized booze.

Ward’s affidavit describes “a cycle of proceeds from the New York smugglers to the Cecil County liquor stores and then to Republic and Reliable,” characterizing the conduct as breaking wire-fraud and money-laundering statutes. While her affidavit refers to several arrests of New York smugglers while on their return trips with vehicles laden with booze, it appears that none of the liquor store owners and wholesalers have been formally accused of committing any crimes.

Laid Bare: Case of drug-dealing stripper murdered for snitching headed for trial

By Van Smith

Published in City Paper, Oct. 3, 2012

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From left to right: Cherrie Marie Gammon, Donte Bernard Baker, and Gary Thenor Cromartie.

Cherrie Marie Gammon, a 25-year-old stripper at Club Pussy Cat on Baltimore’s Block, was due in court on Dec. 17, 2010 to answer to drug-possession charges filed that August. She didn’t show up.

Five days earlier, she’d died in a hospital after having been found by police, shot five times in the chest, near Leon Day Park in West Baltimore. Federal prosecutors allege she was killed over a $100 drug debt owed to the crew she was dealing drugs for, who suspected she was an informant who’d helped police make recent arrests, according to court records. The four people charged with murdering her are also accused of running a $14,000-a-week drug business, supplying heroin and cocaine to customers on the Block, using strip-club dancers as sellers.

A three-week racketeering-and-murder trial is scheduled to begin Nov. 5 in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. Prosecutors had hoped to seek the death penalty against three defendants—22-year-old Donte Bernard Baker, 23-year-old Gary Thenor Cromartie, and 30-year-old Tyrone Johniken—but their request to do so was denied by the U.S. Attorney General in March. Baker’s mother, 42-year-old Monica McCants, was added as a defendant in January 2012.

McCants is expected to testify for the prosecution, court records show, though she has yet to plead guilty in the case, which includes evidence that defense attorneys contend was improperly obtained from defendants’ statements to the police and from search warrants executed in the aftermath of Gammon’s murder.

The weapon used to kill Gammon has never been found, prosecutors said in recently filed court documents, though in August 2011 Cromartie divulged to police that it was in the home of Baker’s girlfriend.

Immediately after Gammon’s murder, court records explain, police canvassed potential witnesses, gleaning that Gammon worked at Club Pussy Cat as a stripper, that she’d been selling crack and heroin for Baker and owed him money for drugs, that members of Baker’s crew had been arrested, and that she was suspected of being the cause of those arrests by cooperating with law enforcers about Baker’s drug-dealing operation.

Recorded phone calls made from jail by McCants, Baker, and Cromartie are also expected to be introduced as evidence, and prosecutors have used some of them in motions filed recently. Conversations between Baker and McCants—who was charged with drug crimes in October 2010 and held in jail until being placed on home detention before Gammon was murdered—appear damning.

On Nov. 25, 2010, Baker told McCants that Gammon had told him that someone had stolen drugs from her locker at work. In response, according to court records, McCants said, “Take the bitch around the corner. Smack the shit outta her ass. Tell her that I’m gonna fuck her up when I come home. If she fucked up, she gotta get that money, work for that shit.” The next day, Baker told McCants that he would “make Cherrie give the money back.”

After Baker’s Dec. 27, 2010 arrest on state drug and guns charges, Baker told police he’d been a Block habitué since about 2003 but denied providing drugs to Gammon or having any knowledge about her murder. Cromartie, who was with Baker when he was arrested, but was not charged at the time, told police that Gammon was his “heart” and that she was killed for being a snitch; he couldn’t bear to look at the photograph of Gammon that police tried to show him.

Later, during an interview with police on Feb. 16, 2011, Cromartie said he “knew that Gammon had owed $100 because she used all of the pills from a package she was supposed to sell,” court documents say. On the same day, Baker initially told police he made $500 to $600 per night selling powder cocaine, but not heroin or crack, on the Block and supplied the operation by buying an eighth of an ounce about twice a week. But in the same interview, he came clean, saying he did sell drugs with Cromartie and Johniken and supplied Gammon, who made deliveries to customers in the club. Baker estimated he made about $14,000 a week in profits, using strippers “from different clubs” who would send runners to him “to purchase narcotics for the club,” according to court records.

Investigators tracked the location of Baker’s cell phone on the night of Gammon’s murder and found that it traveled from the area of Gammon’s home to the Block, then to the Gwynns Falls/Leakin Park area—where Gammon was shot—and onto the vicinity where McCants was on home detention, in the 3900 block of Edmondson Avenue. Gammon’s cell phone has never been recovered, prosecutors say in court documents, but records show the last call she made before her death was to Baker, who promptly cancelled his cell phone service after Gammon’s death.

Prosecutors anticipate that McCants will testify at trial, when she’s expected to repeat what she said during a January 2011 recorded statement she made to police: that she’d heard Gammon was a “snitch” and had shared that information with Baker, Cromartie, and Johniken, who arrived at McCants’ home-detention house in the early-morning hours of Dec. 12, 2010, after Gammon was shot. That’s when Johniken told her, “I shot [Gammon] five times in the chest,” and Baker said, “I wasn’t the shooter.” Johniken, court records say, has asserted an alibi, saying he was in Pittsburgh on the night of Gammon’s murder due to his father’s death.

Trial testimony is also expected to include an eyewitness who heard Cromartie tell Gammon, as he picked her up at her home on the night of the murder, “You know why I’m here, bitch.”

CannaCrime: The Eastern Shore is Maryland’s bastion of anti-pot policing

By Van Smith

Baltimore, March 30, 2019

Cannabis-carrying civilians on Maryland’s Eastern Shore bear a far greater risk of arrest for possession than those in the rest of the state, according to Free State Cannablawg’s analysis of arrest data from 2010 through 2017 compiled by Maryland State Police.

I crunched two sets of data to measure the relative “pot-friendliness” of Maryland’s jurisdictions – to show, in other words, where police are more or less apt to arrest people for possession.

First, using U.S. Census population estimates, I established the annual number of arrests for weed possession per 100,000 residents in all 23 counties and Baltimore City. This per-capita measure gives a sense of what happens on the streets, of the relative weight or density of possession arrests, in each jurisdiction. Here’s the resulting chart, with a dividing line for the state’s 2014 decriminalization for possessing small amounts:

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The possession-arrest disparity between the Shore and the rest of Maryland is already apparent in 2010, and by 2014 it widens to more than a two-to-one ratio. After decriminalization, an immediate drop in per-capita arrests is pronounced – but on the Shore, arrests quickly rebound so that by 2017 the Shore has more than 800 possession arrests per 100,000 residents compared to about 250 in the rest of the state.

Then I determined the annual percentages of all drug arrests that were for pot possession in each jurisdiction. This gives an indication of how intensely each local government’s drug-enforcement effort focuses on people carrying weed. The rise and fall of these percentages, as one would expect, track roughly the pattern for per-capita pot-possession arrests. Here’s the chart:

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Drug enforcement on the Eastern Shore, as the chart shows, has placed far greater emphasis on pot-possession arrests than the rest of Maryland has for the entire period. Thus, it appears that the Shore’s dramatic post-decriminalization possession-arrest jump has been administered without much change in anti-drug policing priorities.

However, all parts of the shore are not equally risky. In 2017, all of the counties of the Upper Shore – Caroline, Cecil, Kent, Queen Anne’s, and Talbot – have at or less the Shore-wide per-capita pot-possession arrest number of 805 per 100,000 residents. On the Lower Shore, though, Dorchester County boasts 1,551 such arrests per 100,000 residents, while Worcester County, where Ocean City is situated, in 2017 reached a whopping 1,842 pot-possession arrests per 100,000 residents.

What interesting about Dorchester and Worcester counties is where they were in 2010. At that time, Dorchester County, whose largest city is Cambridge, had a mere 379 pot-possession arrests per 100,000 residents, so the police really ratcheted up pot enforcement in the post-decriminalization era. In Worcester County, on the other hand, there were 2,218 such arrests per 100,000 residents, so the still-high numbers for 2017 actually represent a significant increase.

The bottom line: if you’re going to possess cannabis in Maryland and are averse to risking arrest for doing so, perhaps it’s best to stay on the Baltimore side of the Chesapeake Bay and the Susquehanna River.

CannaCrime: Latest Maryland pot-possession arrest data show uptick, stark regional differences

By Van Smith

Baltimore, March 28, 2019

The intended effects of decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of cannabis – the civilian benefit of fewer damning arrest records, especially for African-Americans who have suffered arrests disproportionately, and the police bonus of freeing up resources to pursue graver crimes – have been evident in Maryland since the measure became law in 2014. But the latest year for which data are available, 2017, shows a continuing creep upward in the prevalence of cannabis-possession arrests statewide, with stark regional differences, and an uptick in the percentage of African-American drug arrests.

Free State Cannablawg crunched the Maryland State Police numbers released this month, along with annual crime and population data going back to 2010, to find that per-capita pot-possession arrests, while still lower than before decriminalization, have gone up each year between 2015 and 2017. So have the percentages of all drug arrests that are for cannabis possession, a measure of drug-policing prioritization that essentially has returned to pre-decriminalization levels. Drug arrests of African-Americans, after dropping from 60 percent of all drug arrests in 2014 to 53 percent in 2016, in 2017 reversed course to 54 percent.

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In some areas of the state, meanwhile, decriminalization has resulted in either a higher prevalence of pot-possession arrests, a greater level of police resources devoted to such arrests, or both. The Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland, in particular, show a marked rise in per-capita pot-possession arrests in the aftermath of decriminalization. Only the Baltimore region has demonstrated a continued drop in per-capita pot-possession arrests since decriminalization, with Western Maryland exhibiting an apparent plateau at a lower level.

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Both the Baltimore region and Western Maryland also have shown a continued dampening of drug policing devoted to cannabis possession – as has the Lower Eastern Shore, where the slight drop is relative to a very high level of pot-policing. In the suburban Washington region, meanwhile, decriminalization barely made a dent in the drive toward higher percentages of drug arrests that were for pot-possession.

The trends apparent in the pot-arrest data are a function of discretion exercised by police. Clearly, police forces in some regions of Maryland have taken the decriminalization memo to heart, while others have opted ratchet up their dedication to arresting people for possessing cannabis. The result is a state where, despite decriminalization, police increasingly are returning to their previously normal habit of arresting people who are found with some weed.

FreeStateCannablawg doesn’t have data to show reasons why this is happening, but would like to know whether, in a time when increasing numbers of Marylanders have access to legally prescribed medical cannabis, police are encountering more people who are more often carrying apparently illegal amounts over 10 grams, and thus are arresting them.

In the absence of such data, FreeStateCannablawg would accept anecdotes and suggested explanations. Should anyone be aware of medical-cannabis patients being arrested for illegal pot-possession, feel free to send relevant information to van@freestatecannablawg.com – and, please, if you have any, offer ideas for possible other reasons for the data trends in the comments section.

 

CannaCrime: Latest Baltimore crime data show dramatic decline in cannabis-possession arrests as decriminalization takes hold

By Van Smith

Baltimore, March 22, 2109

While racial disparities continue to muddy the waters of pot-prohibition discussions, one thing jumps out when crunching newly available Maryland State Police crime data: Baltimore City’s law-enforcement discretion in the age of decriminalization had led to a free fall in the number of people getting jacked up for possessing cannabis. As the city’s numbers have dropped, so too have the region’s: from nearly 500 pot-possession arrests per 100,000 residents in 2010, to below 150 per 100,000 residents in 2017.

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It took me some time to create this population-corrected analysis, but it’s borne fruit. Also interesting to note are trends in specific counties. In Harford, for instance, per-capita pot-possession arrests jumped significantly in 2016 and 2017 compared to the six years prior – decriminalization since 2014 seems to have had the opposite practical affect there than the policymakers intended – and in Anne Arundel the downward shift is decidedly muted. Baltimore County, meanwhile, clearly has taken the decrim memo to heart by bringing its per capita possession-arrest numbers in 2017 down to Baltimore City’s sub-basement levels.

Good Times: Dion Fearon in Baltimore, asking all about Jean Brown

By Van Smith

Baltimore, March 21, 2019

Yesterday at Studio 4 in downtown Baltimore, producer Dion Fearon asked me questions about lifer Jean Brown, the Baltimore-based Jamaican who in 2009 ordered and oversaw the tortuous murder and dismemberment of Michael Knight, Brown’s friend and co-conspirator in a $1M-a-month Mexican cannabis-trafficking operation. Knight’s body, which was sawed to pieces, packaged, and tossed into various dumpsters in the Baltimore area, was never recovered.

I’d first written about Brown in late 2010, when a search warrant in the case dropped at U.S. District Court in Maryland, and ended up writing about her two more times. Fearon is now putting together a documentary about Brown, and managed to track me down just in time for me to go back over my records and writings quickly in preparation for the shoot.

We covered a lot of ground involving Brown, but Fearon also asked me about how the Brown conspiracy compared to other major pot-trafficking cases I’d covered. That prompted me to recall that the very building we sat in was once part of the real-estate holdings of Jeremy Landsman, who played a role in the globe-trotting, jet-setting cannabis conspiracy headed by Matt Nicka, and that next door used to be the location of Sonar, Dan McIntosh‘s nightclub that prosecutors contended, unsuccessfully, was part of the scheme.

When I arrived at the studio just prior to the appointed time, former federal prosecutor Stefan Cassella, who led the prosecution of Brown, was seated in front the cameras. When we were introduced, he was incredibly pleasant – considering all the words I’ve written about his work in Maryland over the years, much of which was critical reporting. There were stories about seizing assets from South Mountain Creamery, prosecuting online gambling and synthetic drugs, a forfeiture case marred by agents’ creating a faked drug-dog certification in litigation, and an occasion when Cassella drew the ire of a veteran federal judge – and that’s just what I can readily recall.

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That’s Cassella on the right. Photo: Dion Fearon

When my interview was over, Fearon and I spoke about other stories, including Querida Lewis – Fearon brought her up her name, asking if I had heard of her – and Sean Hinton, the Baltimore police trainee whose body was found floating off Manhattan in 1992, and whose son Ronald Hinton was later convicted, on shaky evidence and a controversial confession, of raping and murdering a four-year-old girl.

I had presumed Fearon was a Californian – which she is – but it turns out she grew up in Baltimore. I predict we’ll be crossing paths again, and look forward to seeing what comes of her Brown biopic.