# data[].attributes.headline
Michael Millemann: Vote ‘No’ on Question G - Maryland Daily Record

# data[].attributes.subject
Michael Millemann: Vote ‘No’ on Question G - Maryland Daily Record

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By the time many voters get past the candidates for office and are down to the bottom of the ballot, they may be tempted to vote "yes" on the remaining measures, whether from voter fatigue or a general trust in our governmental leaders. On this year's ballot, however, there is a very good reason to vote "no" on Question G. It would gut the ability of the Department of Legislative Reference to operate in a bipartisan, professional, and objective way, as it has for over a century. The department performs essential tasks that often generate political infighting and deeply held partisan battles. It drafts the ordinances for the city, supervises law revisions and administers the city's ethics code, among other duties.

To keep the department from becoming an agent of the mayor or Baltimore City Council, or of a faction of the council, the Maryland General Assembly in 1906 provided it with some qualified independence. Its governing board includes members outside city government (the president of Johns Hopkins University, the deans of the state's two law schools, and the director of the Enoch Pratt Library), as well as the mayor, president of the City Council, and City Solicitor. The director of the department, in addition, is a civil servant who may be fired only for cause (incompetence or neglect of duty).

I was reporter for the 1994 Charter Revision Commission chaired by Judge Harry Cole. We studied the Department of Legislative Reference and were impressed with its need for independence to do its job well.

Question G would repeal these critically important protections. The mayor, president of the City Council, and comptroller would appoint the board, and the director would be an at-will employee who could be fired for any (or no) reason by the mayor and president of the council. (The resolution which accompanied the bill was quite explicit. It stated that the purposes of the bill included "making the Director of Legislative Reference removable for any reason rather than just for incompetence or neglect of duty; and allowing the Mayor and the president of the City Council to jointly appoint and remove the Director of Legislative Reference.") These changes would expose the department to political infighting, with political winners and losers.

Because of the qualified independence of the department, its directors have been outstanding scholars and technicians. This certainly is true of Avery Aisenstark, who has been the director for the past 22 years. Prior to that he advised a Maryland governor, was chief counsel for opinions and advice in the state Office of Attorney General and directed a major revision of Maryland's code.

Independence is especially important in the department's array of roles with the city's ethics board.
Ethics implications
By a separate city law, the director of the Department of Legislative Reference automatically serves as executive director of the city's Board of Ethics. The ethics board meets regularly and deals with a multitude of ethics problems of city employees that arise throughout the year.

The Department of Legislative Reference, for example, reviews financial disclosure and other statements and reports filed by city employees; conducts the board's ethics investigations, and in this role, administers oaths and issues subpoenas; facilitates hearings; formally and informally advises the board; provides training about ethics requirements to city officials and employees; maintains the board's records; prepares proposed rules and law revisions and forms; and prepares an annual report for the board.

For a city to appear to be free of ethical impropriety, the executive director of the ethics board should not have a sword of Damocles hanging over his or her head in conducting ethics investigations and making apolitical recommendations. If Question G passes, that sword would be the new right of the mayor and president of the City Council to fire the director of the Department of Legislative Reference for no reason at all, including at the behest of an unhappy official who has been caught violating ethics laws. I have served on the ethics board and know how inflamed ethics issues can become. The written materials available to the City Council when it voted to place the proposal on the Nov. 6 ballot never mentioned the possibly devastating consequences of Question G to the objective culture of the Board of Ethics.

To best serve the citizens of Baltimore, the director of the Department of Legislative Reference must be free to act without fear of political repercussions. This has worked well for over 100 years, and there is simply no reason to change it now.
Michael Millemann is a Maryland attorney and law professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Michael Millemann: Vote 'No' on Question G

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Michael Millemann By the time many voters get past the candidates for office and are down to the bottom of the ballot, they may be tempted to vote "yes" on the remaining measures, whether from voter fatigue or a general trust in our governmental leaders.

# data[].attributes.headline
Legal activist Mike Millemann has spent his career striving to provide 'access to justice' - Baltimore Sun

# data[].attributes.subject
Legal activist Mike Millemann has spent his career striving to provide 'access to justice' - Baltimore Sun

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"He's the LeBron James of lawyering for poor people. Whoever is in second place is a distant second."

It hangs on the wall in Mike Millemann's office like a yellowed postcard on the family fridge: a copy of a check for $268,482 from Spiro Agnew, the infamous former governor of Maryland and vice president of the United States.

Thirty-six years ago, Millemann, then an assistant attorney general, used the power of the state to sue Agnew to recover bribes he'd taken as governor.

To Millemann, today a law professor and longtime public-interest attorney, it was a matter of simple justice.

"It was fair," he says with a shrug. "The man was repaying what he owed."

The story is but a footnote in the history of Michael A. Millemann, 71, a buttoned-down bundle of energy who has spent nearly 50 years representing the disempowered, the despised and the dispossessed, from convicted murderers and abandoned mental patients to taxpayers stuck with the tab left by a crooked pol.

As educator, advocate, litigator, lobbyist and friend of the marginalized - and working mostly out of the spotlight - he has striven to expand "access to justice," leaving a far bigger footprint in the state than his low profile would suggest.

"If you look at the legal history of Maryland in the last half of the 20th century, and the first part of this one, no one has played a bigger role in legal reform and the rights of the poor than Mike Millemann," says Dennis Sweeney, a former deputy attorney general and retired Howard County circuit judge. "He's the LeBron James of lawyering for poor people. Whoever is in second place is a distant second."

Millemann has never ducked controversy. He led the first lawsuits for reform at the Baltimore jail. He filed suits that removed hundreds of people from state mental institutions on the grounds they didn't belong there. He helped bring the so-called Unger cases that have freed 98 convicted killers and rapists since 2013 on what many consider a technicality.

And he has been a force behind the groundbreaking clinical law program at the University of Maryland law school, which celebrated its 40th birthday last year. He also helped to found more than a dozen public-interest law programs touching hundreds of thousands of lives.

To some, his achievements are a public treasure; to others, they're wrong-headed and dangerous.

"Releasing these prisoners is a disgrace to the word 'justice,'" says Shirley Rubin of Mount Washington, whose husband was killed in 1972 by a man set free as a result of the Unger actions.

A typical online comment on a newspaper article about the Unger case was even more harsh: "If the world was [fair], this screaming liberal would be the next victim of a violent crime."

Buteven some who oppose Millemann cite the importance of his work.

"As passionate as I am on my side, Mike's just as passionate on his," says Scott D. Shellenberger, Baltimore County's top prosecutor andan adamant supporter of the death penalty. "He's a great lawyer and professor. He serves his clientele well. We need more like him in Maryland."
Emails at 2 a.m.
Ask those who know Millemann - professors, students, politicians, parolees - to talk about him, and most give a similar account.

The man Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh calls "a giant of his profession"knows thousands of people and juggles dozens of projects but always seems available to talk. Email him at 2 a.m. and he replies within the hour.

Then he's often back at work by 6. He teaches, calls clients, courts talent, polishes grant proposals, holds conferences. He shows few signs of slowing down.

"If you caught him in the dark, I believe he'd be working," says Karriem El-Amin, a client who was released from prison in 2013 after serving 42 years of a life sentence for murder.

Millemann insists he's not on a crusade to rattle the powers-that-be, but is driven by a single principle - that all Americans are entitled to equal justice underthe law, whatever their station.

"I'm a bit of a romantic when it comes to the Constitution," he says. "It's leverage for disenfranchised people, their power of last resort. And I do feel a weight of responsibility [to apply it]. But I've never sat down and thought, 'How can I form a career around [expanding] access to justice?' What I do has always come from the gut, a gut sense of injustice."

That feeling took root in his youth.

Millemann was born in Queens, N.Y., in 1944, the second of seven children of Raymond Millemann, a noted surgeon, and his wife, Mary Joan, a homemaker and nurse.

When he was 7, his father moved the family to a quiet corner of Oregon. They set up shop in a modest house five miles from the nearest town and 100 yards from a river near the Siskiyou Mountains.

Dr. Millemann treated patients for free or in exchange for fresh milk or carpentry work. Mary Joan joined the school board and eventually earned her college degree.

"They didn't talk to us about serving others; they just did it," Millemann says.

He recalls plenty of hard work, with summers spent laboring on farms and in lumber mills, and a life centered on nature, with wolves howling in the hills at night and rivers brimming with fish.

He calls that Huck Finn existence a lesson that "all life has dignity, beauty and value."

It was hard to find outlets for that idea - even at Dartmouth College, which he attended on scholarship, or at the University of Oregon law school, where he enrolled in 1966.

At the end ofhis first year of law school,that would change.

He spotted a notice on a bulletin board.A network of law students was inviting others to apply for summer internships working with civil rights groups in the Deep South.

Millemann was accepted and sent to Louisiana.

Just a handful of attorneys in the state accepted civil rights cases.Two would oversee hiswork doing research on school desegregation.

Traveling upstate, the skinny 23-year-old took their advice, driving a car with in-state tags, meeting black movement leaders at nightin their homes and staying wary of sheriffs,some of whom were suspected to be members of the Ku Klux Klan.

He was well aware that several white Northern activists had been killed in the South.But he was struck more by the courage of African-American residents, such as the grandmother who ran a local civil rights group andstacked mattresses in her living roomto block windows blown out by the Klan.

"The brave people - brave beyond my understanding - were the ones who lived and raised children there, who faced constant threats and violence, who put up with being fired from jobs and having their kids ridiculed in school year in and year out," Millemann says.

He'd never seen anyone risk life and limb forrights he'd always taken for granted.

"I found out that summer why I wanted to be a lawyer," he says.
The Cardin Requirement
At the University of Maryland's Francis King Carey School of Law, the professor's office is orderly chaos.

Law books cram the shelves. Artifacts from Central America and Africa fill the windowsills. As a diverse stream of students comes and goes, Millemann - looking decidedly Establishment in striped shirt and power tie - reminds them of court dates, cites precedents and spits out phone numbers, all without consulting notes.

The students are working with him on cases as part of the clinical law program he helped to establish in the 1970s and for which he has created or co-created 14 courses - Community Law in Action Clinic, Consumer Protection Clinic, Child Abuse Protection Clinic.

In 1988, with the leadership of then-Del. Ben Cardin, now a U.S. senator, the law school mandated that its students represent poor clients as a condition of graduation. Millemann played a major role in establishing and implementing the mandate.

The Cardin Requirement, one of the first of its kind in the nation, remains at the core of a program that provides Central Maryland with 140,000 hours' worth of free legal services each year and consistently ranks among the top 10 as rated by U.S. News and World Report.

Millemann's proteges seem oblivious to the dozens of plaques on the wall - awards from various organizations for his "tireless dedication in the public interest," "leadership in working to improve government," support for the elderly and more.

They evoke a man who spent his late 20s and 30s bringing a string of precedent-setting actions.

In 1970, for example, Millemann, then an attorney with Baltimore Legal Aid, led a class-action lawsuit against the state for allowing citizens to be committed to mental institutions without a hearing. A year later, he helped lead a highly publicized case over conditions at the Baltimore City jail, where some guards used handcuffs to hang detainees by their wrists.

In 1981, while in the attorney general's office, he spearheaded a project that removed 300 mentally disabled adults from institutions for the psychiatrically ill and found them appropriate placements. He later sued to ensure mental patients' right to lawyers to argue for their civil rights.

The results: new legal protections for classes of people many say the profession had long neglected - the mentally ill, prisoners, the developmentally disabled.

"Mike has brought the dignity and the generosity of the rule of law to those who need it most," says Stephen H. Sachs, a former Maryland attorney general and a friend.

It's hard to fathom that as recently as four decades ago, such basic rights were not protected in this and other states, says Sweeney. He says Millemann and a few other "upstart" lawyers had to use federal law to bring Maryland into line.

"I tell my clerks what it was like in this state as recently as that, and they roll their eyes," Sweeney says. "They think I'm making it up.A lot has changed in Maryland, thanks to Millemann."
A lawyer for the state
On or off the job, Millemann tends to come across as an even-tempered, possibly ordinary man.

The Lutherville resident, a married father of one grown son, will hold forth on Orioles baseball (he's an ex-college shortstop) or 10-mile charity runs (he stopped competing after undergoing hip replacement surgery last year).

His language is invariably clear, his tone affable. His tidy looks have never evoked a wild-haired William Kunstler.

But colleagues know him as a man who put in 100-hour work weeks, often spending three or four straight nights in his office.

The exterior masks his essence, friends say, making him more effective.

"Mike is a savvy professional and politician," says Timothy Phelps, a Los Angeles Times justicereporter who has known Millemann for years."If he came across as the crazed individual I believe him to be, no one would listen to him."

In the early 1980s, Millemann used that energy and passion to help reshape the mission of the Maryland attorney general's office.

When Sachs was elected to the position in1978, he took the unusual step of reaching out to Millemann, who'd spent a decade racking up legal victories against the state.

Sachs argued that his attorney general's office would reflect the late Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis' view that a well-run government "teaches the ... people by its example."

Millemann accepted the job of chief general counsel of the civil rights division. It meant he could no longer sue the state. But he and Sachs devised a doctrine that produced a similar effect.

Under what they called "preventive law," they investigated ways Maryland agencies might be violating federal law, urging reforms in an effort to forestall potential lawsuits.

Millemann used the approach in matters touching patients' rights, the rights of handicapped children, the nutritional rights of people on welfare and more during his three-year tenure.

"It would be overstating it to say Mike turned the place inside out, but he worked to make the office much more responsive," Sachs says. "He made a profound and creative contribution to the very definition of the state AG's office."

After Millemann returned to the law school in 1981,a death row inmate in another state got his attention.

Ernest Fitzpatrick Jr., a 20-year-old mentally ill man, had hatched a wacky scheme: He would take hostages in a real estate office in Pensacola, Fla., walk them to a bank, demand money, mingle with the crowd until the excitement died down, then return home by bus.

The plan went awry. A sheriff's deputy was killed. A jury convicted Fitzpatrick of first-degree murder, and he received the death penalty.

A Florida anti-death penalty activist asked Millemann to lead an effort to challenge the verdict and sentence. After a handwritten plea from Fitzpatrick, Millemann was in.

He donated 2,000 hours to the case over four years, commuting between Maryland and Florida, directing a team that included his students and a local attorney. Theydug up evidence that Fitzpatrick had long been mentally ill, used forensic evidence to suggest that someone else's bullet killed the deputy, even revealed that a top state lawyer was in the habit of calling death row inmates "maggots."

In 1988, the Florida Supreme Court reduced the sentence to life with a chance for parole.

"I made sure Ernest got the news and then cried tears of relief that it was over and tears of happiness that the Court got it right," Millemann wrote in 2012.

He still teaches a course centered on the case. And a quarter-century later, he's still representing killers.

Three years ago, the Maryland Court of Appeals issued a decision in a case stemming from a 1976 murder in Hagerstown. In Unger v. Maryland, the court ruled thatthe instructions judges gave juriesprior to 1980 were constitutionally flawed.

The state had long required judges to tell jurors to consider the court's instructions on the law advisory, not binding. The Court of Appeals concluded that practice wrongly allowed jurors to use a standard of proof other than reasonable doubt - and that anyone so convicted was entitled to a new trial.

Millemann saw the potential. The ruling could affect about 250 people serving life sentences for violent crimes, including murder, if they pursued legal action.

Working with public defenders, he helped assemble a team of law professors, law students, social workers and social work students. They filed dozens of petitions. He has watched in satisfaction as nearly 100 petitioners have been released, each on probation and with suspended life sentences.

Millemann stresses that the team created a network of post-release services, including help with housing and job leads.

The releases outraged many Marylanders, including relatives of the crime victims.

Shirley Rubin says she was overcome with sadness and anger,when the man convicted of killing her husband was freed two years ago.

"It is an insult to Benjamin Rubin's memory," she said. "It offers no justice for me or my family."

Millemann says he understands such pain and sees it as his duty, and society's, to listen. But he doesn't flinch when citing what he calls a greater value, the primacy in a democracy of the rule of law.

"History shows if we don't fight to preserve that," he says, "all else is lost."
'Grounded and balanced'
Of course, putting so much time into one's work leaves less time for other things.

Millemann concedes that he has probably missed important events, moments even, especially with his wife, Sally,a retired social worker and disabilities advocate,and their son, Matthew, 25.

He's taking some weekends off these days, a recent concession, and traveling more often with the family to the house they own in Maine. "I've come to realize that Sally and Matthew are the most important parts of my life," he says. "They both keep me grounded and balanced."

But he has no plans to retire. And he says he might not fashion his life differently if he could do it over again.

"I've been enjoying what I do for 48 years," he says. "That's a very rare thing."
jonathan.pitts@baltsun.com Michael Alan Millemann
Age: 71

Occupation: Professor, public interest law, University of Maryland law school

Home: Lutherville

Education: A.B., Dartmouth College; J.D., Georgetown University law school.

Family: wife, Sally, one son

Experience: Reginald Heber Smith Community Law Fellow. Baltimore Legal Aid, 1970-1971. Maryland assistant attorney general, 1979-1981. Law professor, University of Maryland, 1974-1979, 1981-present
Notable cases
Michael Millemann has filed or participated in many significant cases in Maryland and elsewhere. Among them:

Long v. Robinson (filed 1969) Struck down state law requiring that 16- and 17-year-olds arrested in Baltimore, but nowhere else, be tried as adults.

Anderson v. Solomon (1970) Federal court overturned state law that allowed citizens to be committed indefinitely to mental institutions without a hearing.

Collins v. Schoonfield (1971) and Duvall v. Lee (1976). Among other reforms, guaranteed Baltimore jail inmates access to adequate medical care, library and reasonable use of mail.

Mental health settlement (1981) As assistant attorney general, helped get 300 mentally disabled adults moved from state psychiatric hospitals to appropriate placements.

Fitzpatrick v. Florida (1984) Got state Supreme Court to reduce death sentence of a mentally ill inmate to life with parole.

Arvinger clemency (2004) With students, wrote report that persuaded Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. to break from predecessor's 'life means life' policy and release Walter Arvinger, a Baltimore man serving life for a 1968 robbery that resulted in death.

Karriem El-Amin v. Maryland (2013) Secured release of El-Amin, convicted of a 1971 murder, one of 98 prisoners released statewide after the Unger decision.
Legal services programs
Millemann has created or helped to create more than a dozen public-interest law programs. Among them:

Prisoner Assistance Project (1969), now Prisoner Rights Information System. Provides legal information and advice to state prisoners.

Maryland Volunteer Lawyers Service (1981) The state's largest pro bono organization.

Maryland Legal Services Corporation (1981) Provides funding for legal services for the poor.

Public Justice Center (1985) Nonprofit public interest law office.

Civil Justice (1998) Supports solo and small-firm private lawyers in providing legal services to low and moderate-income clients.

Prisoner Advocacy and Re-Entry Support Project (2013) Provides pre- and post-release services to inmate released as a result of the Unger decision.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Legal activist Mike Millemann has spent his career striving to provide 'access to justice'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"He's the LeBron James of lawyering for poor people. Whoever is in second place is a distant second." It hangs on the wall in Mike Millemann's office like a yellowed postcard on the family fridge: a copy of a check for $268,482 from Spiro Agnew, the infamous former governor of Maryland and vice president of the United States.

# data[].attributes.headline
Getting the racist stain out of the wood | Afro

# data[].attributes.subject
Getting the racist stain out of the wood | Afro

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I began my legal career in 1967 doing civil rights work in Louisiana. I had many extraordinary experiences there, but the one that made the deepest impression on me occurred in the Louisiana Supreme Court library. When I looked for a rest room, I found two: one for "White men" and a second for "colored men." This was 1967, 13 years after Brown vs. Board. The letters had been taken down, but they had been up so long they had stained the wood. I learned then that making government take down racist signs did not get the racist stain out of the wood. Forty-seven years later, I am still working to do this.

Today, in partnership with the Public Defender's Office, our clinical and social work faculty and students are representing over 50 inmates in Maryland who were convicted in the 1960s and 1970s, most of felony murder. All received life-with-parole sentences, but have never been released. Their average age is 64 and they have been locked up three to five decades.

The error in their cases was fundamental. The judges told the jurors they were "the judges of the law" and anything the judge said about the law was "advice" only, which the jurors were "free to reject." The judges invited the lay jurors to create their own legal rules.

In 2012, the Maryland Court of Appeals decided that all of the 250 or so prisoners still locked up from these 1960s and '70s trials are entitled to new trials.

To date, 62 prisoners statewide, 50 from Baltimore City, have been released through negotiations, and almost all placed on probation. Of the 50 from the City, a shocking 98 percent - all but one - is African American. Until the early 1970s, Baltimore City was a majority White city, and African Americans certainly did not commit 98 percent of the homicides there during the 1960s and '70s.

Indeed, racism was pervasive. When George Wallace ran in the Maryland Presidential Primary in 1964, he finished a strong second with 43 percent of the vote! His motto was "Segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!"

Our clients were convicted by all-White or disproportionately White juries in trials that lasted one or two days. They were represented by several lawyers who later were disbarred. Many were in fact innocent, or were guilty of a lesser degree of homicide, or never had a lawyer who argued for them at sentencing.

They grew up in prison, got GEDs and bachelor degrees, and participated in an array of prison programs. Over time, many have become peaceful and infirm senior citizens. They should have been paroled over 20 years ago, but, because Democratic governors effectively abolished parole for lifers, they were not. They pose no risk to public safety. We need to return to the long tradition of paroling lifers who earn that parole.

The extended families of the 62 never gave up on them. Social workers and social work students working with the Law School Clinic and Office of Public Defender have established a network of re-entry services for those released, and to date, there has been no recidivism.

The release of these 62 individuals is the result of hard work by many people, including the Office of the Public Defender (who has been the leader), the inmates' families, their faith communities, social workers and re-entry non-profits, and, in many cases, courageous prosecutors who have opted to do what is right instead of what is easy.

Most striking, however, is the transformative work that these returning citizens have done for themselves. They have grown into responsible and contributing members of society.

These releases are cause for hope that with perseverance and cooperation among people of good will, we can begin to get the stain of racism out of the wood.
Michael Millemann is a law professor at the University of Maryland-Carey School of Law and a long-time civil rights lawyer.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Getting the racist stain out of the wood

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I began my legal career in 1967 doing civil rights work in Louisiana. I had many extraordinary experiences there, but the one that made the deepest impression on me occurred in the Louisiana Supreme Court library. When I looked for a rest room, I found two: one for "White men" and a second for "colored men."

# data[].attributes.headline
Namibia: The Rule of Law Is Not a Luxury - Walters - allAfrica.com

# data[].attributes.subject
Namibia: The Rule of Law Is Not a Luxury - Walters - allAfrica.com

# data[].attributes.headline
Baltimore Project on Vacant Houses Gives Students Legal Insight - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
Baltimore Project on Vacant Houses Gives Students Legal Insight - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The program began last fall when a member of the neighborhood group, the Park-Reist Corridor Coalition, asked the law school, which has its campus in Baltimore, to assist the group in securing a building to serve as a community center.

Bev Thomas, the coalition member, had hoped that the center would offer legal aid, counseling and educational and recreational programs for a community center.

The request attracted the attention of Olivia Cammack, a 49-year-old second-year law student.

Initially, she was just going to help the coalition draft incorporation papers. But when she heard the group was looking to establish a legal clinic, she came up with the idea to train students to find the landlords.

For the past two years the University of Maryland's clinic has been pursuing absentee landlords for other communities. So far 20 former vacant houses are in the process of becoming low-income houses.

But the process has been grueling for law students, who have had to do all the legwork, from researching tax records to serving subpoenas. Recruiting high school students, Ms. Cammack said, should give the law students more court time.

For one teen-ager, Nathaniel Bond Jr., the program has helped change his image of the legal system and what he considers excessive criminal penalties.

"I just didn't like the law," he said. "I couldn't stand it. I saw people get 20 years when they should have gotten 20 days and people get 30 days when they should have gotten 30 years."

Ms. Cammack said that the program is not only overturning myths the students had about the law, but showing them career paths.

Toward that goal, Ms. Cammack has given morning "street law" classes for the high school students on subjects like sexual harassment and civil rights. The students have also gone through two mock trials.

As a result, they have talked about holding an assembly for the rest of the high school to debate random searches of backpacks and drug tests to insure safety versus students' constitutional rights.

Michael A. Millemann, a professor of law and head of the clinical law program, relishes the problem that high school students, fueled by a little legal knowledge, could be growing out of control.

"Education," Mr. Millemann said with a wry smile, "is a dangerous thing."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Baltimore Project on Vacant Houses Gives Students Legal Insight

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The program began last fall when a member of the neighborhood group, the Park-Reist Corridor Coalition, asked the law school, which has its campus in Baltimore, to assist the group in securing a building to serve as a community center.

# data[].attributes.headline
LAWYER TESTIFIES AGNEW ADMITTED HE RECEIVED CONTRACTOR KICKBACKS - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.subject
LAWYER TESTIFIES AGNEW ADMITTED HE RECEIVED CONTRACTOR KICKBACKS - The New York Times

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Mr. White, who agreed today that for 20 years he had been Mr. Agnew's ''friend, lawyer and confidant,'' was forced by the court to testify under subpoena, over his objection and the protests of Mr. Agnew's lawyer here that this violated the secrecy of the attorneyclient relationship.

Judge Bruce C. Williams of the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court ordered Mr. White's appearance today because the judge had held that both Mr. Agnew and Mr. White had breached the lawyer-client trust - Mr. Agnew in his book and Mr. White in a $17 million defamation suit against Mr. Agnew for describing him in the book as ''a nervous wreck'' Two 'Desperate Men' Recalled

Assistant Attorney General Michael Millemann of Maryland drew from Mr. White an account of how on the same day in February 1973 both Jerome B. Wolff, the Maryland State Roads Commissioner when Mr. Agnew was Governor here from 1967 to 1969, and Lester Matz, a contractseeking highway engineer, had gone to Mr. White's suburban Baltimore law office saying that they were ''desperate men'' who ''needed to talk to Mr. Agnew.''

Both Mr. Wolff and Mr. Matz were by then prime investigatory targets of the United States Attorney's office in Baltimore. Without then knowing that Mr. Agnew was involved, the Federal prosecutors were looking into a suspected contract kickback conspiracy in Baltimore County, where Mr. Agnew served as the elected County Executive before his successful campaign for Governor in 1966.

Mr. White testified that Mr. Matz and then Mr. Wolff, and then the two of them together, had told of their complicity in bribing Mr. Agnew.

''They said this thing is going to blow up, and they might have to tell the Federal prosecutors, and they didn't want to tell,'' Mr. White said. Alleged Kickback Breakdown

He testified that Mr. Wolff had told him that I.H. Hammerman 2d, an Agnew friend who is a wealthy Baltimore real estate developer, was collecting kickbacks from state contractors and dividing the payments, 25 percent to himself, 25 percent to Mr. Wolff and 50 percent to Mr. Agnew.

''Mr. Matz claimed that he had been making payoffs, kickbacks, to Mr. Agnew as Baltimore County Executive and as Governor - and claimed to have paid him between $20,000 and $30,000 while he was Vice President of the United States,'' Mr. White testified.

Mr. White said he later confronted Mr. Agnew with his information and ''his answer was that it's been going on for 1,000 years''. ''What Jerry and Bud told you is true,'' Mr. Agnew was quoted as saying, referring to Mr. Wolff and Mr. Hammerman. ''But Matz is grossly exaggerating the amount of money involved. He only gave me $2,500.''

The trial is expected to end Monday with closing arguments.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
LAWYER TESTIFIES AGNEW ADMITTED HE RECEIVED CONTRACTOR KICKBACKS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Mr. White, who agreed today that for 20 years he had been Mr. Agnew's ''friend, lawyer and confidant,'' was forced by the court to testify under subpoena, over his objection and the protests of Mr. Agnew's lawyer here that this violated the secrecy of the attorneyclient relationship. Judge Bruce C.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Today, judges instruct juries in criminal cases that they must presume the defendant is innocent and must hold the state to its burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. These are the fundamental rules of our criminal justice system.

Before 1980, however, judges in Maryland told jurors that the jurors, not the judges, were the judges of the law, and that anything the judge said about the law was advisory only. The two fundamental rules, as well as all others, were not binding on the jury. Instead, every jury was invited to be its own constitutional convention.

In 2012, in Unger v. State, the Maryland Court of Appeals finally recognized that this jury instruction produced trials that were structurally flawed and fundamentally unfair. It reaffirmed the unconstitutionality of the jury-decides-the-law jury instruction and held, as the law required it to do, that the ruling applied retroactively to anyone who was convicted before 1980. As a result, approximately 200 people locked up in prison are entitled to new trials.

The question today in Maryland is not, "Isn't it outrageous to give new trials to, or to free, 'murderers' convicted three, four or five decades ago?" Instead, it is "How, consistent with our most basic constitutional values, could we have convicted and incarcerated these men for three, four or five decades based on trials in which judges told juries to make up their own legal rules?"

Who are these approximately 200 prisoners? Overwhelmingly, they are African-American males, convicted by juries from which African-Americans and women had been systematically excluded.

They are old or soon to be old men. In the 14 hearings held so far in Baltimore City, several came to court in wheelchairs or supported by canes. Many have acute health problems. They are hands-down the most expensive prisoners in the Maryland prison system.

Many were convicted when they were young - some as young as 15, 16 or 17 - and have grown up in prison. Most have become peaceful adults and high achievers, earning GED degrees, bachelor degrees, and some graduate degrees, before Congress in 1994, as part of its "Contract With America," abolished Pell grants for prisoners. The vast majority have worked, taken vocational courses, and participated in a broad variety of programs.

All were sentenced to life with parole, with the expectation, based on the policies and practices of the day, that if they did what they were supposed to do, and demonstrated that they would not endanger society, they would be paroled in 20 years or so. In 1993, many were on work release, a step away from parole. That all changed when a life-sentenced prisoner on work release killed his girlfriend and then himself. All of the lifers were immediately returned to prisons, which is where they remain today, ineligible for work release and effectively ineligible for parole.

Most were convicted of felony murder, which does not require intent, premeditation, recklessness - or even that you were the killer - for conviction.

Most have supportive families, and all will have carefully developed release plans before they will be set free.

All, I believe, are entitled to new trials under Unger. In Baltimore City, a number have won new trials.

Which brings me to these questions: Is retrying men who have demonstrated in prison that they are fully rehabilitated, for homicides that occurred in the 1960s or 1970s, a wise expenditure of today's limited prosecutorial resources? Is it the right thing to do? Should these cases have the same priority as today's murder cases? Will contemporary juries convict these men again?

Gregg Bernstein, the Baltimore City state's attorney, has adopted a more logical approach. Prisoners give up their Unger claims, agree to accept their murder convictions, agree to a period of probation, agree that if they violate probation they can go back to prison, and agree to produce a post-release plan that assures they will have the structure they need to live lawfully in the community. In return, they will be sentenced to "time-served."

None of this diminishes the awful losses of the victims' families. They have given powerfully moving testimony about their losses and the continuing effects today of the homicides on the children and grandchildren of the victims.

Their testimony cannot, however, retrospectively cure the fundamental legal error in the original trials or answer the question: why aren't three, four, or more decades of incarceration enough punishment?

When people soberly and fairly consider the interests at stake, I trust that they will see that the approach we are taking is the best approach, or at least understand why we are taking it.

It not only is consistent with public safety, it corrects decades-old, and historically shameful violations of the rule of law.
Michael Millemann is a professor of law at the University of Maryland-Carey School of Law. He and his colleagues and law students represent a number of prisoners who have legal claims under Unger v. State. His email is mmillem@law.umaryland.edu.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Today, judges instruct juries in criminal cases that they must presume the defendant is innocent and must hold the state to its burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. These are the fundamental rules of our criminal justice system.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tuesday, November 30, 2004; Page A19

CUMBERLAND, Md. -- Walter Arvinger walked out of prison yesterday, a free man for the first time in 36 years. Locked up in 1968 for a murder he didn't commit, he was released by order of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., who commuted his sentence last Friday. His decision, Ehrlich said, is a reflection of "my view that Maryland's criminal justice system must be tough but fair." Hurray to the governor for doing the right thing. But a more honest epilogue to Arvinger's case would be: "His conviction was a travesty of justice, and his incarceration for more than three decades was a scandal. His case represents a stain on Maryland's criminal justice system."

Arvinger is 55, a taciturn father and grandfather whose neatly trimmed beard has gone to salt-and-pepper. When I met him a couple of weeks ago, an ebony rash had spread the length of his arms, legs and torso, and he was more preoccupied with his health than with any immediate possibility of release, which seemed remote. He hoped one day to live at home again with his grandmother, who is 105, and his mother, who is 76. But if anyone had reason to squelch the faintest glimmer of optimism, it was Walter Arvinger.

At the time of his arrest, Arvinger was 19 years old, employed and church-going. He'd been a slow learner at school but had a clean record, with no hint of drugs or violence. His chief mistake was one of timing: On a rainy night in October 1968, he was in a house in Baltimore with four other teenagers who talked about mugging someone -- "yoking" a man, they called it. A few minutes later, they did just that, and one of the youths beat 52-year-old James R. Brown to death with a baseball bat.

Arvinger played no more than a cameo role in the murder. The state's chief witness, a 14-year-old boy named Paul Gillis, testified that Arvinger had walked out of the house before or just after the talk about "yoking" began, and took no part in the conversation. Arvinger went up the street to a store and bought some cake. A few minutes later, when the other youths raced out of the house and attacked Brown, Arvinger spotted them and ran after them. Afterward, when the boys divvied up the man's pocket change, Arvinger may have received a few cents, although he denied it.

The justice system started failing Walter Arvinger from the get-go. His trial lasted half a day. His lawyer, retained for a few hundred dollars in the days before Maryland had a public defender's office, was a colorful, careless character named Morris Lee Kaplan, who boasted that he carried no more documentation to court than he could fit in his coat pocket. Kaplan also had a conflict of interest: Although he had managed to win an acquittal on murder charges for one of Arvinger's co-defendants in a separate trial, he did not permit him to testify on Arvinger's behalf -- possibly for fear that the other boy could expose himself to robbery charges.

Inexplicably, the judge found Arvinger guilty of first-degree murder, inferring that he may have stood ready to help in the crime, or acted as a lookout. He reached his verdict despite the absence of testimony that Arvinger helped in any way or was a lookout, and despite the fact that Arvinger had at first walked away from the scene of the crime, which Kaplan failed to point out at the trial. The judge was "pained," he said, to sentence Arvinger to prison "for the balance of your natural life."

Although he was the least culpable of the five youths present at the crime, Arvinger was the most harshly treated. Two others served no prison time and one was out in six or seven years. The only other defendant to receive a life sentence was the one who wielded the baseball bat; his term was shortened in 1973 by the governor, Marvin Mandel, and he was released in the early 1990s.

Only Arvinger languished behind bars, decade after decade. His lawyer dropped his case without pursuing it through the appeals process. But if the courts had deemed Arvinger unfit for society, the Maryland corrections system knew better. In prison he had a spotless record, earned a high school diploma and taught welding to other inmates. For four years starting in 1989, he was allowed out on work release, living in a minimum-security dormitory in Baltimore, reporting to a construction site at the Inner Harbor and compiling an exemplary employment record. One weekend a month, he was allowed to visit his elderly grandmother and mother.

In 1993 even that measure of compassion was yanked away when another Maryland lifer on work release, Rodney Stokes, shot his ex-girlfriend and then himself. In a dyspeptic response, Gov. Parris N. Glendening ordered all 134 lifers on work release, including Arvinger, rounded up and returned to prison. And two years later Glendening declared that as far as he was concerned, everyone serving a life sentence in the Free State could rot behind bars. "If you want to term this more as retribution . . . it's exactly that," the governor said. When the state parole commission voted unanimously in 1998 to release Arvinger, Glendening ignored the recommendation. For the past several years, Arvinger has spent 14 hours a day locked up in a small, two-man cell in Western Maryland.

It was just last year that Arvinger got the first break of his life. He sent a brief, handwritten letter to Michael Millemann, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore, and Millemann became interested. "I've seen hundreds of claims of innocence, most of them without merit," Millemann said. "This one had merit."

Ehrlich, who has made good on pledges to revive the governor's powers of clemency in a number of cases, has righted a profound wrong. He cannot repay Arvinger for his lost years, but he has restored some measure of dignity.

Yesterday afternoon, I called Arvinger as he rode home to Baltimore. He chuckled when I asked him about his plans. "It feels like I got brand new shoes on my feet," he said. "I'm ready to do a little walking, man."

The writer is a member of the editorial page staff. His e-mail address is hockstaderl@washpost.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tuesday, November 30, 2004; Page A19 CUMBERLAND, Md. -- Walter Arvinger walked out of prison yesterday, a free man for the first time in 36 years. Locked up in 1968 for a murder he didn't commit, he was released by order of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., who commuted his sentence last Friday.

# data[].attributes.headline
Restoring justice to Maryland’s incarceration policy - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.subject
Restoring justice to Maryland’s incarceration policy - The Washington Post

# data[].attributes.headline
The Ungers: Righting a miscarriage of justice - CBS News

# data[].attributes.subject
The Ungers: Righting a miscarriage of justice - CBS News

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The people who call themselves THE UNGERS are convicted criminals -- some 250 in all -- sentenced to life in prison many years ago for violent crimes. Thanks to an appeals court in Maryland, they now have the opportunity to be released, an opportunity many have already taken. Our Cover Story is reported by "Sunday Morning" Senior Contributor Ted Koppel:
The group has been away a long time. They are, all of them, convicted criminals who went to prison in their youth; back when Nixon, Ford and Reagan were in the White House.

In their day, Apple was just a fruit: "I don't even know how to work all this one here," said one man pondering an iPhone.

At this recent celebration in Baltimore, there's a mix here of public defenders, law school interns, social workers, murderers and rapists. The first of those convicts was released four years ago.

Charles Chappell did 39 years on a charge of murder one. He told a Baltimore County prosecutor, "I'm not going to let myself down and I'm most definitely not going to let you down."

"Good to see you again."

"Yes, sir, it's good to see you."

"There are a quarter-million older prisoners locked up across this country; 170 of you are now out. More to come, I hope," said Mike Millemann, a law school professor at the University of Maryland. He's also a defense attorney who was deeply troubled by the fact that for decades in Maryland, judges had been telling juries that it was their job to interpret the law pretty much as they saw fit.

It sounds incredible, but a jury could -- if it so decided -- ignore a defendant's presumption of innocence, in effect tossing the constitutional right to a fair trial out the window.

"If the jurors liked the fundamental requirement that the state has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, they could apply it. If they didn't, they could reject it," said Millemann.

"So, the constitution was nothing more than a guiding principle?" asked Koppel.

"It was 'advice.' That really nullified the rule of law. So these, in effect, were lawless trials."

In 2012 a Maryland appeals court agreed, and ordered a new trial for Merle Unger, who was serving a life sentence for killing a police officer. That opened the door for 250 other lifers convicted in Maryland before 1981.

With much of the work being led by lawyers from the public defenders office, they and Mike Millemann argued that all those trials had been unconstitutional. And, interestingly, prosecutor Scott Shellenberger -- Maryland's state attorney for Baltimore County -- is on the same page:

"By saying to the jurors that they are judges of the law, it undermined those very fundamental constitutional rights of reasonable doubt and presumption of innocence," Shellenberger said.

"After they were found guilty, but in a flawed proceeding," said Koppel. "Therefore, is it in fact fair to conclude that they are guilty?"

"Well, they were granted a new trial. Now, most of those have pled guilty because prosecutors are recommending time served -- which means they get out.

With the exception, it should be noted, of Merle Unger himself. He was retried, reconvicted, and is still in prison. In acknowledgement of his case, the now more than 180 prisoners who have been released refer to themselves as "the Ungers."

Over four years, there have been a few misdemeanors, but so far, not a one of the Ungers has committed another felony.

Millemann said, "The success of the Unger folks should be a beacon for the whole United States of America."

Kareem Hasan was one of the first of the Unger group to be released. According to his count, he spent 37 years, nine days in prison.

"So if I said to you, 'You're out on a technicality,' how would you feel about that?" asked Koppel.

"Well, I was just trying to get out. I didn't care how I got out," Hasan laughed. "You know, after 37 years I said, 'Okay, why are you still sitting here? Yes, I want that deal!' Because I wanted to get out."

Etta Myers is the only woman in the group. To this day, she maintains her innocence.

"I was in prison 36 years, nine months, five hours, 24 minutes. And I didn't count the seconds," she said.

Karriem Saleem El-Amin has been out for four years now: "I served 42 years, three months and three days," he said.

"The fact that you can all remember down to the day and in some cases down to the hour how long you were in, what does that say about doing time in prison?" Koppel asked.

"That you're conscious of every day that you're in there," El-Amin said. "You don't actually count it while you're doing it. But seems like when you get closer and closer to a year, then it means something. Other than that, you're just living, trying to survive while you're in there. You don't want to just think about how much time you're doing, because there's no end to a life sentence."

Actually, when El-Amin was convicted -- when all the Ungers were convicted -- wasn't true. They were all eligible for parole.

Millemann said, "Because when they were sentenced, the norm was that if you did what you were supposed to do in prison and you were a lifer with the possibility of parole, you were paroled after 15 or even, you know, later, 20 years. So there's an expectation, if they did what they were supposed to do, they'd be coming out. And that all changed when a liberal Democratic governor in effect ended parole for lifers in Maryland."

Because? "Because a lifer in a work release program killed his woman friend and then killed himself," said Millemann.

That was in the mid-1990s and from that time on, even model inmates like Etta Myers paid the price. She had three parole hearings.

"Obviously, you were turned down at each one," said Koppel.

"No, actually I was recommended for each one," Myers replied.

And what happened? "The governor never signed off on it."

It didn't matter what the parole board ruled; without the governor's signature, there was no release.

Maryland's parole boards were still going through the motions, but their recommendations of parole for a lifer were simply ignored.

Hassan said, "So, at that time, I was married to my wife, that I'm married to now -- Miss Annette - and I made her leave me. You know, I took her off my visiting list. Told her to go ahead, enjoy her life. That I'm never coming home. And I made her divorce me."

It would be twenty more years before Hasan's ultimate release. "She came the day I came home from court," he recalled. "And I seen her. The feelings, the emotions, and everything was still there. And asked me to marry her again. And we married."

"Well, good for you."

"And it's enjoyable!"

Incredibly, and this is according to social workers who've been counseling the Ungers, 70 percent of the freed inmates were initially taken in by a family member.

Charles Chappell moved in with his sister last December. Finding work has been something else again. In prison, Chappell was head clerk in a multi-million dollar furniture business.

"And now that you're out," said Koppel, "you've got another job running another million dollar business?"

"I can't even flip a burger for Burger King because I have a felony," Chappell said.

He's been applying for warehouse supervisor or warehouse associate. "I have these skills in running a business, so I can run a warehouse," he said.

"Now part of the problem obviously is -- and I say this as a guy who's almost old enough to be your dad -- but you're an old man in terms of the labor market. How old are you now? 60?"

"I'm 61 years old. My disappointment is being incarcerated for 39 years, that this body has been preserved. I could do ten years of labor Mr. Koppel and I know that I would hold up. So I'm asking for not the online interview. I would like a face-to-face interview, so where they could see a 61-year-old man who is ready to become a productive member of society."

Scott Shellenberger is a tough prosecutor who takes a common-sense approach. Koppel asked him, "When we talk about imprisonment, we're talking about two things. First and foremost, punishment for a crime. But secondly, implicit in that is also the notion of the possibility of rehabilitation. Your thoughts on that?"

"Well, certainly, I do believe in rehabilitation in the criminal justice system," said Shellenberger. "When we get to murder, I believe there has to be a balance, and that balance has to strike between the appropriate punishment and what's going to happen when you're released in society. The studies show that most violent crime is committed by men between the ages of 17 and 35. And the Ungers are a perfect example that you can age out of violent crime."

Wayne Brewton-Bey only got out last Spring. After decades in prison, he needs the support of the other Ungers. It may be that only another Unger can appreciate how disorienting the outside world can be -- even the old neighborhood. "My heart just fell outta my chest," he said. "I couldn't believe all the abandoned homes around here. And once the neighborhood was so beautiful."

Still lingering after all these years are the memories of what some basketball coaches were telling Brewton-Bey when he was a youngster, and what his fellow inmates called him: "The Legend."

"Still makes you smile now?" Koppel said.

"Absolutely!"

"Could'a been?"

"As a matter of fact, my mother used to always say that I was supposed to be living in a mansion. That's what she used to tell me when she used to visit me."

Just then, a young man with a basketball was spotted walking down the street. Koppel asked Brewton-Bey, "Give you any thoughts?"

"Yeah. That's how I was. Going, looking for a game at one point in my life."

Brewton-Bey's mother, who waited almost 38 years for his release, died the year before he came home. But his wife, Vickie, was waiting for him. They've renewed their vows. And his 10-year-old granddaughter, Madison, is helping Brewton-Bey adjust to the brave new world of the internet.

It needs to be said that even these tiny stories of long-deferred happiness must grate on the families of the victims.

Koppel said, "Well, I'm gonna put it to you very brutally. Tell me why you're an asset to the community."

"Because I believe I can save lives by sharing my story with a lot of the younger guys and women in the neighborhood, and that one mistake, one bad choice can ruin your life forever," Brewton-Bey replied. "I took a young man's life. And so his family suffered. My family suffered. 'Cause I went to

prison, I took my whole family with me. And during the process of my incarceration my family spent $10-20,000 on legal fees, which they didn't have. You know, they went in debt for me.

"And I believe I owe Earl Jenkins a debt."

"He's the man you killed."

"The man whose life I took."

The Ungers are guardians of a fragile success, and they are acutely aware of what their failure would mean. Their motto: "Failure is not an option."

Because? According to Charles Chappell, "There's so many guys that we left behind who may not have 'Unger.' But our success will show those individuals who are making these major decisions on individuals who have rehabilitated themselves. after 30 to 40 years of incarceration, that it's a possibility, because the Unger guys made it."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Ungers: Righting a miscarriage of justice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The people who call themselves THE UNGERS are convicted criminals -- some 250 in all -- sentenced to life in prison many years ago for violent crimes. Thanks to an appeals court in Maryland, they now have the opportunity to be released, an opportunity many have already taken.

# data[].attributes.headline
Public Justice Center | Mission & History

# data[].attributes.subject
Public Justice Center | Mission & History

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Public Justice Center | Mission & History

# data[].attributes.headline
UM Carey Law | UM Carey Law Faculty and Students Represent Those Wrongly Convicted Years Ago

# data[].attributes.subject
UM Carey Law | UM Carey Law Faculty and Students Represent Those Wrongly Convicted Years Ago

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
UM Carey Law Faculty and Students Represent Those Wrongly Convicted Years Ago

In 1976, Merle Unger was convicted of felony murder in the State of Maryland. However, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled in May 2012 that the jury had been given improper instructions during the initial trial - a decision that led to release of 20 prisoners and could affect up to 200 cases statewide.

The jury in Unger's initial trial was instructed by the judge to "feel free to reject my advice on the law and to arrive and your own independent conclusions." By relegating the court's instruction to advisory status, the judge infringed on the defendant's right to due process, his attorneys argued in the appeal.

"How, consistent with our most basic constitutional values, could we have convicted and incarcerated these men for three, four or five decades based on trials in which judges told juries to make up their own legal rules?" questioned Mike Millemann, Jacob A. France Professor of Public Interest Law, in a Baltimore Sun op-ed.

Millemann, along with the school's Law & Social Work Services Program, directed by Rebecca Bowman-Rivas, has been working with the Office of the Public Defender to identify the affected prisoners; they have painstakingly gathered case records, some over three decades old. Twenty students in the spring and 10 students over the summer worked on these cases.

"At the end of the day, this project forces the State to obey the rule of law and teaches students how to do this," said A.J. Bellido de Luna, managing Director of the law school's Clinical Law Program and co-supervisor of the summer students.

"This has been the most important law reform project, and has been one of the most fulfilling experiences, of my career, and it has reunited me with the leaders of the Office of Public Defender, where I began my career," added Professor Jerry Deise

Millemann and Deise co-teach "Criminal Law Reform: Legal Theory and Practice," in which students represent prisoners affected by the ruling who must petition the court for their release and may be retried at the request of state prosecutors. Others who are released without retrial were either eligible for parole or considered to be not a threat to public safety.

"Some of the inmates who are being released because of the court's ruling are in their 60s and 70s, and Marylanders might be surprised to learn that we really keep guys behind bars at those advanced ages," wrote columnist and WYPR-FM host Dan Rodricks in the Baltimore Sun.

"They are not threats to public safety. They, for the most part, are senior citizens," added Millemann in another Baltimore Sun article. "They've had exemplary prison records. They've demonstrated by living without violence in prison that they have rejected violence as a way of life."

Even if release is granted, the men affected face many challenges re-entering society, where, once again, the course provides resources not offered by the state. It submits release plans, ranging from contacting family, applying for essential benefits, researching possible employment, concerns of mental and physical health, even providing information just to get a driver's license.

"These guys are going through something that really no one else can truly understand," Rivas told the Baltimore Sun. "So we're trying to create a community."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
UM Carey Law Faculty and Students Represent Those Wrongly Convicted Years Ago

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
UM Carey Law Faculty and Students Represent Those Wrongly Convicted Years Ago In 1976, Merle Unger was convicted of felony murder in the State of Maryland. However, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled in May 2012 that the jury had been given improper instructions during the initial trial - a decision that led to release of 20 prisoners and could affect up to 200 cases statewide.

# data[].attributes.headline
Out of the asylums and into the streets - Baltimore Sun

# data[].attributes.subject
Out of the asylums and into the streets - Baltimore Sun

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Deinstitutionalization of 1981 likely caused rise of homeless in Baltimore

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Your Oct. 29 editorial asserts that Question G on the Nov. 6 ballot in Baltimore "merely redefines the city's director of legislative reference as an at-will employee, instead of a civil servant." Really? As two distinguished attorneys wrote in a recent op-ed ( "Baltimore's Question G: 'a very bad idea,'" Oct. 25), this change in the City Charter is like a snake in the garden.

Your editorial misses an important part of the Question G proposal. The City Code provides that the director of legislative reference also serves as executive director of the indispensable City Ethics Board on which I have served. The ethics board meets regularly. It deals with the ethical problems of city employees without political interference. This structure has worked well for many years because the executive director could not be removed except for incompetence or neglect of duty.

Approval of Question G would enable the mayor and president of the City Council to remove him or her without cause. Thus, if there are city employees with serious ethical challenges, the director will no longer be able to conduct his or her investigation and make recommendations to the ethics board free from the political concern that if the investigation is pursued, he or she can be fired. Why would a thoughtful person even want to apply for such a position?

In short, passage of Question G would result in the fox guarding the henhouse. The citizens of Baltimore deserve much better. Vote no on Question G!

Michael Millemann, Lutherville

The writer is a law professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law.
Become a subscriber today to support editorial writing like this. Start getting full access to our signature journalism for just 99 cents for the first four weeks.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Your Oct. 29 editorial asserts that Question G on the Nov. 6 ballot in Baltimore "merely redefines the city's director of legislative reference as an at-will employee, instead of a civil servant." Really? As two distinguished attorneys wrote in a recent op-ed ( "Baltimore's Question G: 'a very bad idea,'" Oct.