The Office of the State's Attorney for Baltimore City has decided to end its ties with the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE) as it relates to Victim Services and the Gun Violence Reduction Strategy, a move reaffirmed by an independent legal review. According to the State’s Attorney’s Office, discontinuing this partnership is crucial for ensuring the integrity of prosecutions and upholding defendants’ Constitutional rights.
Created in late 2020, MONSE is tasked with implementing a Comprehensive Violence Prevention Plan devised by Mayor Brandon M. Scott. Despite its ambitious goals, this entity has attracted scrutiny for allegedly withholding crucial information from the State's Attorney's Office, which could potentially be used for exculpatory or impeachment purposes in criminal trials. Although MONSE is not a city agency and lacks enabling legislation, the legal review suggests its records, especially when dealing with the State's witnesses, could be regarded as containing significant evidence.
At the center of the controversy is the failure to disclose three different kinds of information MONSE handled, as outlined by the legal review: financial benefits offered to witnesses, their identity as GVRS participants, and their statements related to criminal conduct. In particular, the review insists on the mandatory responsibility of the State’s Attorney’s Office to "gather the exculpatory and impeachment information and to timely disclose same to the defense."
"[The prosecutor] is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done," cites the review, detailed by State’s Attorney’s Office, referencing the Berger opinion.
The independent legal review has consequences that extend beyond the immediate relationship between the State's Attorney's Office and MONSE. By bringing an end to the formal partnership with MONSE, the Office of the State's Attorney aims to preserve the integrity of the legal process and safeguard against the risk of wrongful convictions stemming from undisclosed evidence.
