Shaila Dewan

The contraband is scary enough: Homemade knives with grips whittled to fit particular hands. Homemade machetes. And homemade armor, with books and magazines for padding.

Then there is the blood: In puddles. In toilets. Scrawled on the wall in desperate messages. Bloody scalps, bloody footprints, blood streaming down a cheek like tears.

And the dead: A man kneeling like a supplicant, hands bound behind his back with white fabric strips and black laces. Another hanging from a twisted sheet in the dark, virtually naked, illuminated by a flashlight beam.

These were ugly scenes from inside an American prison, apparently taken as official documentation of violence and rule violations.

Prisons are the black boxes of our society. With their vast complexes and razor wire barriers, everyone knows where they are, but few know what goes on inside. Prisoner communication is sharply curtailed — it is monitored, censored and costly. Visitation rules are strict. Office inspections are often announced in advance.

So when prisoners go on hunger strikes or work strikes, or engage in deadly riots, the public rarely understands exactly why. How could they? Many people harbor a vague belief that whatever treatment prisoners get, they surely must deserve. It is a view perpetuated by a lack of detail.

But some weeks ago, The New York Times received more than 2,000 photographs that evidence suggests were taken inside the St. Clair Correctional Facility in Alabama. Some show inmates as they are being treated in a cramped, cluttered examination room. Others are clinical: frontal portraits, close-ups of wounds.

It is hard to imagine a cache of images less suitable for publication — they are full of nudity, indignity and gore. It is also hard to imagine photographs that cry out more insistently to be seen.

As I scrolled through them, shock rose from my gut to my sternum. Was I looking at a prison or a 19th-century battlefield? Those pictured betrayed little emotion and certainly none of the bravado broadcast by their tattoos: South Side Hot Boy, Something Serious, $elfmade.

After considering the inmates’ privacy, audience sensibilities and our inability to provide more context for the specific scenes depicted, The Times determined that few of these photos could be published. But they could be described.

St. Clair is known to be a deeply troubled institution in a state with an overcrowded, understaffed, antiquated prison system. Alabama has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates and, as measured by homicides, its deadliest prisons, according to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit civil rights organization in Birmingham. Suicide is epidemic as well — there have been 15 in the past 15 months.

For years there have been complaints that St. Clair inmates are heavily armed — some for self-protection — and allowed to move freely about the compound. In fact, St. Clair is more deadly now than it was in 2014, when the Equal Justice Initiative brought suit against it for failing to protect prisoners. There have been four stabbing deaths there in seven months.

Last June, the group said the prison was failing to comply with a settlement agreement.

Prison officials dispute that, saying the Alabama Department of Corrections is committed to improving safety and security. The department has requested money to raise salaries and increase the number of officers. Multiple law enforcement agencies recently teamed up to conduct a contraband search at St. Clair that recovered 167 makeshift weapons, said Bob Horton, a department spokesman.

But as of October, the prison was still severely short-staffed, with more vacancies than actual officers.

A second lawsuit, brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a legal advocacy group in Montgomery, Alabama, says the prisons have failed to provide adequate mental health care. (The photos show a message painted on the wall in blood, with letters about the height of a cinder block. “I ask everyone for help,” it read in part. “Mental Health won’t help.”)

The photos were given to The Times by the SPLC, which said it had received them on a thumb drive. Bob Horton, a spokesman for the corrections department, said the department could not authenticate the photos.

But Maria Morris, a staff lawyer at the SPLC, said the environment shown looked like St. Clair, and some photos had identifying information that corresponded to known inmates or showed men that the SPLC recognized as its clients (SPLC removed the identifying information before giving the images to The Times).

The man who painted the blood on the wall, referred to in the lawsuit as M.P., had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and repeatedly tried to kill himself. He testified that he had been held in solitary confinement for six years, allowed to exercise one hour a day in ankle shackles.

Morris has specialized in prisoner’s rights litigation for more than a decade. She hears accounts of rape, beating or stabbing on a daily basis. I asked what it was like for her to see the photographs.

They made it impossible, she explained, to retreat into that small, self-protective corner of her mind — the place where it was possible to imagine that her clients’ stories might not be as bad as they sounded.

“Seeing what had been done to those people’s bodies — it just stripped away all of the numbing,” she said. “It was very painful to see that all of the suffering that I’ve been hearing about and trying to relate to the court — how deep it goes.”

The thumb drive included a document titled “READ ME FIRST” and claiming to be from a corrections officer. It said the photos represented only a “small portion of the injuries from inmate-on-inmate violence in the past three years.”

The writer said that the current legal agreements governing the prison stood no chance of working: “The day-to-day treatment of these men does nothing but foster anger and despair. Until major fundamental changes take place in our sentencing and housing of these men it will only continue to get worse. I can’t help but wonder if the public knows just how bad these men are treated day after day and year after year.”

The photos show dozens of wounded men. One had been stabbed at least 10 times. Another had a hole in his lip you could stick a pencil through. A pair of handcuffed wrists displayed 15 precise slashes. There was a recurring palette of pale red and sickly, Mercurochrome yellow. One man’s back had a shiv at least an inch wide still buried in it, right between the shoulder blades.

There were three individuals pictured in a folder called “Dead men” and seven in a folder called “Murders,” all of whom could be identified through news reports, news releases and booking photographs.

But most disturbing were the images that seemed to echo the most painful aspects of African-American history.

Many convincing arguments have been made that our penal system was at least partly designed to extend control of black people and their labor, particularly in the South, where after slavery ended black men were conscripted into chain gangs for offenses like vagrancy and “selling cotton after sunset.”

Amid the St. Clair pictures were 19 taken of a black man who was completely naked but for a pair of handcuffs, photographed from the front, back, left and right. In one frame two white officers, standing guard inches away from him, avert their eyes.

Another image brought to mind the photos of the monstrously disfigured face of Emmett Till, the teenage victim of a 1955 lynching in Mississippi, which galvanized the civil rights movement when they were published by Jet magazine.

Though separated by more than half a century and by a wide gulf in circumstances, the St. Clair photos showed another mutilated, African-American face, this time belonging to Emory Cook, a 54-year-old prisoner killed in a cell three years ago. Under Alabama’s harsh version of a three-strikes law, Cook had been serving a life sentence for third-degree burglary.

As a prisoner, he was entitled to be protected from harm. He looked like he had been hit with a plank.

The violence of prison A rare, and troubling, look behind the walls

CAPTION: Prisoners at the St. Clair Correctional Facility in Alabama made knives out of fan blades and other materials.

The violence of prison: A rare, and troubling, look behind the walls

“Leaving Neverland” profiles two men who say Michael Jackson sexually abused them when they were children. Jackson faced several allegations that he molested young boys dating to 1993 but was never convicted of any charges.

For more than two decades, R. Kelly has been trailed by a series of allegations of sexual misconduct with minors. Then in February, after “Surviving R. Kelly” aired, the authorities in Chicago charged him with 10 counts of sexual abuse. He denies the charges.

With these developments coming years after the alleged abuse, many are asking why victims can take so long to come forward, why they might at first deny the abuse and whether their parents could have done more. Here are some answers to those difficult questions.

Why do some victims take so long to come forward?

It can take decades for people who are sexually abused as children to come forward, for a multitude of reasons. They may suffer from effects of trauma or believe they are to blame, and it can take years for them to even identify what happened as abuse. In one German study, the average age of disclosure was 52. Despite that, some states in the United States gave victims only two or three years after reaching age 18 to seek criminal action.

The Catholic Church child abuse scandal in the early 2000s drove most states to change their statute of limitation laws, extending the time those abused as children had to come forward. More recently, a wave of reports like one in Pennsylvania that found more than 1,000 child victims of Catholic priests has renewed a push to allow more time.

Last year, Michigan extended its statute to 15 years after the victim turns 18, and this year New York extended it from age 23 to 28 and gave victims even longer to file lawsuits. Marci Hamilton, a child sex abuse expert at the University of Pennsylvania, said a record 34 states are considering changes to the statute of limitations this year.

Is the Jackson case typical of what usually happens?

Legal experts cautioned that in every case, there is much that remains hidden to the public, for reasons that include the privacy of the victims. So it would be unwise to make too many comparisons. But a revered musician would be in an exceptionally strong position to achieve what many abusers strive for: the trust of their communities and the benefit of the doubt.

What is child sex abuse and how does it start?

Child sex abuse occurs when a person uses power to engage a child in sexual activity.

Abusers target children who both fit their preferences and are vulnerable. They may work to ingratiate themselves with their victims, positioning themselves as special or irreplaceable in the child’s life and only gradually introducing sexual contact. The fact that they do not abuse all children they come in contact with only serves to give them more cover.

Traditionally this process has been referred to as grooming, but Chris Newlin, executive director of the National Child Advocacy Center, prefers to call it manipulation. It makes appropriate boundaries very hard to detect.

“Offenders make children like them. If I like you, you’re 98 percent good — it’s just that 2 percent of the time,” Newlin said. “This is why children have trouble disclosing when it’s a family member. Because they like them.”

Newlin also said that not all abuse is violent or physically painful, which would make it harder for children to distinguish it as abuse.

“The other part about sexual abuse — this sounds gross — is, most of it is gentle and tender,” he said. “It feels good sometimes. It doesn’t hurt. It’s not as scary as a violent rape. And that’s super-confusing for kids.”

How could the parents not know?

By the same token, Newlin said, abusers begin by manipulating their community and, particularly, parents. “Before they’re ever really engaging the child in that situation, they’ve been manipulating the parents into thinking they’re trustworthy and safe. And manipulating the environment: ‘There’s no way Chris did something, I’ve known Chris for 20 years, he’s a great guy.'”

Experts generally agree that there is no uniform set of symptoms or signs that a child is being abused, nor is there a profile that fits every abuser. Even those familiar with the dynamics of sexual abuse can miss it.

So what can parents do? Don’t shy away from the subject. Children with supportive parents are more likely to report abuse, Newlin said: “Open conversation, open dialogue about this is really important.”

Are most children abused by authority figures or strangers?

“Stranger danger” warnings aside, when it comes to child victims, more than 90 percent are sexually assaulted by someone they know — which makes sense, because those are the adults who generally have access to children. In about a third of such cases, the perpetrator was a family member, according to FBI data, and in another 58 percent it was an acquaintance — a category that includes teachers, foster parents, neighbors and day care employees.

Why might a child deny the abuse when asked?

The research, though sparse, seems fairly clear on a couple of points: Most children do not disclose abuse, and sexual abuse is difficult to detect.

Abusers may instill in their victim a sense of shared responsibility for what has taken place, imply that the abuse is the child’s fault, warn them of the importance of secrecy, overtly threaten them or undermine the child’s credibility by forging alliances with other adults in the child’s life.

What does it take to prosecute a child sex abuse case?

“It’s a challenge, but it’s not an insurmountable challenge,” said Melissa Jampol, a former sex crimes prosecutor in Manhattan who now serves on an expert committee examining the case of Larry Nassar, who was convicted of molesting the young gymnasts he treated as specialist in sports medicine. “There’s been a sea change since the #MeToo movement started in terms of the way people view victims of these crimes.”

Many cases, especially those that happened long ago, will come down to the credibility of the victim, though prosecutors must seek any corroboration they can find. And even with changes, the statute of limitations will bar many prosecutions, since such changes cannot be made retroactive in criminal cases.

That will push much of the legal action into the arena of lawsuits. Some states have opened limited “windows” during which victims can sue even if their case is outside the civil statute of limitations. For example, last year Michigan gave victims of Nassar a 90-day window to file civil suits.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/us/child-sexual-abuse-questions.html" id="ba453253-8042-3940-a327-786cb8d37cd8">The New York Times</a>.

The explosive documentaries “Leaving Neverland” and “Surviving R. Kelly” have reignited a national conversation about child sex abuse.

Michael Jackson, R. Kelly and the Lingering Questions About Child Sex Abuse Cases

Given this dire set of facts, the city’s top prosecutor announced Tuesday she would no longer bother with marijuana cases, a move she argued would improve police-community relations and allow law enforcement to devote more time to serious violent crime.

“If you ask that mom whose son was killed where she would rather us spend our time and our attention — on solving that murder, or prosecuting marijuana laws — it’s a no-brainer,” said Marilyn Mosby, state’s attorney for Baltimore. She vowed at a news conference to no longer prosecute marijuana possession, regardless of quantity or prior criminal record, and said she would seek to vacate almost 5,000 convictions.

Mosby’s move places her in a vanguard of big-city prosecutors, including Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. in Manhattan and Eric Gonzalez in Brooklyn, who are moving away from marijuana cases.

Much of their reasoning sounds familiar from the many statewide campaigns that have resulted in outright legalization: Marijuana, they say, is not linked to violent crime.

But increasingly, another argument is creeping in: Letting marijuana cases go actually makes communities safer, by shifting the focus to stopping violence and untangling a legacy of racial discrimination.

The Baltimore police do not share her view, however, and the response to her announcement cast doubt on how effective it would be. Mayor Catherine E. Pugh applauded Mosby’s attempt to address the “unnecessary criminalization” of marijuana users, but stopped short of endorsing the new policy.

The interim police commissioner, Gary Tuggle, said he would not tell officers to stop making marijuana arrests.

Under Mosby’s new rules, people will not be prosecuted for possessing marijuana at all, and will not be charged with distribution or intent to distribute based on quantity alone — there must also be other indicators of drug dealing, such as scales or plastic bags.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/us/baltimore-marijuana-possession.html" id="d5c64825-8fa4-3510-a268-3b9df15754ec">The New York Times</a>.

A Growing Chorus of Big-City Prosecutors Say No to Marijuana Convictions

BALTIMORE — Baltimore has both the highest murder rate among the nation’s big cities and one of the most broken relationships between its police and its citizenry. Only one out of four homicides was solved last year. And the city’s enforcement of marijuana laws has fallen almost exclusively on African-Americans.

Given this dire set of facts, the city’s top prosecutor announced Tuesday that she would no longer bother with marijuana cases, a controversial move that she argued would improve police-community relations and allow law enforcement to devote more time to serious violent crime.

Mosby’s move places her in a vanguard of big-city prosecutors, including Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. in Manhattan and Eric Gonzalez in Brooklyn, who are moving away from marijuana cases, declaring them largely off-limits and in some cases going so far as to clear old warrants or convictions off the books.

Much of their reasoning sounds familiar from the many statewide campaigns that have resulted in outright legalization: Marijuana, they say, is not linked to violent crime. Enforcing its prohibition is a waste of resources, and has left thousands of people with criminal convictions that hinder their search for jobs and housing.

But increasingly, another argument is creeping in: Letting marijuana cases go actually makes communities safer, by shifting the focus to stopping violence and untangling a legacy of racial discrimination, allowing the seeds of trust to germinate in neighborhoods where a chief complaint of police officers is that no one will help them solve crimes.

“How are we going to expect folks to want to cooperate with us,” Mosby said in an interview in her office Monday, “when you’re stopping, you’re frisking, you’re arresting folks for marijuana possession?”

The Baltimore police do not share her view, however, and the response to her announcement immediately cast doubt on how effective it would be. Mayor Catherine E. Pugh applauded Mosby’s attempt to address the “unnecessary criminalization” of marijuana users, but stopped short of endorsing the new policy.

“Without the police, this is just political theater,” said Thiru Vignarajah, a former Maryland deputy attorney general who ran against Mosby in the 2018 Democratic primary. Vignarajah noted that many of those who are found with marijuana these days are issued citations and allowed to go on their way anyway.

More than 90 percent of marijuana citations between 2015 and 2017 were issued to black residents, who make up roughly two-thirds of the population.

Other critics of the prosecutor’s move called the announcement too little, too late. Tre’ Murphy, a community activist with Black Leaders Organizing for Change, initially expressed support. “Wow, it’s a major overhaul,” he said. But a few beats later, his skepticism set in, and he wondered why it had not happened until Mosby’s second term in office.

“I don’t think we can afford to wait these long time frames,” he said. “Until we recognize the harm that many of these policies have caused and rebuild these institutions from the ground up, people will never trust it.”

Mosby’s first term was occupied by a series of epic police scandals, which placed her at odds with the department. Other prosecutors across the country have moved more quickly on the issue.

In Chicago, Foxx said her office will move to expunge all misdemeanor marijuana convictions. In St. Louis County, Wesley Bell will prosecute no marijuana cases involving amounts under 100 grams. In Boston, Rachael Rollins has pledged to stop prosecuting drug possession and possession with intent to distribute, along with 13 other crimes.

Advocates for such policies applauded Mosby’s new rules for pushing the envelope. People will not be prosecuted for possessing marijuana at all, and will not be charged with distribution or intent to distribute based on quantity alone — there must also be other indicators of drug dealing, such as scales or plastic bags.

“That’s kind of taking it to the next step, in a manner that’s consistent with how people actually use when they’re not trying to profit,” said Jolene Forman, a senior staff attorney with the Drug Policy Alliance.

Mosby said people charged with felony distribution for the first time will automatically be referred to a diversion program designed to help them enter the job market. Successful completion of the two-year program can result in expungement of the case.

The new policy would not apply in cases in which a defendant faces multiple charges, such as possession of both marijuana and a gun, Mosby said.

Mosby said her office would also seek to pass a statute that would make it less cumbersome for prosecutors to overturn a conviction when the circumstances warrant.

Police departments and unions have sometimes put up resistance to these broad uses of prosecutor discretion, saying they defy the intent of lawmakers. Mosby said that when she briefed Tuggle, “He said he felt that marijuana drives violent crime, and I explained to him that is not the case.”

After her announcement, the interim commissioner released a statement confirming that arrests will continue “unless and until the state Legislature changes the applicable laws.” A new police commissioner, Michael Harrison of the New Orleans Police Department, will arrive next month — the fifth person to head the department since Mosby took office.

In 2016, Harrison publicly embraced a legal change that allowed the New Orleans police to handle most marijuana possession cases by issuing a summons, and said that officers would have to get permission to make arrests in those cases.

In Baltimore, police have few grounds to claim that the status quo is working well.

First there was the shocking case of the elite Gun Trace Task Force, whose members robbed residents and planted evidence. Then there were the body-camera videos that appeared to show officers staging the discovery of evidence. A recent investigation by BuzzFeed and TheTrace.org examined the department’s failure to solve, or in some cases even investigate, shootings.

The department’s credibility is so tattered that in April, when the police commissioner himself testified that he had found a loaded gun in a driver’s glove compartment, the jury acquitted the man.

A settlement with the Justice Department to correct systemic racial disparities and excessive use of force has proved to be a challenge. Last week, the judge overseeing the settlement said the department seemed to have a “culture of timidity” when it came to confronting corruption.

Mosby has been called a divisive figure, particularly after her handling of the case of Freddie Gray, whose death from injuries sustained in police custody set off weeks of unrest. Mosby charged six officers in the death, and then — after a hung jury and three acquittals — dropped the prosecution, dishing out blame for what she called the Police Department’s failure to conduct an unbiased investigation. She was attacked for being too progressive and for not being progressive enough.

But last year, it became clear that Mosby understood her base: communities in the city that were both overpoliced for minor infractions and underprotected from violence, with serious crimes going unsolved in their neighborhoods.

In the 2018 primary, she defeated Vignarajah and another opponent, Ivan Bates, by wide margins, and was unopposed in the general election.

BALTIMORE — Baltimore has both the highest murder rate among the nation’s big cities and one of the most broken relationships between its police and its citizenry. Only 1 out of 4 homicides was solved last year. And the city’s enforcement of marijuana laws has fallen almost exclusively on African-Americans.

The announcement by Marilyn Mosby, state’s attorney for Baltimore, follows a nationwide trend in which big city prosecutors are de-emphasizing marijuana prosecutions.

Baltimore has both the nation’s highest murder rate among big cities and one of the most broken relationships between its police and its citizenry. Its marijuana enforcement has been wildly disproportionate — more than 90 percent of the citations for low-level possession between 2015 and 2017 were issued to black residents, who make up about two-thirds of residents.

So for Mosby, declining to prosecute marijuana possession cases has everything to do with making the city safer.

“If you ask that mom whose son was killed where she would rather us spend our time and our attention — on solving that murder or prosecuting marijuana laws — it’s a no-brainer,” Mosby said in an interview in her office Monday. “I don’t even think there’s a choice there.”

She also said that with a poor record of solving crime — only 1 in 4 homicides was solved last year — law enforcement needs to foster more goodwill. “How are we going to expect folks to want to cooperate with us,” she said, “when you’re stopping, you’re frisking, you’re arresting folks for marijuana possession?”

Mosby joins a flurry of prosecutors, including Kim Ogg in Houston, Rachael Rollins in Boston and Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, who have adopted similar policies that vary in the details such as weight limits and retroactivity.

Under Mosby’s new rules, people will not be prosecuted for possessing marijuana, regardless of quantity, and will not be charged with distribution or intent to distribute just because they have a large amount in the absence of other indicators of drug dealing such as scales and baggies.

Those charged with felony distribution for the first time will be automatically referred to a diversion program designed to help them enter the job market. Successful completion of the program can result in expungement of the case.

Some pullbacks from marijuana prosecution have been hailed by police departments, while others have met with resistance. Mosby briefed the interim police commissioner, Gary Tuggle, who told her that he would not instruct officers to stop arresting people caught with marijuana, she said. “He said he felt that marijuana drives violent crime, and I explained to him that is not the case,” Mosby said.

After her announcement, Tuggle released a statement confirming that arrests will continue “unless and until the state Legislature changes the applicable laws.” A spokesman for the mayor, Catherine Pugh, said that she supports the commissioner’s position.

Mosby said her office would also seek legislation that exists in other states: a statute that would make it less cumbersome for prosecutors to overturn a conviction when the circumstances warrant it. Because Maryland has no such statute, the process for vacating marijuana possession convictions is cumbersome, requiring a writ claiming that a fundamental error was made. Mosby said her office has data going back to 2011, accounting for nearly 5,000 cases, and has requested records going further back.

Mosby may not seem like the first choice to broker peace in Baltimore, where she has been called a divisive figure. She made national headlines in 2015 when she promised to prosecute six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, who sustained fatal injuries while in police custody. Her announcement calmed the city.

She made headlines again in 2016 when, after a hung jury and three acquittals, she dropped the prosecution, dishing out blame for what she called the Police Department’s failure to conduct an unbiased investigation of Gray’s death.

She was faulted for being too progressive, and not progressive enough. The police chief called her incompetent, and the Baltimore Sun admonished her to “play nice.” The death of Gray, coming less than four months into her tenure as a young, promising reformer, delayed her agenda, she said.

But when it came time for her re-election, it became clear that Mosby understood her base — communities that were simultaneously overpoliced for minor infractions, and underpoliced, with serious crimes going unsolved in their neighborhoods. In the primary, she defeated two opponents by a wide margin, and was unopposed in the general election.

She is now in a bit of a hurry. She did not hold her announcement, for example, for the arrival of Michael Harrison, the incoming police commissioner, who is supposed to start Feb. 11. He will be the fifth chief since she became the state’s attorney.

And her arms-length relationship with police, while unusual for a prosecutor, has seemed vindicated by scandals of epic proportions, most notably the shocking case of the elite Gun Trace Task Force, whose members robbed residents and planted evidence.

The department’s credibility is so tattered that in April, when the police commissioner himself testified to having found a loaded gun in a driver’s glove compartment, the jury acquitted the man.

A settlement with the Justice Department to correct systemic racial disparities and excessive use of force has proved to be, to put the best face on it, a slog. Last week, the judge on the case said the department seems to have a “culture of timidity” when it comes to confronting corruption.

A recent investigation by BuzzFeed and TheTrace.org examined the department’s failure to solve, or in some cases even investigate, shootings.

Baltimore to Stop Prosecuting Marijuana Possession Cases

BALTIMORE — Marijuana is officially against the law in Maryland, but Baltimore’s top prosecutor said Tuesday that she would stop prosecuting marijuana possession cases within the city limits, regardless of quantity, and seek to vacate almost 5,000 convictions.

“If you ask that mom whose son was killed where she would rather us spend our time and our attention — on solving that murder or prosecuting marijuana laws — it’s a no-brainer,” Mosby said in an interview in her office Monday.

She also said that with a poor record of solving crime — only 1 in 4 homicides was solved last year — law enforcement needs to foster more goodwill.

Mosby briefed the interim police commissioner, Gary Tuggle, who told her he would not instruct officers to stop arresting people caught with marijuana, she said.

After her announcement, Tuggle released a statement confirming arrests will continue “unless and until the state Legislature changes the applicable laws.” A spokesman for the mayor, Catherine Pugh, said she supports the commissioner’s position.

BALTIMORE — Marijuana is officially against the law in Maryland, but Baltimore’s top prosecutor said Tuesday she would stop prosecuting marijuana possession cases within the city limits, regardless of quantity, and seek to vacate almost 5,000 convictions.

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Shaila Dewan

Articles written by the author

The violence of prison: A rare, and troubling, look behind the walls

Michael Jackson, R. Kelly and the Lingering Questions About Child Sex Abuse Cases

A Growing Chorus of Big-City Prosecutors Say No to Marijuana Convictions

A Growing Chorus of Big-City Prosecutors Say No to Marijuana Convictions

Baltimore to Stop Prosecuting Marijuana Possession Cases

Baltimore to Stop Prosecuting Marijuana Possession Cases