The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 Read Online Free PDF

“I was testifying the whole time. But I just act like I didn’t know what he was talking about.”
    A few weeks later, Love called Dowery again. “He like, ‘Man, the other guy, he say he ain’t gonna testify. What about you?’”
    Dowery again played dumb. “I say, ‘Man, he lied. I don’t know whatcha talking about. You cool.” Love seemed satisfied. “It was, like, a friendlier conversation the second time,” Dowery would testify.
    Dowery was nervous about the calls and about becoming known in the neighborhood as a snitch. But he didn’t believe he was in immediate danger. The trial kept getting pushed back. Summer gave way to fall. Then came the morning when two men met him at his front door with a gun.
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    O NE OF J ESSAMY’S primary weapons against witness intimidation is her office’s witness-assistance program. Unlike the federal witness-protection program—the one most people know about from the movies—Baltimore’s program can’t provide marshals to guard witnesses around the clock for years. It can’t offer witnesses a new identity in some distant city. Instead, the Baltimore program—run by a staff of two, with an annual budget of $500,000—tries toget witnesses out of harm’s way by putting them in low-budget hotels that serve as temporary safe houses. The average stay is 90 days. The program also helps witnesses relocate permanently, generally within Maryland, providing a security deposit or first month’s rent, moving costs, and vouchers for food and transportation. If necessary, it helps with job placement and drug treatment.
    In most cases, this is enough to keep witnesses safe. Few Baltimore drug gangs have much reach beyond a couple of blocks, let alone outside the city. Still, many witnesses refuse the help. Almost a third of the 255 witnesses whom prosecutors referred to the program last year did not even come to an initial meeting. Of the 176 who did, only 36 entered safe housing. “Many of these people have never left their neighborhood,” says Heather Courtney, a witness-assistance coordinator. “A lot of people can’t handle it. They just can’t be out of that neighborhood. That is all they know.”
    Even after the shooting, Dowery did not want to leave East Baltimore. He had spent his whole life there. His entire family—aunts, uncles, cousins—lived nearby, most on or near Bartlett. This included many of his nine children. In a neighborhood of absentee fathers, Dowery doted on his kids. Two of them lived with him and Yolanda. And he tried to stay involved in the lives of the others.
    Eventually the witness coordinators prevailed upon Yolanda, who in turn convinced Dowery that they should leave. After less than two weeks in a hotel, Dowery, Yolanda, and their five-year-old daughter moved to a house outside the city. Most of his relatives remained in the old neighborhood.
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    T HE TRIAL OF Tracy Love and Tamall Parker for the murder of James Wise began on January 26, 2006, in the cramped courtroom of Baltimore Circuit Judge Sylvester Cox. During openingarguments, Christopher Nosher, the boyish assistant state’s attorney prosecuting the case, appeared confident. Although Judge Cox had barred any reference to the shooting attack on Dowery, ruling that the defendants had not been definitively linked to the incident, Dowery would be allowed to testify about the phone calls from Love. For Nosher, this was a coup: Jurors can be instructed to interpret a threat against a witness as “consciousness of guilt.” Evidence of intimidation can also help juries understand why witnesses may back up on the stand.
    Nosher had another reason to be confident: He knew that all of his witnesses would show. John Craddock, the man who had caught three numbers of the Lexus’s license plate, had never wavered during the long pretrial process. Bassett, Jay’s