Baltimore County Needs a New State’s Attorney. Now. -Part 1
[This is the first in a series of commentaries to highlight the long career of Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger. These commentaries will be heavily supported by facts linked to news stories. The purpose is for voters of Baltimore County to get to know him better ahead of the next Democratic primary election. Democrats can do better. But also for everyone in Maryland because of his outsized influence on statewide legislation.]
Scott Shellenberger was first elected as the State’s Attorney in Baltimore County, Maryland in 2006. He previously served as an assistant state’s attorney in the same office from 1982–1993. American views on the criminal justice system have changed since 1982, and so have the values of the Democratic Party and its voters. However, Shellenberger has maintained his inherently racist “tough-on-crime” approach to criminal justice since he first started sending citizens to jail. He hasn’t changed with the times because he hasn’t felt pressured to.
Shellenberger last faced a Democrat in a primary election in 2006 when he defeated prominent personal injury attorney, Stephen L. Miles. In that first election, he rode to victory with an enormous boost from the Baltimore County Victory Slate, created by then-County Executive Jim Smith. The slate gave Shellenberger a total of $435,000 in that campaign.
This is the same slate that illegally bankrolled Catherine Pugh in the final days before she won her 2016 primary election to become Baltimore’s mayor.
Shellenberger’s last contested general election was in 2010. Not a single Democrat or Republican challenged Shellenberger in the 2014 or 2018 election cycles. Because he has gone unchallenged for so long, his campaign war chest sits empty. The Baltimore County Victory Slate is out of money and regular citizens from Baltimore County have never been regular contributors to his campaign. As of January of 2021, his campaign account only reports $22,091.42 — extremely small for an incumbent in a county-wide race.
Why don’t Baltimore County voters make campaign contributions to Scott Shellenberger? Well…there’s not much to like. In later commentaries, I will discuss his racist views and his opposition to the Democratic Party platform (even though he plays a Democrat on the ballot). But let’s start by looking at his actual record at “law-and-order.” There is no one that Shellenberger has failed in Baltimore County more than sexual assault survivors.
In January of 2021, the Gilman School released an internal investigative report into allegations of sexual abuse that occurred at the school over the course of decades. Several students were sexually abused by a teacher and baseball coach. The perpetrator was never charged with a crime. We learned that Scott Shellenberger learned of these allegations during his first term in office, but he let the abuser off with a “non-prosecution agreement.” A monster who molested boys was allowed to walk away by agreeing to resign from the school. That was Shellenberger’s choice. This wouldn’t be the last time that Shellenberger let an abuser walk away.
If the Gilman story sounded familiar, it might be because Scott Shellenberger similarly declined to prosecute anyone following a report of decades of sexual assaults at the McDonogh School in 2019. Several faculty members assaulted dozens of students. Shellenberger said he did not have enough evidence to build a case because the incident happened in the 1980s, when Maryland laws concerning sexual assault required the encounter to be forced or for the victim to be a younger age than she was.
In 2016, a report unveiled that thousands of rape kits had sat untested, or worse, destroyed. Democratic Delegate (now Senator) Shelly Hettleman introduced legislation to retain and have mandatory testing of those rape kits. The testing could match DNA and determine who the rapist was. Scott Shellenberger opposed the legislation because he didn’t want to be told how to do his job. Hettleman wrote to the Baltimore House legislative delegation to respond to Shellenberger’s arguments. “I’m honestly perplexed as to why a prosecutor wouldn’t want to use the fullest array of tools available to him or her,” she wrote. It was just another example of his disinterest in sex offenses.
In 2018, Shellenberger was sued in federal court by several women for his mishandling of sexual assault allegations. For example, the lawsuit says Baltimore County police, working with Shellenberger, would “routinely and maliciously classify credible reports of sexual assault” either as “unfounded” or cleared by “exceptional circumstances” without conducting any investigation of the reports. The lawsuit says the department had miscoded several reports as cleared due to “exceptional circumstances” to avoid dealing with scrutiny of “unfounded” cases.
In 2020, a federal judge allowed a female plaintiff to proceed with a claim that two county police detectives and State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger and others in his office for violating her First Amendment rights by trying to stop her from filing charges on her own after they declined to prosecute her case. The woman had been sexually assaulted by a student of University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
The woman in the lawsuit tried to pursue charges on her own by going to Maryland District Court commissioners after prosecutors declined to pursue her case. State law allows people to apply for charges with a District Court commissioner.
The woman alleges that Shellenberger and others in his office ordered detectives to tell her to stop going to the commissioner’s office or she would face criminal charges. She says that the detectives showed up at her home, where her grandmother answered the door.
“Having police show up at one’s house and pose demanding questions to one’s grandmother as to one’s whereabouts, receiving repeated calls as to the same, and attempting to track one down while in class would collectively chill a person of ordinary firmness from attempting to refile a criminal complaint,” Judge Chasanow wrote.
Also, the judge wrote, Shellenberger only told the others to stop their conduct after the woman’s lawyer “inserted himself into this situation.”
These are just a few headlines that caught the media’s attention. There are many more women in Baltimore County who feel betrayed by the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office under Scott Shellenberger’s leadership. If you are one of them and want to tell me your story, then please send me an email at robertleonardesq@gmail.com.
There’s a lot more to unpack about Baltimore County’s State’s Attorney. Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series. And don’t forget to share this story right now on Facebook, Twitter, email, or any other social media. Follow me on Facebook and @RobbieLeonard42 on Twitter.