This report aims to uncover the quantitative realities of the Baltimore City District Court system using the information that has been publicly available in Maryland Judiciary Case Search (MJCS), the official tracking system for criminal and civil court cases in Maryland.
It answers:

How many cases are dropped?
How often is a defendant held without bail?
Most importantly, how often is a defendant incarcerated without bail only to have their case later dropped?

Based on the available data, we found that:

Defendants were held without bond at least once about 45% of the time
Defendants who were held without bond at least once had their cases fully dropped
70% of the time
Defendants who were held without bond at least once had their cases fully dropped
or acquitted 75% of the time

In total, the majority of defendants who were held during pretrial were never convicted of a crime. These findings suggest that there is reason to question the connection between a defendant’s actual guilt and the pretrial system’s aims of ensuring appearance in court and community safety.

This report would not have been possible without the dedicated work of Megan Kenny, BALT’s former Data Analyst, Colin Starger and the University of Baltimore Legal Data Clinic, and Open Justice Baltimore.