Bernstein leads Jessamy with absentee ballots left to count 

Posted: 9:27 am Wed, September 15, 2010
By Brendan Kearney

The race for Baltimore City State’s Attorney could come down to absentee ballots.

At 3 a.m., the Associated Press reported challenger Gregg L. Bernstein with 29,121 votes and incumbent Patricia C. Jessamy with 27,700. Although AP said all precincts were reporting at that time, the Baltimore City Board of Elections amended that later to say 97 percent of precincts were reporting.

By noon Wednesday, neither candidate had conceded and nearly 3,000 absentee ballots have yet to be counted, starting Thursday.

The slow pace of election returns frustrated candidates and their supporters throughout the night.

Polls closed at 8 p.m., with the first returns posted about 90 minutes later. Jessamy led in the early hours.

Just before 11, with the numbers still in her favor, Jessamy’s supporters were in a celebratory mood and their candidate was on hand.  A crowd gathered behind her and cheered as she did a television interview at the Baltimore Rowing Club, headquarters for the night’s festivities. Music pounded from out on the deck that overlooks the Patapsco and the Baltimore skyline.

Bernstein, at JD’s Smokehouse in Canton, took the lead shortly after that and continued to climb.
Just before 12:30 a.m. Wednesday, his spokeswoman said he would be following the returns at home and that he would not be making any comment until morning.

As the Rowing Club’s staff folded up tables and chairs, Jessamy was also ready to go.

“We’re going home,” she said, though she would actually be spending the night at a downtown hotel.

Former U.S. Rep. and former NAACP President Kweisi Mfume was heading out of Jessamy’s election party around 12:30 a.m., the end of a long night that also featured visits to Baltimore County Executive candidate Kevin Kamenetz’s gathering as well as state Sen. Joan Carter Conway’s. He said Jessamy is a “personal friend” alongside whom he’s “fought a lot of battles.”

Voter turnout was especially low in Tuesday’s primary — only 13.6 percent of registered voters in the city cast their ballots by 7 p.m.

Earlier in the day, Bernstein hoped the tepid turnout would inure to his benefit.

“I think that our voters are energized and enthused and voting with a purpose,” he said just after 5 p.m. as he stood outside a Southeast Baltimore senior center. “I don’t know that Mrs. Jessamy’s voters are the same.”

Jessamy, greeting friends outside a North Baltimore church earlier in the afternoon, seemed surprised by the low turnout, which stood at just 8 percent number as of 3 p.m.

“Oh my goodness,” she said. “That’s low, very low.”

The race between Bernstein and Jessamy has been the most closely watched primary in Baltimore, a city infamous for its crime. The candidates have stood in stark contrast in many respects, from the physical to the philosophical. Sheryl A. Lansey, the third candidate, is a former elementary school teacher from an old Baltimore family.

Jessamy, the 15-year incumbent, had touted her incarceration rate and her prevention and diversion programs. Bernstein, a former federal prosecutor who has spent the past 20 years in private practice, had promised a higher conviction rate of the city’s most violent criminals by getting along better with the police department and even trying some cases himself.

Jessamy, who grew up during the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi before rising through the ranks of the State’s Attorney’s office, had the support of the political establishment: U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings and former U.S. Rep. Kweisi Mfume, as well as other state legislators from Baltimore, were loud in their support of the 62-year-old prosecutor. Jessamy’s immediate predecessors, including former Mayor Kurt Schmoke, also endorsed her re-election.

Bernstein, a Baltimore native who was considered a possible replacement for U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein before entering the city race earlier this summer, was the choice of many of the city’s most prominent lawyers, from former city judge William H. “Billy” Murphy Jr. to former U.S. Attorney and Maryland Attorney General Stephen H. Sachs. They gave him a clear fundraising advantage over Jessamy.

The police union also endorsed Bernstein, as did The Baltimore Sun and City Paper. On the other hand, a group of Baptist ministers in Baltimore announced their support for Jessamy on Monday.

Even their Election Day campaign styles differed. Jessamy crisscrossed the city in a black Ford Grand Marquis, making dozens of 10- or 15-minute stops. Bernstein made far fewer stops in his SUV, and was holding a Starbucks coffee as he chatted with voters in Southeast Baltimore, including a State’s Attorney’s office employee. The political “neophyte” said it had been a long day but he had gotten a lot of thumbs-up and car-horn honks.

In North Baltimore, a 67-year-old retired teacher and nurse leaving the First English Lutheran Church polling place said she voted for Bernstein because she has been “singularly unimpressed” with Jessamy’s office whenever she’s served jury duty.

“The cases we lose are appalling to me,” said the Guilford resident, who did not want to be identified but described herself as an “old liberal Democrat.” “We definitely need a change.”

But Jessamy seemed to have the clear support of Barbara Armstrong, who brought her 94-year-old mother to vote at that same church minutes earlier. The younger Armstrong called Jessamy the “lady of the hour,” and Jessamy leaned into Armstrong’s Jaguar to hug one of her oldest supporters.

And at the Tench Tilghman Elementary School polling place, Glenn Ross, a community activist, offered full-throated support for Jessamy and answered criticism of low conviction rates.

“They’re letting people go because police officers are not writing more accurate reports, arrest reports,” Ross said, adding that plea deals in exchange for information against other criminals is part of the “game” that is not widely understood.

The campaign, though just a couple of months long, has been a lively affair, including the kinds of accusations Ross referenced.

Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, who has overseen historic drops in homicides and violent crime in the city with Jessamy but has clashed with her as well, planted a Bernstein campaign sign in his front yard early last month. He later took it down amid charges of using his office to support Bernstein, but the message was clear.

Bernstein’s television and radio ads, bankrolled by donations from his Zuckerman Spaeder LLP partners and other high-powered attorneys in Baltimore and beyond, were also controversial. One featured Jessamy’s former witness-protection coordinator criticizing the office’s handling of the Dawson family, who were fire-bombed in their East Baltimore row house after repeatedly complaining about drug dealers in their neighborhood.

Most recently, Jessamy’s comments at a meeting with local church leaders that Bernstein’s election “would be taking us back 60 years” led to criticism that she was making a racial appeal to Baltimore’s majority black citizenry. However, the context of the comments in the Youtube video seemed to suggest she was talking about her and Bernstein’s differing views on prevention and treatment of crime.