On the Record

By: Brendan Kearney

Instead of writing about yet another day of evidentiary motions in the run-up to trial in the murder of former Baltimore City Councilman Ken Harris, allow me to offer a couple of curtain-raiser thoughts.

With jury selection scheduled to start tomorrow and go into next week, this high-profile trial is expected to get underway in earnest on Sept. 13 — one day before voters go to the polls to decide whether State’s Attorney Pat Jessamy deserves another four-year term as Baltimore’s top prosecutor. Although the confluence of events appears to be a coincidence — trial has been postponed four times — the case contains many of the issues Jessamy and principal challenger Gregg Bernstein have argued about this summer and could provide fodder for some 11th-hour posturing.

Bernstein’s first campaign ad controversially faulted Jessamy for not keeping the Dawson family safe from the drug dealers about whom they called police. In the Harris case, the Northwood Shopping Center security guard who picked out defendants Gary Collins and Charles McGaney from surveillance video said he delayed calling police out of fear for his family – and then, sure enough, he was the victim of intimidation after coming forward. (He is now in the state’s attorney’s office’s witness protection program.) The Northwood security guard, Germyn Murray, appears to be the only person who could identify Collins and McGaney after the fact.

Also, the candidates have talked about focusing on violent repeat offenders, and Collins and McGaney have previous gun convictions and have served prison terms. McGaney was a suspect in another murder, which is how the police obtained his DNA and linked him to the Harris case. I’ll leave it to the candidates to pick out more talking points as trial gets under way…

Unrelated to the election, another interesting factor in the case is that Murray is a “special police officer” – more on what that means in a second – who worked for a security company founded by a Baltimore police officer that was the subject of a federal lawsuit and state and local police investigations concerning illegal arrests, among other unlawful behavior. Special police officers are basically real cops on the property for which they’ve been granted a commission: they often wear official uniforms and drive police-like cars, they have official immunity, and they can make arrests. But they don’t have nearly as much training as regular cops, and critics say this leads to the kind of “cowboy” behavior for which Federal Security Specialists was investigated. Murray began working at FSS in 2005; in September 2008, when Harris was shot, Murray was a major at Mid Atlantic Protection Agency, the successor company to FSS.

Now, there was no mention of Murray in the 57-page federal lawsuit against FSS, a related company and several of its employees (including some John Does), and the lawsuit was dismissed for lack of prosecution two years ago. And nothing has been made of the allegations against FSS this week in court. But who knows whether Murray’s employer’s past could haunt him on the witness stand?

Finally, on a decidedly non-legal note, I think plenty of people are curious to hear about the woman Harris, the married father of two and a one-time city council president candidate, was with the night he stopped at the New Haven Lounge to borrow a corkscrew, and how that stop led to his untimely death at 45. The woman is expected to testify at trial, so stay tuned.