Wednesday, April 24.

LGBTQ Homelessness in Baltimore: Folks with Lived Experience: A conversation about how to improve current conditions, and eventually end homelessness for the LGBTQ community in Baltimore City. 5:30-7:30 p.m., Chase Brexton Healthcare, 1111 N. Charles St.

The Necessity of Tomorrow(s): Boots Riley and Mickalene Thomas:
Hear Boots Riley, critically-acclaimed rapper, activist, and director of “Sorry to Bother You,” in conversation with internationally-renowned artist Mickalene Thomas. 6-10 p.m., The Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive.

Charm City Spec: Justina Ireland, Arkady Martine, And Sarah Pinsker: Monthly speculative fiction reading series. 7 p.m. Bird in Hand, 11 E. 33rd St.

Thursday, April 25.

Our Work: Client Art Exhibition 2019: Health Care for the Homeless’ client artists show their artwork. 5-7 p.m., Health Care for the Homeless, 421 Fallsway.

Parent and Community Advisory Board Meeting: PCAB advises the City Schools’ CEO and the Baltimore City Board of School Commissioners about how parents, families, the community, and educators can collaborate to help our youth succeed. 6:30 p.m., Baltimore City Public Schools Headquarters, 200 E. North Ave.

Writers LIVE: D. Watkins: D. Watkins, editor-at-large for Salon, talks about his new book, “We Speak for Ourselves” with Dr. Wendy Osefo. 7-9 p.m., Union Baptist Church, 1219 Druid Hill Ave.

Friday, April 26.

CM/Bal: Steph Hsu on Inclusive: Steph Hsu is one of the organizers of The Chinatown Collective, who’s mission is to amplify the voices and experiences of Baltimore based Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) artists, entrepreneurs, and creatives. 8:30-10 a.m., Open Works, 1400 Greenmount Ave.

2019 High School Graduate Job Fair: Students can meet employers, get information about careers, and more. 10 a.m. – 2 p.m., Columbus Center, 701 E. Pratt St.

Raised in the System Screening and Talk with Michael K. Williams: The Mayor’s Office of African American Male Engagement, Open Society Institute-Baltimore, and Reginald F. Lewis Museum of African American History host Michael K. Williams’ documentary “Raised in the System.” 6-9 p.m., Reginald F. Lewis Museum, 830 E. Pratt St.

Saturday, April 27.

Res Hill Community Clean Up: Third Saturday clean ups. 9 a.m., Whitelock Community Farm, 930 Whitelock St.

CityLit Festival 2019: Author talks, writing workshops, and more (including a workshop run by the Beat). 9:30 a.m. – 6 p.m., University of Baltimore William H. Thumel Sr. Business Center, 11 W. Mount Royal Ave.

“It Takes Two” The Power of One on Ones: Black Leaders Organizing For Change begins its Organizing 101 series. For those interested in learning more about organizing, learning what organizers do, and gaining knowledge of some of the tools needed to dismantle oppressive systems. 10 a.m.-1 p.m., Open Works, 1400 Greenmount Ave.

Baltimore City Schools Day of Play: Face painting, food, and more for parents and families with children five years or younger. 10 a.m. – 2 p.m., Harford Heights Elementary School, 1919 N. Broadway.

LinkedIn for Journalists with Intero Advisory’s Colleen McKenna: LinkedIn tips for journalists and media-related professionals. Noon-2 p.m., Maryland Public Television, 11767 Owings Mills Boulevard.

Confronting Gentrification and Displacement: Video screening and panel discussion about the issues of gentrification and displacement. 4-6:30 p.m., Oak Hill Center for Education and Culture, 2239 Kirk Ave.

Sunday, April 28.

Poisoning the Black Butterfly: Runners4Justice event focused on environmental racism and lead poisoning. 9-11 a.m., Dovecote Cafe, 2501 Madison Ave.

Nature Connections: Bird Friendly Communities: Learn about creating bird friendly communities. 1-4 p.m., The Natural History Society of Maryland, 6908 Belair Rd.

Baltimore Abortion Fund’s Fifth Bowl-A-Thon: Spend your Sunday fun day with us and support access to safe abortion care across the state of Maryland. It’s a win-win, even if you’re a terrible bowler. 2-6 p.m., Mustang Alley’s Bar, Bowling, and Bistro, 1300 Bank St., Second Floor.

Monday, April 29.

Chris Wilson – The Master Plan: Author Chris Wilson presents his new book, “The Master Plan: My Journey from Life in Prison to a Life of Purpose.” 7:30-9 p.m., Greedy Reads, 1744 Aliceanna St.

Tuesday, April 30.

Court Support For Keith Davis Jr.: Join organizers supporting Keith Davis Jr. and his family as the state’s seeks to retry Davis Jr. for the fourth time. This is a motions hearing related to the case. 8:45 a.m., Baltimore City Courthouse East, 111 N. Calvert St.

Baltimore City Council Public Safety Committee Meeting: Council meets with representatives from the Baltimore City Police Department. 5 p.m., Baltimore City Hall, 100 Holliday St.

Baltimoreans for Educational Equity General Membership Meeting:
Get updated on campaigns, set next steps, and more. 7-8:30 p.m. 2601 N. Howard St.

First Annual International Day of Tatreez & Palestinian Culture: This celebration calls on Palestinians to post pictures on all social media platforms, using the hashtags #TweetYourThobe, #TweetYourTatreez, and #TweetYourCulture. The Museum of the Palestinian People – inaugurating its physical location this spring in Washington, DC – will serve as a leader for the annual hashtag campaign and celebration. All day. Online.

Wednesday, May  1.

Cornerstone Staffing Open Hiring Event: Meet with staff from Cornerstone Staffing and inquire about available positions. 10 a.m. – 2 p.m., Enoch Pratt Central Library, 400 Cathedral St.

The post Government Meetings and Activist, Social Justice Events—4/24-5/1 appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Bearded, big, and in a prison jumpsuit on the stand, Itisham Butt testifies at a Dec. 1 motions hearing in Baltimore’s Circuit Court. Keith Davis Jr. is demanding a new trial, and Butt hopes, in the process, that he can “clear [his] name.”

“I need to clear my name,” he says. “It’s important to me to clear my name.”

Butt’s Muslim brothers and all the boys on his tier at Jessup Correctional Institution were talking about him. Some lawyer he hadn’t met before came and told him, too: That during Davis’ October trial, David Gutierrez, Butt’s former cellmate and the State’s star witness, told the court that Davis bought alcohol from Butt and that during one of these illegal booze exchanges, Davis told Gutierrez he murdered Kevin Jones, another Baltimore man.

“I can’t take the smell of alcohol,” Butt, a practicing Sunni Muslim who is therefore forbidden to consume or sell alcohol, tells Judge Lynn Stewart Mays, State Prosecutor Andrea Mason, Davis’ attorney Latoya Francis-Williams, Davis, and a packed courtroom. “Never. I don’t know anything about alcohol.”

Davis looks toward Butt up on the stand, then to his left at his lawyer and her notes, and then back to Butt again. He does this all afternoon. This case isn’t just about whether Davis killed Kevin Jones anymore, it didn’t even begin that way, it began in June of 2015 as a police shooting. Now, the Keith Davis Jr. trial is a high-profile activist cause—part of a saga that includes alleged misconduct in the State’s Attorney’s Office, a jailhouse snitch, and beef between lawyers.

“If they found some people saying I’m making wine, that’s not good, on my stuff, and in front of my God,” says Butt, who teaches Islam while he’s inside Jessup. “Because I’m preaching to others to change their lives.”

Butt knew Gutierrez as “Da’ud,” not David, though he says Gutierrez “didn’t have that much knowledge of Islam,” but Butt isn’t there to judge, just to instruct. Butt is serving 30 years he says, because he was “found guilty,” of “child abuse, sexual assault, and false imprisonment,” among other charges. A 2012 SAO press release says Butt sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl.

Mason points out that nowhere in the murder trial where Gutierrez testified did Butt’s name come up; it’s something of a “gotcha” save for the fact that prison talk is real if you’re doing 30 years and your name is all you got and you’re teaching Islam and you’re a locked-up sex offender ostensibly making a change—even murmurs matter a great deal.

“When you say certain stuff [in prison] they know who you’re talking about,” Butt says. There was “rumor everywhere” in Jessup, he says. Plus, “Mr. Jeremy,” came to visit him. Mr. Jeremy is Jeremy Eldridge, a criminal defense attorney and former State prosecutor who Butt says came to Jessup and told Butt what Gutierrez said about him in court. He’d never met Eldridge before, Butt says. He starts to stammer and Judge Mays interjects.

“Stop shaking your head,” Judge Mays says to Francis-Williams.

After a bench conference, Judge Mays announces to the court that there cannot even be the “appearance of either attorney coaching,” and that coaching is “not allowed, inappropriate, unethical.”

Davis’ hearing for a motion for a new trial, which began on Dec. 1 and continued into Dec. 4, was full of moments like this, cinematic courtroom drama. This whole hearing for a new trial hinges on an informant with a dark, drug-cartel-tied past. Gutierrez’s criminal record wasn’t fully revealed in the last trial, Francis-Williams argues. He was not only a drug dealer tied to a Texas drug cartel, but a “hitman,” she says, who, among other things, helped dispose of a dead body by lighting it on fire.

A cynic might say that this hearing hinges on whether to believe the word of a cartel enforcer who helped set a dead body on fire or the word of a convicted sex offender.

According to the police officers who shot Keith Davis Jr. early in the morning on June 7, 2015, he had used a gun to hold up a hack. When the hack pulled up beside a police car, the gunman fled and the pursuing officers, Lane Eskins, Alfredo Santiago, and Catherine Filippou, chased Davis into a dark garage. They started firing.

In total, 44 shots were fired and Davis was struck three times. Police charged Davis with 16 crimes, including firing his weapon. The problem was almost none of it held up. Davis claimed he had been walking down the street on the phone with his then-girlfriend, now-wife Kelly, when he saw officers running. This was only two months after the in-custody death of Freddie Gray. Davis says when he saw the police he was scared and ran.

In court in 2016 for the robbery charges, Charles Holden, the hack driver, was asked to identify Davis and could not.

“If I go closer I can tell you that’s him or not,” Holden said.

When he got up close to Davis, the prosecutor asked him if he recognized the man who held him up.

“To my recollection that don’t look like him much to me,” Holden said.

Davis’ gun had not been fired during the June 2015 shooting by police, but it did have Davis’ palm print on it. His lawyer argued that the gun had been planted and his prints wiped on it. On March 3, 2016, Davis was acquitted on the charges that led to the shooting (robbing a hack cab driver, assaulting police officers, among them) except for possessing a gun. That then became the foundation for Davis being charged with Jones’ murder. According to charging documents, investigators “determined that cartridge cases recovered from the scene of the murder” of Jones, “were fired from the gun recovered by the defendant.”

Davis’ first trial for the murder ended in a hung jury, but he was swiftly convicted in October. The State disingenuously alleged the circumstances of the robbery, of which Davis was cleared, as evidence in the murder and Davis’ acquittal for the robbery was not allowed to be mentioned in court.

“Keith was still referred to as ‘a robber.’ In the prosecutor’s closing arguments, she actually said, ‘He robbed a hack,’” Kelly Davis told the Real News last month. “He was acquitted of all these charges and even though the prosecutor was able to allude to those charges he had already stood trial for, as well as this gun, he’s already been found not to have possessed this gun . . . she was able to allude to these allegations as if he had never been tried.”

The second trial also had a new witness, Gutierrez, a federal prisoner being housed at Jessup. Gutierrez testified that Davis told him he shot Jones over a “neighborhood beef” and that he thought he would get away with it because a do-rag made witnesses think he had long hair, explaining both motive and why the hack couldn’t identify him in court in 2016.

Additionally, Frances-Williams argued, Gutierrez’s involvement in a past RICO case was misrepresented to the jury and judge because Gutierrez was circumspect with admitting the full extent of his involvement and charges tied to the RICO case.

Later on, at Davis’ hearing for a new trial, Mays slows the proceedings down amid a debate about what Gutierrez should have disclosed and asks the State what RICO even means.

“I’m a fan of old movies,” Mays says. “When I hear ‘RICO,’ I think Chicago mobsters and G-Men.” This is the first of two golden age of cinema references during the hearing.

Mason doesn’t seem to know what it stands for and Francis-Williams doesn’t answer. “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations,” Mays answers after looking it up.

Mason wonders aloud why any of this matters. Nobody here claims Gutierrez is a good guy, he’s here because he knows something about a crime and he gets “time off his sentence” for testifying, simple as that.

Francis-Williams characterizes Gutierrez as essentially a jailhouse snitch who has been “parading around the country testifying in homicide cases in order to gain leniency for his gruesome crimes.”

Butt meanwhile, well, he gets nothing and plenty of people here buy his “clear my name” stance—except for Mays, who later in the day blurts out an angry aside that mentions Butts’ “child abuse” charges with disdain and mocks Butt’s “clear my name” shtick. It is a bad sign for Davis’ defense.

Butt also claims that until recently, when Davis came up to him in Jessup to discuss Gutierrez talking about him, he’d never even seen “Mr. Keith.” All three certainly weren’t drinking in his cell and shooting the shit earlier this year. Butt’s claims are in part supported by the second witness at the hearing, Chief Joseph Harris, head of security at Jessup Correctional Institute, who confirms documents showing when Davis was moved to Butt’s building.

Harris, a bemused bureaucrat who explains his role at Jessup as “supervisor to the supervisors of the staff” confirms that there was never a point where Davis would’ve been on the same tier as Butt and Gutierrez when they were cellmates, which makes the three meeting, especially in a cell like Gutierrez explained, nearly impossible. He did admit that “it’s possible” someone could move undetected, though at great risk.

The State’s witness, David Greene, chief of case management for the Department of Correctional Services, confirms that Gutierrez was transferred from Jessup to somewhere else because of his testimony in the October Davis trial. Greene also confirms that it was a “protective order”—though one Gutierrez requested—and says it invokes the fact that “BGF has a kill-on-sight order,” to those who testify against others in cases.

If this was supposed to link Davis to BGF, it falls flat.

Mays, who seems exasperated by the nearly day-long hearing, quotes the 1942 Bette Davis vehicle “Now, Voyager” (“Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon, We have the stars”) to Frances-Williams, as she argues out a new supplement to the motion: something or other about the DNA expert from the second trial.

As in both murder trials for Davis, the State’s argument mostly focuses on circumstantial evidence: that it was possible Davis could have gone to another inmate’s cell despite not being permitted (SAO’s Andrea Mason invoked recent news that a guard at Jessup is also a Crip) and that Davis also could have spoken to Gutierrez “during chow,” even though Gutierrez specifically testified that the conversation happened in his cell.

Very little of this, it seems, ultimately matters. It’s all about Gutierrez and those RICO charges and the State’s apparent obfuscation, which Judge Mays refers to as a “sanitized” version of its star witness’ criminal history. The jury did not get a full sense of Gutierrez and because of that granting a new trial makes sense.

Davis will return to court in April to be tried for the murder of Kevin Jones—for the third time.

“We respect the judge’s decision,” Melba Saunders, director of communications for the SAO, said in a statement, “and look forward to presenting the facts of this case again in the pursuit of justice for the family of Mr. Jones.”

“It doesn’t open the door to let him out, but I feel he’s been at least partially vindicated,” Kelly Davis says right after the new trial announcement. “No matter what you believe, no matter what you thought, he did not do this. He should not have been convicted behind the dirty antics of the State’s Attorney’s Office. This is just one step closer to getting him home where he belongs.”

Later in the day, at a press conference in front of the SAO’s office, Davis describes her husband’s reaction to the news.

“He dropped his body down, he came back up, punched his fists,” Davis says. “And his lawyers patted him on his back.”

Additional reporting by Baynard Woods.

Portions of this report were previously posted online (see here and here); this is the version that runs in print in the Dec. 13 issue of the Baltimore Beat.

The post To Clear My Name: Keith Davis Jr. granted a new trial in a case that keeps getting more complicated appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Keith Davis Jr., a man shot by police in June of 2015 and later charged and convicted of the murder of Kevin Jones, has been granted a new trial. 

A hearing for a motion for a new trial, which began on Dec. 1 and continued into today, found Davis’ lawyers focusing on the unreliability of the state’s star witness David Gutierrez, who claimed Davis confessed to him about Jones’ murder. That claim, according to Davis’ lawyers, was impossible given prison layout and permissions.

The defense’s two witnesses were Gutierrez’s former cellmate Ishtahim Butt, and James Harris, the security chief at Jessup Correctional Institution. 

Butt testified that he only recently met Davis for the first time, and that he is a practicing Muslim and therefore cannot drink or make alcohol—Gutierrez said Davis bought alcohol from his cellmate, who would’ve been Butt, and that’s how they met and got to talking and Davis to confessing.

Harris testified that permissions would have prevented Davis from entering Butt and Gutierrez’s cell and vice versa.

The defense argued that Gutierrez was the primary factor that made the second trial different from the first trial—most other state witnesses in both trials were related to the police shooting of Davis that led to him being charged with Jones’ murder—and that if Gutierrez’s testimony was not reliable and if the defense now had Butt to challenge Gutierrez’s account, then a new trial was necessary. Additionally, Francis-Williams suggested that Gutierrez’s involvement in a past RICO case was misrepresented to the jury and judge because Gutierrez was not only involved in the drug-dealing elements of it, but also in the disposal of a body, which he burned. On Monday, Judge Lynn Stewart Mays referred to the state’s presentation of Gutierrez’s record as “sanitized.”

For a motions hearing, it was particularly dramatic—in part because of Baltimore Bloc’s demand that people in support of Davis “pack the court,” which led to a fairly full courtroom and also a number of strange and compelling moments. During his testimony, Butt explained how he learned about Gutierrez’s allegations and said a lawyer, Jeremy Eldridge, had visited him. Judge Mays chastised Frances-Williams for what she said at least “looked like” she was shaking her head and “coaching” Butt.

Butt, who is doing 30 years for the sexual abuse of a 14-year-old girl, said that he was there to “clear his name” in regards to alcohol sale and consumption as a Sunni Muslim. But Judge Mays blurted out an angry aside challenging Butt’s statement, referring to his “child abuse” charge. Mays, who seemed exasperated by the nearly day-long hearing on Friday, also quoted the 1942 Bette Davis vehicle “Now, Voyager” (“Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon, We have the stars”) to Frances-Williams, who argued for a while about a supplement to the motion.

Similar to both murder trials for Davis, the State’s argument mostly focused on circumstantial evidence: that it was possible Davis could have gone to another inmate’s cell despite not being permitted (SAO’s Andrea Mason invoked recent news that a guard at Jessup is also a Crip) and that Davis also could have spoken to Gutierrez “during chow” (Gutierrez specifically testified that the conversation happened in his cell).

It is something of a victory for local activists and Davis’ wife Kelly, who have been calling attention to Davis’ situation since 2015.

“It doesn’t open the door to let him out, but I feel he’s been at least partially vindicated,” Kelly Davis said. “No matter what you believe, no matter what you thought, he did not do this. He should not have been convicted behind the dirty antics of the State’s Attorney’s Office. This is just one step closer to getting him home where he belongs.”

“We respect the judge’s decision,” Melba Saunders, director of communications for the SAO said in a statement. “And look forward to presenting the facts of this case again in the pursuit of justice for the family of Mr. Jones.

This will be the third time he has been tried for Jones’ murder.

Kelly Davis will hold a press conference in front of the State’s Attorney’s Office today at 3:30 p.m.

Additional reporting by Baynard Woods.

The post Keith Davis Jr., shot by police in 2015, later charged and convicted of murder, granted new trial appeared first on Baltimore Beat.