Retired Baltimore City Homicide Detective Stephen Tabeling, co-author of the newly published memoir You Can’t Stop Murder, says Baltimore City police are unprepared to handle a sniper attack like the one that occurred on Good Friday in April 1976.

Now 84, Tabeling decries lack of proper training
by Baltimore Police Department;  officers have
inadequate understanding of U.S. Constitution

‘UNGER DECISION’ COULD FREE HUNDREDS
 
By Alan Z. Forman
 
The Baltimore City Police lieutenant in command at the scene of the “Good Friday Shooting” of 1976, in which six patrol officers and a detective were shot by a teenage sniper from his third-floor window in West Baltimore, says that if a similar situation were to occur today, “city police are not prepared for it.

“We couldn’t contain the carnage any better today than we did 37 years ago,” he declared.

Retired Homicide Detective Stephen Tabeling, who has been a police officer for more than six decades and is a harsh critic of the lack of proper training regarding arrest procedure and the obtaining of proper warrants by the BPD, believes that with today’s high-powered weaponry — that did not exist on the street in 1976 when 18-year-old John Earl Williams shot a total of seven city cops, one fatally, using an arsenal that could have outfitted an army unit — the carnage that occurred near the corner of Lombard and Carey Streets would be far worse today than on that Good Friday 37 years ago.

Last week, Tabeling, who is now 84, met with one of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s senior aides to discuss ways to improve policing in the city.

“I’m very disturbed at the direction that law enforcement in Baltimore, and other U.S. cities as well, has been taking,” he told Voice of Baltimore.

“Police officers don’t know the Constitution and aren’t being trained to make arrests that will hold up in court,” he said.

‘GET A WARRANT! GET A WARRANT! GET A WARRANT!’

When he teaches at the Police Academy he tells the young cadets, “There are three things you need to do when you set out to investigate a crime:

“Get a warrant! get a warrant! get a warrant!”

But he says the department is also negligent about training officers in how to write them.

“This needs to be fixed,” he told VoB. “Urgently.”

As a young patrolman in East Baltimore, Tabeling was mentored and trained in the writing of proper warrants by former City State’s Attorney Charles E. Moylan Jr., now a retired judge on Maryland’s Court of Special Appeals.

“Without a proper warrant, any good defense attorney is going to get the best evidence excluded at trial, resulting in the defendant’s likely acquittal,” he explained.

The “Good Friday Shooter,” John Earl Williams, now 55 years old, is eligible for immediate release — if he can cut a deal — or a new trial as a result of the so-called “Unger decision” last year whereby the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that in cases tried before 1980, judges gave juries bad instructions, resulting in confusion over whether defendants could be convicted without proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

THE CASE OF MERLE W. UNGER JR.

The high court’s ruling came in the case of Merle W. Unger Jr., now 62, who was sentenced to life in prison for shooting and killing a Hagerstown police officer who interrupted a holdup he was committing in 1975.

The judge in Unger’s trial told jurors that his instructions about the law were “merely advisory,” thereby allowing the jury to disregard the defendant’s rights, the Court of Appeals ruled in May 2012.

Unger was retried and convicted a second time in July. In many other cases however key witnesses are no longer living and felons are being released into the community.

At least 200 convicted felons who are still serving sentences in Maryland prisons could end up free under the ruling.

About half that number committed their crimes and were convicted and sentenced in Baltimore City, and a dozen or more are eligible for retrial or release in Baltimore County.

Since late August, about two dozen have been released statewide, along with at least 25 released by the city’s judicial system.

A hearing is scheduled for Nov. 14 to determine who will be retried and who will be released in the next wave mandated by the Unger ruling.

Tabeling said he expects that Williams will be retried. “We have the evidence and the witnesses are still here,” he said.
 
alforman@voiceofbaltimore.org
 
READ VOICE OF BALTIMORE’S THURSDAY STORY ON DETECTIVE TABELING AND THE UNGER DECISION:  click here