Baltimore City Circuit Court — Site of Lawsuit Challenging Board Terms
Jesmond Riggins, a member of Baltimore’s Police Accountability Board, sued the Scott administration on September 9 in Baltimore City Circuit Court. He is asking the court to stop the city from removing current board members while it decides whether their seats became vacant when their terms expired or whether they remain protected by four-year terms, according to the Daily Record.
The dispute centers on competing readings of the board’s terms
At a July 6 board meeting, the mayor’s office said that all but the youth appointee were serving in holdover status because their terms had expired on December 3, 2024. Members were given two weeks to apply again, and a city memo set September 9 as the deadline for the mayor to submit nominations to the City Council, according to Baltimore Brew.
Riggins was appointed in February 2023 to what he says is a four-year seat. He argues that the administration’s interpretation would end that term early and allow the mayor to replace nearly the entire 17-member board at once. An administration lawyer has taken the opposing view, saying the members’ terms are “coterminous with the mayor’s term of office,” according to the Daily Record.
Appointment and removal rules are part of the legal question
How the oversight system handles complaints
According to Baltimore City, the Police Accountability Board receives all public complaints of police misconduct, refers them to the appropriate law-enforcement agency for investigation and does not assign independent investigators. During the first five months of case reviews in 2023, Baltimore’s civilian oversight bodies evaluated 413 police investigation files, according to CBS Baltimore. Baltimore City describes the related Administrative Charging Committee as a five-member civilian body that reviews investigations of complaints filed with the Police Accountability Board and decides disciplinary outcomes. The supplied records establish the number of files reviewed during that 2023 period but do not provide a cumulative total or a breakdown of disciplinary outcomes since the state accountability law took effect…