IVAN BATES
As a child in Hampton, Virginia, in the 1980s, Ivan Bates rode the bus every day from his predominantly African American neighborhood to a school in a majority white district.
Three decades after attorney Thurgood Marshall, who went on to become the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, successfully argued that racial segregation of public schools is unconstitutional, Bates experienced an America still falling short.
While Bates dreamt of being a lawyer, he recalled feeling discouraged when a “scholastic aptitude” test in eighth grade suggested “a plumber or a brick mason.” His attention drifted away from school — until he began to understand how people like Marshall fought so he could be in the classroom. After serving in the U.S. Army, Bates earned a degree from Howard University.
“When I thought about going to law school, he was really the only Black lawyer that I knew,” Bates said of Marshall.
Bates graduated from William & Mary Law School in 1995 and began a legal career that has, so far, spanned more than 25 years and culminated with his swearing-in as Baltimore State’s Attorney. Bates said he’s keeping his “hero” in mind while taking office at a challenging time.
For eight years running the city has surpassed 300 homicides. His office has been battered by prosecutor attrition. Also short-staffed, the police department remains under a federal consent decree for widespread civil rights violations.
“Marshall was never afraid,” Bates said. “He embraced the law and he learned to use it for his people.”
The Democrat has promised to attack the gun violence epidemic without returning to broken windows policing, which led to the mass incarceration of minorities. Some criminal justice experts raised concerns about his reinstating the prosecution of certain low-level offenses.
Just like the majority of his clients over decades as a defense attorney, Bates said, most of the people his office prosecutes are Black. He wants his prosecutors to master the law’s nuance like Marshall, to hold offenders accountable while giving deserving people second chances.
“I’m not doing it from a position that I just want to put people in jail,” Bates said. “I’m doing it from a position that when I look, the victims of these crimes tend to look like me. Now I’m representing the victims. I’m now making sure that we protect the citizens, but I feel we don’t make a one size fits all in terms of every single sentence.”