‘Worthy of mercy’
State’s longest-serving woman behind bars wins her freedom amid coronavirus concerns
She stepped into prison at 18 years old. She gets out at age 61.
Eraina Pretty, the longest-serving female prisoner in Maryland, won her freedom Monday from a Baltimore Circuit Court judge. The Northwest Baltimore womanhasservedmorethanfour decades behind bars for her part as a teenage accomplice in two1970s murders.
Over the years, she mentored other prisoners, won respect for her leadership behind bars, even assembled Braille books for the blind. State lawmakers and advocates of prison reform have championed her many tries for release.
Circuit Judge Yvette Bryant re-sentenced Pretty to time served.
“Ms. Pretty’s release was the result of many years of advocacy. We are grateful to Marilyn Mosby and to the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office, whoultimately agreed that Ms. Pretty was worthy of the mercy the court exercised in her re-sentencing,” said her attorneys, Leigh Goodmark and Lila Meadows, in a brief statement.
They requested privacy for
their client and said she wouldnot take questions. In recent months, Pretty had contracted the coronavirus at the MarylandCorrectional Institution for Women in Jessup and been hospitalized, her daughter said.
Pretty becomesthe second prisoner released through the partnership of defense attorneys and a newunit of the Baltimore State’s
“Most landowners really don’t want to change things unless they can see a clear benefit for themselves. They don’t want to see land taken out of production unless it’s gotten to the point where it’s so wet that it’s not worth their time.”
— Jim McGowan, The Nature Conservancy’s regional land protection manager in Virginia
Farmers
into the earth and advances inland through drainage ditches dug to carry water away.
Maryland soils that nourished corn, soybeans and vegetables on the Eastern Shore are overrun with phragmites, jungles of sharp-leaved invasive plants 10 feet or more in height. Soil testing showed levels of salinity too high for common crops.
A dozen samples on field locations showed salinity levels ranging from 1.3 parts per thousand (ppt) to 3.6 ppt — enough to stop or stunt the growth of traditional crops.
Fifty miles north in Dorchester County, samples from a cornfield of shriveled stalks showed salinity ranging from 3.7 to 4.5 ppt. Corn seedlings typically don’t withstand more than 0.9 ppt.
“I don’t think even weeds will grow in some places,” remarked the property owner, Richard Abend.
Change has arrived more swiftly in the Mid-Atlantic than along other coasts because the land is sinking, a geologic process begun millennia ago after advancing ice raised its level. It continues to subside, a factor in seas rising from 3 to 6 millimeters a year, depending on location, hastening research to help farmers and landowners adapt.
In September, t he National Science Foundation awarded a $4.3 million grant to University of Maryland agroecologist Kate Tully and colleagues in Delaware and Virginia to study the transforming effects on the Delmarva Peninsula.
In Maryland, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found a drop in farm acreage of 9% in between 2012 and 2017 in Somerset County.
Somerset’s l oss of uplands over eight years was nearing 2.4 square miles, most of it farmlands, according to newly published research by wetlands ecologist Keryn Gedan of George Washington University, and Rebecca Epanchin-Niell of Resources for the Future, members of Tully’s research team.
Tully and colleagues are seeking crops that can tolerate salt even as she and other researchers unravel the complex changes in soil chemistry as salt creeps farther inland. The salty and wet conditions can trigger release of phosphorus and nitrogen stored in fields from farming, polluting the surface and groundwater.
Tully’s team monitored Somerset County’s waters for three years before publishing research documenting that nutrients that have accumulated on farm fields “are moving downstream through connected agricultural ditches and tidal creeks.”
That nutrient exodus could mean more trouble for Chesapeake Bay, where dead zones of oxygenstarved waters — caused in part by fertilizers — nearly tripled last year.
Tully has experimented with crops in southern Maryland that have promising markets. Sorghum might be used to feed chickens in Eastern Shore broiler houses. Switchgrass has potential as poultry bedding. Barley, which she said fared “pretty good” in her test plantings, could be sold to regional microbreweries.
Quinoa, a super grain and technically a fruit, is among the most salt-tolerant food crops. But farmers have shown little interest.
At Cape May Plant Materials Center, a U.S. Department of Agriculture installation in southern New Jersey working on problems in nine states, a dozen of the 16 crops being tested aim at adaptation to salty soils, according to Christopher Miller, installation manager.
Tully has tested soybeans bred to withstand salt but reports little success, not good news along Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore, where farmers in three counties planted about 85,000 acres of soybeans last year.
The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service is signing up farmers willing to turn over salt-scarred land for restoring marshlands and other conservation purposes.
In Maryland this spring, The Nature Conservancy said it had agreements to put 130 acres into permanent preservation. From aerial photos, the conservancy identified dozens of parcels in Maryland and Virginia where salt buildup was so heavy along farmland ditches that they looked like roads from the air. Projects in Virginia show promise. Near Bloxom, a town along the Chesapeake Bay, the USDAconservation service has begun an elaborate wetlands restoration project on 33 acres surrounding a home built in 1730.
The agency planted millions of seeds for plants such as creeping spikerush and bearded beggarticks.
Dr. Charles Wilder, who owns the land, is keenly aware of the climate crisis and signed up for the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program because he wanted to put his acreage to good use.
“I think we’re running out of time, I really do,” said Wilder, 67.
Getting to the point where landowners agree to subscribe to programs and easements — the legal right to use part of their land — is challenging. They might see more value in priming the land for duck hunting, which would bring in some income.
“Most landowners really don’t want to change things unless they can see a clear benefit for themselves,” said Jim McGowan, The Nature Conservancy’s regional land protection manager in Virginia. “They don’t want to see land taken out of production unless it’s gotten to the point where it’s so wet that it’s not worth their time.”