State must investigate JudgeWachs
OnTuesday, Anne Arundel Circuit Court Judge MichaelWachs’ rushed through the plea hearing in theTyriqueHudsonmurder case. Hudson had been gunned down by James Verombeck on April 15, 2019.
TheHudsonfamilywaited forover a year for “justice” — only to be locked out of the judicial proceedings and ill-informed of the details of the plea of insanity or the report supporting the determination that Verombeck was indeed insane.
Many of Hudson’s family members and supporters were left outside of the hearing and were not appropriately prepared by State’s Attorney Anne ColtLeitess’ office.
In this case, the judicial system failed to consider the needs of Hudson family members. In fact, The Capital “Our Say” on Thursday captured how Blacks might feel under these circumstances when it stated emphatically that Wachs failed Tyrique’s family by “…failing to give answers to those who loved Hudson…” and by doing so “… Wachs acted in a way confirming “Black Americans’ worst fears: they do not have the same protections in the judicial system as whites.”
This disparity is more than mere perspective. Let’s compare how families were handled by the Anne Arundel County judicial systemwhenadjudicating amurder case. For example, the Hudson family, is Black, and the families of the Capital Gazette victims, are white.
It is our position that the white families were treated with care, concern and were likely given an opportunity to discuss the case with the State’s Attorney before the day of the proceedings. Presiding Judge Laura Ripkin carefully handled those hearings to be sensitive to the victims’ families
and to not rush the families out of court.
However, she failed to send the memo to her brethren jurist on how to treat all families because, by all accounts, the Hudson family, who are Black, were not told in advance of the day of the hearing the nature of the insanity plea deal. They were not given an opportunity toweigh in.
Wachs callously denied access to all Hudson family members, then rushed through the hearing without giving the Hudson family the opportunity to digest what occurred and denied access to critical information that should have been publicly available.
The disparity described above is the proverbial foot on the necks of Black families confronted by judicial proceedings in Anne Arundel County. Let’s not pretend that justice prevailed in the Hudson case when it did not.
Let’s stop turning a blind eye when no
one within the judicial system is held accountable for this perversion of justice. The sense of one having achieved justice must be based on the totality of the experience within the judicial system, including the experiences of the victims’ family members. Simply focusing on obtaining a hollow insanity guilty plea is just not enough!
From our perspective, there must be judicial accountability. We challenge the State’s Chief Judge Barbera to investigate the poor handling of the Hudson hearing. We strongly feel that JudgeWachs owes the Hudson family an apology.
TyriqueHudsonwas killed in amodernday lynching and his family cast carelessly aside by our judicial system similar to how the families of lynching victims were often ignored in the past as an unimportant factor in aworld of hate.
Colt-Leitess and her staff are no better
than the judges mentioned above because she gets an “F” in her response to issues that impact people of color aswell as to ensuring accountability within the judicial system. The Anne Arundel CountyNAACP and the United Black Clergy intend to meet with her on the disparity by which victims’ families of color are treated as compared to white families.
We conclude that the Maryland judicial system, at all levels, does not appear to care about the rights of victims’ families to having non-ambushed plea hearings, public access to evidence gathered during a trial or even with the trauma that the judicial process creates for families. The simple truth is that it is abundantly clear that in the Maryland Judicial System — Black lives really don’tmatter!