Harford sheriff must turn over evidence
Judge rules AG to get materials on fatal shooting by deputies
A Harford County judge ruled Thursday that the county sheriff must turn over all evidence from Saturday’s fatal police shooting of John Raymond Fauver to the Maryland attorney general’s office.
The ruling follows a prolonged dispute between the two offices, which began after the passage of state legislation requiring the attorney general’s office to investigate civilian deaths involving police officers.
After the shooting Saturday, Harford County Sheriff Jeff Gahler said his office would collect and maintain the evidence in the shooting, partially since he had a duty as sheriff to investigate any crimes that may have occurred prior.
But in the five days since, the attorney general’s office has not received all of the evidence it requested, including digital copies of officer body camera footage, dashboard camera footage and witness interviews, Maryland Attorney General Brian
Frosh said in court Thursday.
In a news conference after the judge’s ruling, Gahler said he intends to comply, and does not believe that his attorneys will appeal.
“I do not plan on fighting that,” the Republican sheriff said. “In fact, I think the body camera data transfer is taking place right now.”
In her ruling, Harford County Circuit Court Judge Yolanda Curtin said she felt the intention of the law passed by the General Assembly was clear: that the attorney general’s office’s Independent Investigations Division ought to be the primary investigator in police-involved fatalities, and that local law enforcement agencies must comply.
“It is a one-way cooperation requiring the local enforcement agency to cooperate,” she said.
Curtin also emphasized that the legislative history of the bill made it clear that lawmakers intended for the attorney general’s office to operate independently in its investigations. Additionally, an update to the law takes effect in July, and it clarifies further that the attorney general’s division is to be the primary investigator in deaths
owned the enslaved people, since it is known that census enumerators would have asked not just about the presence of enslaved household members, but also about who owned them.
For much of the time since, the university’s website has included the statement that “recently discovered records offer strong evidence that Johns Hopkins had held enslaved people in his home until at least the mid-1800s.”
The version on the university’s website Wednesday read: “New research has uncovered census records that indicate enslaved people were among the individuals living and laboring in Johns Hopkins’ home in 1840 and 1850, with the latter document denoting Johns Hopkins as the slaveholder.”
Andy Green, a university spokesman, said in a statement that Hopkins Retrospective, a universitywide project to document the history of the institution, published an update on the research in January following a December symposium, “and we recently made minor edits to a few other institutional sites to make sure the language about the work is consistent.”
But critics of the first report heralded the change as a step forward for a university they say “jumped the gun” in 2020 when it asserted that Hopkins didn’t merely have more complex dealings with slavery than was long believed, but also personally enslaved people.
Former Maryland State Archivist Ed Papenfuse and Sydney Van Morgan, the director of the international studies program at Johns Hopkins, were among the scholars who argued in a paper published last May that while unearthing the census records was important, the documents could be interpreted in a variety of ways. Among other things, Papenfuse said that while enumerators counted enslaved and free people between the years of 1790 and 1850, it was not until 1860 that they were tasked with determining who owned enslaved people.
“Employment and living arrangements for enslaved people could be especially complicated in Baltimore,” wrote the scholars, who are part of what they call the Johns Hopkins History Project, in their paper. “An enslaved individual could be owned by one person, live with another person, and work for a third person.”
An updated version of their work, “Seeking the Truth: Johns Hopkins and Slavery,” is on the Open Science Framework website.
While the findings “don’t exclude the possibility that Hopkins owned people,” Papenfuse said in June, the known evidence “does not demonstrate it as fact.”
The group called for Hopkins to remove language from its website that asserted “absolutely” that the founder owned people.
Members say they have watched carefully for updates. Van Morgan termed the change a “softening” of the university’s position.
“The university is no longer claiming that their census evidence is ‘strong evidence,’ and they have eliminated the statement that Johns Hopkins ‘held slaves in his home until at least the mid-1800s,’ ” she said.
“The new language can be interpreted as implying that Johns Hopkins probably owned slaves, which is unfortunate,” Van Morgan added. “But it also says that the university is seeking a more nuanced and complex picture, and that’s a positive thing.”