On July 1, a criminal plea was taken in Baltimore City Circuit Court, Room 636, Courthouse East. It was a case common enough to rate no media attention whatsoever. A substitute prosecutor called the case at 2:09 p.m. She stood at the trial table with the public defender facing Judge Pamela White. The defendant was absent. At the time, the judge and the lawyers believed that the Maryland Division of Correction (DOC) had failed to transport the defendant. A postponement date was set.

Referring to the sentence she planned to impose, White said, “It’s my intention to make it concurrent with the parole retake.” Retake warrants, issued by the Maryland Parole Commission, are similar to violations of probation, which are issued by the courts. At the time of this crime, the defendant was in violation of his release from prison, and a warrant had been issued for his return to incarceration.

At 2:51 p.m. the defendant had been found, and the case was called again. A bald, stout, bespectacled African-American man of 54 dressed in DOC pale blue had joined the lawyers facing the judge. White set forth the terms of the plea agreement, which had clearly been worked out beforehand.

In exchange for pleading guilty to a sex offense in the first degree, the defendant would accept a sentence of 30 years, with all but 10 years suspended, and a period of 5 years probation upon release. Certain standard conditions of probation for sex offenders would be imposed. The judge addressed the defendant with special concern for his request for protective custody.

The public defender then took her client through the guilty plea litany, to ensure that he understood all the rights he was giving up in relieving the state of the burden of proving its case. The prosecutor read the statement of charges.

Late in the evening of May 10, 2009, the defendant had picked up a woman at East 24th Street and Greenmount Avenue. He asked her if she wanted to “party,” which would include crack cocaine. The pair eventually strolled to the 2500 block of Loch Raven Road, where an overgrown path strewn with debris leads uphill from the street to the cut beside the railroad tracks that pass over Loch Raven. A hundred feet up the path, the defendant “began to strike the victim in the head and face,” according to the charging documents.

He dragged her by the hair across the track into the filthy brush. He made her take off her clothes. He took off his clothes and forced the victim to perform fellatio and anilingus. He “began to masturbate and eventually ejaculated on the victim.” They put their clothes back on and walked back to Greenmount. The defendant set off toward parts unknown. The victim went home and called the police, who met her at Mercy Hospital after midnight and took her statement.

The victim identified the defendant from an array of photos of men similar in appearance. He was arrested May 15, 2009. Eventually the DNA taken from the rape kit at Mercy matched a criminal named Willie Featherstone, who lived only a few blocks from the railroad cut.

As evidenced on the video of the hearing available from the clerk’s office, Criminal Division, Baltimore City Circuit Court, White imposed the aforementioned sentence. At no point did she or either of the lawyers refer to the Maryland Sentencing Guidelines. This is a set of matrices adopted by the Maryland courts to encourage uniform sentencing, given the nature of the crime and the convict’s criminal history. There was no mention of Featherstone’s history whatsoever.

Five days later, on July 6, a man named Peter Levin died at his home in Cedarcroft. On Saturday, July 17, his mourners convened at the Stony Run Friends Meeting House to remember him.

Peter Levin was one of 26 first cousins, two of whom are Carl Levin, senior U.S. senator from Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Carl’s older brother Sander, the Michigan congressman who chairs the House Committee on Ways and Means. Both of them came to the memorial service, and both were moved to tears. The Levins are a close family, and cousins are like brothers and sisters.

Peter and his wife were Detroit natives who happened to meet in Baltimore when they came here for law school. They built a fine life together here, raising three children. Peter’s surviving children and his widow spoke strong and tender words of tribute to a man who was still giving them, in a very real sense, great love and comfort. Peter had managed to live long enough to welcome into the world his first grandchild. His greatest accomplishment in a long and fruitful life was his family.

Sander Levin spoke of an unspecified “crisis” in Peter’s life. “Out of this crisis,” he said, “came this infinite compassion.”

There was hardly a mention of Trudy, Peter’s oldest child. There was certainly nothing said of why she was absent. Trudy Levin, age 15, was murdered in 1986 at a railroad cut that ran over Loch Raven just above East 25th Street. Her killer was a man named Willie Featherstone.

What follows isn’t a matter of 20-20 hindsight. Willie Featherstone’s case is simply an example of the institutional amnesia, laziness, and indifference that hound Baltimore’s way of delivering criminal justice. Criminal behavior isn’t rocket science. There is no better predictor of what a man will do than what he has already done.

I know what Featherstone has done. I was law clerk to the judge who tried him for Trudy Levin’s murder.

On Saturday, Aug. 30, 1986, Trudy Levin is a sophomore at Friends School living with her parents and siblings in Cedarcroft. Her friend Brian Jenkins calls her that evening and invites her to a movie at the Boulevard Theatre at 33rd Street and Greenmount Avenue. Brian, 16, lives in the 2600 block of Saint Paul Street. Brian is what will come to be called “developmentally disabled.” Trudy agrees to meet him. Her mother Nancy watches her catch the No. 8 bus down York Road. Trudy’s parents expect to pick her up from the Boulevard at 11:30 p.m.