Had this year’s mandatory minimum bill made it out of Vallario’s committee and passed the General Assembly, future defendants facing the same charges would have been subject to a minimum of 18 months behind bars. Vallario is currently listed as the attorney of record for 10 more defendants awaiting trial or sentencing for gun crimes.
Vallario said his opposition to the bill was philosophical and had nothing to do with the livelihood of his firm.
“Any mandatory, I’m opposed to mandatory,” he said. “I think that’s what we hire the judges for, that’s what we pay them the big bucks, to make decisions like that in the appropriate cases.
“It doesn’t help or hurt any lawyer if you have mandatory minimums,” Vallario added.
“You know, though, it probably would help,” he quipped. “Then you’d try to get him off the mandatory, too.”
He said he was not actively involved in the defense of many of the clients for whom he was the attorney of record. “It’s my firm — my name is on every case,” he said.
Vallario’s counterpart in the state Senate, Judicial Proceedings Chairman Brian E. Frosh (D-Montgomery), is a lawyer who specializes in commercial litigation and real estate law. Frosh also says he is philosophically opposed to mandatory minimums and did not bring to a vote the measure sought by Prince George’s and Baltimore.
“Of course prosecutors want it, it gives them a bigger gun to point” at defendants, said Frosh, who was a sponsor of both the gun-tracking legislation and the measure seeking smaller semiautomatic clips that died in Vallario’s committee.
“To put it in the most positive light, [Vallario is] interested not only in public safety but in fairness to the individuals charged – his clients,” said Daniel W. Webster, a professor and co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (D), a supporter of the mandatory-minimum bill, said she learned from its demise and would fight for it again next year. The city’s crime statistics show 44 percent of those arrested for homicide had prior records for firearm offenses. Despite a maximum penalty of three years, those criminals spent an average of four months in prison for a first gun offense.
“You have to be prepared for whatever the makeup of the committees are,” she said. “The fact is that there are several lawmakers, for philosophy or whatever reason, who are opposed. We have to do a better job next year of explaining.”
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