From emergency response to sustained resistance: How Baltimore Action Legal Team endured after the Uprising

This story was originally published by The Baltimore Beat, a partner with Technical.ly in the Baltimore News Collaborative. The collaborative is a project exploring the challenges and successes experienced by young people in Baltimore, supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

As day turned to night in Baltimore on April 27, 2015, the number of arrests for disorderly conduct, failure to obey, and destruction of property ticked upward. What began as street protests over the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray exploded into a raw expression of fury. Thousands took to the streets to express their outrage both at Gray’s death and the decades of disinvestment and unjust policing of Black communities in Baltimore.

Many of the hundreds of people that would be arrested in the coming days would be held for more than 18 hours; many would not face charges and be released without explanation. 

The media in the city were laser-focused on the unrest — not the violation of rights that protesters were experiencing. 

A small group of legal professionals and activists, including Iman Freeman, Matthew Zernhelt, Dorcas Gilmore, Charlene Dukes and Jenny Egan, began organizing efforts to support those detained.

“We were a part of a small group of lawyers who helped set up legal observing, 24-hour jail support, and helping to bail folks out,” recalls Freeman, one of the founding members and the executive director of Baltimore Action Legal Team (BALT).

BALT was founded to make sure no one swept off the streets disappeared without due process and a network of care on the outside. They set up a legal hotline, tracked arrests in real time, and waited outside jails to meet people as they were released.

“I remember sitting in [Office of the Public Defender]’s office, writing down the names of everyone who was arrested. At first, it was minimal — just a few people. And then it was thousands. I remember seeing $300,000, $400,000 bails,” Freeman said. 

BALT’s jail support program, inspired by work done in Ferguson and New York after the police killings of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, provided critical resources for those detained. Legal volunteers worked around the clock to track detainees, provide legal representation, and, when possible, secure bail.

Police were caught on camera brutalizing and pepper-spraying protesters, further fueling the sense of injustice. Prosecutors failed to convict the officers involved in Gray’s arrest and death, while many protesters faced severe charges and exorbitant bail as high as $500,000 — the people protesting Gray’s death faced harsher punishment than the officers whose actions led to it.

A decade later, BALT is among the few initiatives launched in the wake of the Uprising that continues to operate. What started as an emergency legal response has transformed into a long-term fight for systemic change both through the courts and through grassroots organizing. 

Along with expunging hundreds of criminal records, the organization has filed lawsuits to win  the release of police misconduct records and led advocacy efforts to address Baltimore’s pretrial detention system, which disproportionately affects low-income residents and people of color.

That kind of systemic reform may be the end goal, but the real change happens through BALT’s boots-on-the-ground community work. Client by client, BALT workers strategically post up in disenfranchised communities, working with residents to ensure the broken legal system can no longer rob them of their livelihoods.

On an unseasonably warm day this February, a handful of residents signed in at an addiction treatment center in Baltimore’s raucous Penn North neighborhood. The location is tucked away in the heart of one of the city’s most notorious drug markets. 

Outside, it was a typical day in the West Baltimore neighborhood. Gospel music blasted, Black Baltimoreans chatted outside of Narcotics Anonymous meetings and nearby street pharmacists shouted out what they had in stock that day.

Inside, however, a renewed sense of hope was alive. Some sought sobriety; others wanted freedom from the weight of a criminal record. Long after a sentence ends, the punishment persists. A criminal record can be a lifelong sentence to poverty, slamming shut doors to decent jobs and housing. 

BALT began hosting clinics in 2022 to provide low-barrier legal services to anyone who may need them. For many, access to qualified legal professionals can be out of reach, increasing their chances of being weighed down by a criminal record — or incarcerated.

One of the primary services BALT offers is expungements, which can get rid of sometimes decades-old charges, ranging from simple misdemeanors to some felonies. This work is imperative, organizers say, as criminal records can interfere with access to employment, housing and some social services.

But it’s not just about doing away with cases of the past. The organization also provides warrant recall services, which can put a stop to ongoing law enforcement action. A warrant recall is a judicial order that revokes someone’s arrest warrant, interfering in the enforcement process and potentially preventing incarceration.

Since its inception, BALT has offered free expungement and warrant recall services to nearly 400 Baltimoreans.

Clearing the slate isn’t easy, nor is it a panacea. Yet it can provide opportunities to those who have faced off with a system that entraps Black Americans by design, attendees said.

At the treatment center, Matt Parsons, a community lawyer with BALT, sat upstairs in a conference room. One by one, residents ascended the stairs of Penn North Recovery Center with hopes they’d leave with a clean record. 

Nearly all of BALT’s clients are Black, which the organization takes into account by intentionally making its services available in neighborhoods with high Black populations such as Penn North, Parsons said. 

Reggie Johnson, who struggled to find gainful employment because of his criminal record but now works in the security field, had four offenses expunged with the help of BALT last year. It opened the world up to him again.

“Now I could do anything I want,” Johnson said.

He was such a satisfied client that he was sitting in the waiting room of the treatment center with his friend, Dennis Hughes, whom he brought to BALT’s February clinic with hopes Hughes could experience the same relief.

“I’m going to get my concealed carry (permit), and it don’t bother me because they’re not violent crimes. But I just wanted them off my record,” Hughes said. Hughes could have as many eight records expunged, Parsons said.

The excitement from former and current BALT clients in the waiting room was palpable. Whether the expungements gave way to new job opportunities or simply the peace of mind offered by a clean slate, clients expressed gratitude for the nonprofit’s work.

The criminal justice system is one piece of the deep inequities that plague Baltimore. Morgan State University professor Lawrence Brown coined the term “Black Butterfly” to describe the city’s apartheid-like disparities: wealthier, predominantly white areas in the central corridor receive the lion’s share of opportunities and investments at the expense of predominantly Black neighborhoods in the east and west parts of the city that are starved of resources.

These inequalities are even reflected in life expectancies: Those living in wealthy, white neighborhoods live nearly two decades longer than residents of the Black Butterfly. 

Residents in these neighborhoods are also disproportionately targeted by policing. The police arrest them; the judges and juries sentence them; the prisons hold them; and the system itself grips them and refuses to let them go. In Baltimore, this oppressive system largely impacts those in the Black Butterfly.

It’s a vicious, carceral cycle not only in Baltimore but nationwide. Black Americans are imprisoned at five times the rate of white people and experience the highest recidivism rates of all racial groups.

Even a brush with the criminal justice system can have devastating lifelong consequences, especially when whole communities are targeted. People imprisoned early in their lives go on to earn half as much as those untouched by the criminal justice system, a 2020 Brennan Center for Justice report found.  

BALT interrupts the cycle to free them from the shackles of a system designed to hold them captive.

“There’s an acknowledgment that people whose rights are violated deserve remedies. I think as far as what we value, which is movement lawyering — community lawyering — we want to focus on community relationships,” Parsons said. 

“My job shouldn’t really have to exist. These are not natural conditions. They were created by systems of oppression, by oppressors. We view providing pro bono services as being consistent with what we value in terms of Black people not deserving to be dehumanized and incarcerated en masse.”

BALT’s research found that in 2019, 75% of defendants denied bail later had their charges dropped or were acquitted. For those caught in the system, pretrial detention can mean months — or even years — of incarceration without a conviction, which can result in loss of employment and housing. Since 2020, BALT’s bail fund has assisted 78 people using $600,000 in bail funds. And between 2020 and 2022, BALT spent $300,000 covering electronic monitoring fees to help alleviate the financial burden on those awaiting trial.

“When you think of the role of law in achieving justice, a lot of people truly buy into that myth that through the law we can shift power because that’s what’s needed,” said Freeman, executive director of BALT. “History has taught us time and time again that that’s not right — it’s a people solution, and that includes lawyers utilizing legal tools.”

A decade after Freddie Gray’s death, Freeman acknowledges the progress made but says the work is far from over.

“We were born out of Black pain,” Freeman said of the organization’s founding after the killing of Freddie Gray in police custody. “It’s not lost on us that we stand on someone’s grave. And it’s not lost on us that nearly 10 years later, we’re still fighting many of the same battles. We’ve pushed for more transparency around police misconduct, and we did a lot of work around the consent decree that followed Freddie Gray’s death.”

BALT has survived this long because of its deep connections to the community and its ability to adapt. Sustaining a movement for the last decade and the years to come also means navigating challenges and responding to the evolving needs of the communities it serves. 

“We’re very good at the reaction. We’re very good at pulling up when people need us without the plan in place,” says Santana Alvarado, BALT’s director of operations. “But it’s nice that we’re able to also have this vision of the next five, 10 years and how we want to sustain this work in between disasters.”

BALT aims to fundamentally transform the legal landscape so its services are no longer needed. In 2022, a lawsuit brought by BALT led the State’s Attorney’s Office to release a list of more than 300 police officers flagged for credibility concerns based on Internal Affairs complaints. The following year, BALT secured a legal victory against the Baltimore Police Department, with the Maryland Supreme Court ruling that the department acted arbitrarily in denying public interest fee waivers for records requests.

By exposing the failures of policing, increasing transparency, and making legal knowledge accessible, BALT aims to equip Baltimore communities with the tools to advocate for themselves. Rather than relying on outside intervention, people should have the language, expertise and direct access to power needed to fight for their rights in courtrooms and beyond. 

“We want to put ourselves out of work,” says Zernhelt, BALT’s legal director.

The light that BALT brings to the community isn’t only found in its success in the courts, however. It’s visible in the people it helps.

The weight of criminal records that can make progress seem impossible is lifted. Incarceration is prevented, allowing people to be with their families and continue with their lives. And for some, such as Qiana Johnson, it can allow them to overcome the oppressive legal system and reinvest the hope that BALT gave them back into the community.

Johnson spent two and a half years incarcerated, found guilty of numerous charges related to real estate and theft in two separate cases. Her sentence could have been significantly longer, but she was released in 2017.

With BALT’s help, she got numerous records expunged after they were able to get felony charges converted to “probation before judgment.”

The organization also helped her fight nearly $300,000 in restitution set by a judge, which a higher court struck down as illegal. The latter helped prevent her from spending five more years in prison.

“I had to fight so hard,” Johnson said through tears. “I had to develop so many relationships; I had to beg so many people to listen to me that this was illegal. This was not supposed to happen to me. And BALT said, ‘I gotchu, we’re going to do this. We’re not going to see you back in prison.’”

Nearly a decade after her release, Johnson is still fighting to resolve remaining legal issues. She founded Life After Release, a nonprofit led by Black women that offers services to the formerly incarcerated, in response to a “barbaric” prosecutor in her case. 

The organization now partners with BALT in the arduous battle against a system created to put people like her down. That design is perhaps most evident in a key exemption in the 13th Amendment: Slave labor remains legal behind bars. And as the so-called “justice” system has grown, so has the complex structure that entraps the descendants of those who fought for their freedom many years ago.

“Most people think that [the system] is broken, but it’s not,” Johnson said. “It’s functioning in the way that it was designed to function.” 

“BALT has to exist, Life After Release has to exist in order to abolish what is currently in place and build a system of rehabilitation, a system of transformative justice and a system that would work for everybody. But the current system was built to oppress; it was built on the backs of slavery and has formed from that time until now.”