A Second Baltimore Legislative Immunity Decision: There Are Limits!

There are limits on the legislative immunity of local government officials, according to a decision yesterday by the Baltimore Circuit Court in the Dixon case (attached; see below), involving the mayor of Baltimore at the time she was president of the city council.

The court rejected Dixon's motion to dismiss a second round of perjury charges (I discussed the motion in a recent blog post). The court found that a witness's testimony regarding meetings outside of the council did not merit dismissal:

Whether one denotes the very limited testimony provided before the Grand Jury in this case as “non-substantive”, or merely “incidental to the legislative process”, or only concerning the status of the Defendant, it does not rise in the final analysis to the level of invading the core legislative immunity enjoyed by the Defendant. As a result, it does not form the basis for the drastic remedy of dismissal with prejudice of an otherwise valid indictment.

The court goes on to say that even if it were a violation of legislative immunity, this testimony was too minimal to merit dismissal:

Even assuming that there was a violation of the legislative immunity doctrine in the grand jury process, dismissal of the Indictment would not be warranted. The Court’s prior dismissal was premised on the fact that the wording of the indictment and the grand jury process was permeated with violations of the privilege which required the extraordinary step of dismissal.

And then the court leaves the door open for a later finding that the evidence violates the council member's legislative immunity:

the State has indicated that it may not even use the supposedly offensive evidence at trial. If this is the case, the issue of violation of the privilege will be avoided altogether. If the State does decide to use the evidence, the Court remains open to further argument in limine or at the time of the offer of the evidence at trial to review and reconsider the preliminary ruling made here as to the applicability of the legislative privilege.

This decision is hardly earth-shattering, but it's so rare these days to have any judicial decision that is not fully in support of broad legislative immunity, that does not put a council member's "rights" far ahead of the public's.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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