House Bill 756 -- the "Maryland Gang Prosecution Act of 2010" -- has made it past its "third reading", meaning that it's ready for final Senate concurrence and correspondence. Effectively it's "good to go" in the present form.
The crossfiled Senate Bill 517 is slightly different, but it adds an exceptionally valuable bit of language:
... "OR ASSOCIATION OF THREE OR MORE PERSONS, INCLUDING OTHERWISE LAWFUL ENTITIES OR ASSOCIATIONS, WHETHER PUBLIC OR PRIVATE, SECULAR OR RELIGIOUS, OR INCORPORATED OR UNINCORPORATED, WHOSE MEMBERS" ...
This exceptional wording makes it quite clear that it doesn't matter whether or not you seem to have respectable credentials due to being part of an Association, Church, Clinic, Club, Congregation, Fraternity or Soririty, etc., those credentials cannot excuse activity which would rightly be considered the activity of a gang.
For example: let's say that someone decides to not pledge a certain fraternity, and at least three members of the fraternity decide to make that person suffer, or at least understand that there is no escape from the wrath of the frat-brothers, whether or not you are a fraternity member. Things happen, unpleasant things, some of which rise to the level of second-degree assault, or even farther. Further, the errant frat-brothers order all other members of the fraternity to keep silent and look the other way, and if anyone comes snooping around, stall them or misdirect them.
This law, with the specific wording, makes it clear that insofar as their operations are concerned, harassment, witness intimidation, instructions to interfere with an investigation and to give false information to police officers -- not to mention a bit of "whack and run" bashing of the target and possibly any frat-brothers who don't feel like cooperating -- fraternities that go bad are no better than the worst slum street gang... with the exception that frat boys have been getting away with it even while the street thug gangsters have been getting locked up for 15 to 20.
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever", or so the saying goes. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What frat boys -- or worse yet, college Mean Girls -- might see as their just due, what with being "Greeks" and all of that, others might see as raw oppression and indeed might see it as criminal victimization.
But such things cannot happen, I mean, it's all just urban legend that fraternities and sororities would ever stoop to crime, much less habitually go totally overboard, right?
Well, ask all of the gals who ever got "roofied" at a frat-house party. And ask me how I feel after having been hounded off campus, and indeed out of town, back in the mid-1980s. It seems that for one of my English Composition courses, I wrote a little story called Loaded and all of a sudden my life began to really really suck... and it has not stopped since. Why? In my humble opinion, it's because Maryland's laws against criminal conspiracy effectively don't exist.
So let's pass these bills, and let's get something on the books that will change the mindset of Marylanders, who have been for far too long left totally unaccountable for conspiracy, for ganging up on people, for ensuring the primacy of any group willing to organize to violate the rights of the individual. There need to be lines that people simply dare not cross without assuming extreme personal risk. And those risks need to be far greater for acting as a group than for comparable offenses by an individual acting alone.
No longer should someone be exempted from gang prosecution because "a church isn't a gang", even though a significant percentage of some given congregation each took a whack at some individual their preacher doesn't like. Should the church at large be prosecuted as a gang? Don't be ridiculous. Yet the law should, and must, directly admit that in any congregation you might find a sub-group of folks who grievously have sinned.
If a civic association hires a hit-man, it would be a bizarre misuse of the law to allow the people who hired "the torch" to escape the penalties for arson, simply because "the neighborhood looks better and property values are higher now that we've run that guy out for not cutting his grass how we like it". Without this law, there's not much penalty on the organizing group, though of course the arsonist could go to prison for a long long time.
If an association of merchants decides that they don't like some individual, and act as a group to ensure that there's no place that individual can shop without being steered into a hastily-arranged "bum fight", should the merchants be immune? Should only the assailants be prosecuted, and not the people who slip a derelict a fifty-dollar bill to break a bottle over someone's head, and then tell investigating officers "nope didn't see it that never happened"? Hell no. It's one thing to call a customer a jerk and tell them to get the hell out; it's quite another thing to get together with your fellow merchants and decide as a group to have a beating waiting for that customer in every store he ever enters. That kind of crap can ruin someone's life, it's far outside the law but until this bill is passed there's not any real legal disincentive. Ruin someone's life like that, and you need your own life ruined. Need a customer to not come to your store? Call a cop and have the cops tell that person that you said you don't want them coming in to that store. Just be prepared to have to answer in court as to why you don't want them coming in, and are willing to pay to have someone whack them with a crowbar for trying to do business with you. Maybe they witnessed you doing something wrong and you're intimidating the witness? Maybe you're excluding customers based on race, religion, ethnicity, or disability? And maybe you're getting everyone else to fight your fight with you, because the law didn't have any way to deal with this sort of thing?
Look, this law is long overdue, and the lack of anti-gang and anti-conspiracy penalties in Maryland has led to a widespread culture of "get together to fuck up someone a little bit at a time over a long course of time". This is a sort of decadence that would revolt most barbarians, and the existence of any such "association of like minds" leads victims to organize their own little association in counteraction. Gangs of all types will proliferate and a gangster mindset emerges even in the staffs of mental-healthcare organizations and bridge-clubs of elderly church-ladies.
That a whole culture slides into one or another degree of mob mentality, and merely due to a lack of comprehensive legal reform, is insupportable.
Send these laws, combined in the strongest and most broadly-applicable form, to the Governor for signature, with enough votes to obviate veto.
The one guiding principle should be "act as a group of criminals, go to prison as a group".
