Arrested for Stealing Snacks, Baltimore Diabetic Dies in Jail
Louis Maurice Mason, a 67-year-old struggling with diabetes and a four-decade cocaine addiction, died on March 8, 2024, in Baltimore’s jail system. Despite his deteriorating health, a judge had set his bail unaffordably high, effectively signing his death warrant.
Mason’s struggles began with a Valentine’s Day arrest on petty theft charges for allegedly stealing candy and chips. His public defender argued at a bail hearing on February 15, 2024, that Mason required ongoing treatment for diabetes and recent strokes. Despite this, bail remained set at $3,500.
At the same hearing, a pretrial release investigator said Mason had prior convictions for trespassing, drug possession and second-degree murder dating back to his teenage years in the 1970s. The investigator recommended no change in bail, though the assistant state’s attorney acknowledged that the amount was equivalent to ordering him held without bail.
Assistant Public Defender Kati-Jane Childs pointed out his diabetes and said that he suffered two strokes in the last year and was seeing a doctor. Childs asked Judge Jennifer Etheridge to release her client or keep his bail the same, planning to ask a nonprofit to post it. Judge Etheridge told Mason to “find another way to make money.”
Court records show that Mason was hospitalized on February 24, 2024, but returned to jail that same day. He was readmitted to the hospital four days later, where he remained until his death. Three days after that, on March 11, 2024, a judge lowered Mason’s bail to an unsecured bond, apparently unaware he was already dead. University of Baltimore law professor David Jaros called the death an “inevitable tragedy” in a legal system lacking resources to address Mason’s social and medical issues.
The state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services is still working to comply with a 2016 settlement reached in a decades-old lawsuit brought by civil rights groups that challenged the constitutionality of the state’s healthcare and mental health systems. The state has proposed building a $1 billion mental healthcare facility to meet its obligations the settlement, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, March 2017, p.50.] Critics say that money would be better spent on community-based interventions and comprehensive healthcare provisions.
Additional source: Baltimore Banner
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