Elusive Justice in Baltimore: The Conviction of a White Policeman for Killing a Black Man in 1875

In July 1875 a Baltimore, Maryland, police officer rushed into the home of the Brown family, and clubbed and shot Daniel Brown, an unarmed black man. Brown died within an hour, and the Irish immigrant policeman, Patrick McDonald, was charged with murder and convicted of manslaughter. The conviction, more than 140 years ago, of Officer McDonald seems surprising. In recent years Baltimore's conviction rate in cases of police killings has been below 2 percent. From 2006 to April 2015, Baltimore policemen killed sixty-seven people, and prosecutors brought charges in only two of these cases. One officer was acquitted, and one was convicted. Following Freddie Gray's death in Baltimore police custody in April 2015, prosecutors brought charges against six officers, but none of them were convicted. And Baltimore's record is not out of line with the rest of the United States. According to the Washington Post, law enforcement officers killed thousands of suspects in the decade preceding 2015, and only fifty-four officers faced charges.¹

Undoubtedly, the police sometimes face dangers that make the use of deadly force justifiable. But the high rate of exonerations suggests that some officers escape punishment when they use deadly force unnecessarily, especially when the force is applied against minorities. More than half of the 319 persons killed by police in Los Angeles between 1947 and 1966 were members of minority groups.² In cases in which the victims were African Americans, the evidence indicating police misconduct goes beyond suggestive statistics. Protesters, many of whom base their charges on personal experiences, contend that police officers in some cities have a long history of routinely abusing black citizens, and in recent years video devices have provided evidence to corroborate their charges.

The troubled relationship between African Americans and police forces has deep roots in U.S. history. Although Daniel Brown died well over a century ago, the circumstances surrounding his death and the conviction of Officer McDonald illuminate many of the social, political, and cultural factors that come into play when the justice system addresses cases of police violence against African Americans. Daniel Brown's case, of course, is atypical. From the immediate aftermath of the killing to the end of the trial, the case drew an unusual degree of public attention, as agents of the criminal justice system responded promptly and stayed with the process through all the steps necessary to get charges before a jury. But the unusual level of attention from the public and agents of the criminal justice system is exactly what makes the incident valuable as the subject of a case study. It presents an opportunity to examine all the procedural steps in the criminal justice system. In contrast, generalized statistical analyses often exclude records of the first stages of criminal proceedings in favor of trial records, because trials, unlike arrests and coroner's inquests, are thoroughly documented. Roger Lane, for example, in a study of violence in postbellum Philadelphia notes that, as a result of the characteristics of the nineteenth-century justice system, very few homicides were labeled as murder at the coroner's inquest stage. Despite his acknowledgment of the importance of the coroner's role in processing homicide cases, Lane concedes that the limitations in the available sources led him to rely on trial records as "the most direct and significant evidence about justice, black and white."³ As will be shown in this article, in Daniel Brown's case the people involved in the arrest and in the coroner's inquest were major factors accounting for the conviction of Officer McDonald.

The location of Brown's death is also significant. To a remarkable extent, historians have overlooked Baltimore in studies of the development of uniformed, armed, full-time police forces in U.S. cities. Beginning in 1967 with Roger Lane's study of Boston, historians focused on the role of police in regulating social conflict in nineteenth-century northern cities. Following Lane's lead, historians produced studies of police and policing in...