Spending just five years in prison for a gun murder is not enough, Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld tells the Baltimore Sun. He was commenting on the case of Michael Guest, 32, who shot two people near a courthouse at lunchtime on Monday before he was killed by police. Guest had been convicted of a murder in 1993 but was released and “spent his short life ricocheting from the streets to drugs to police to judges to prison cells – and back to the streets again,” says Sun crime reporter Peter Hermann.
The case “raises a lot of questions in my mind about the value of life, and the sentences that people in this city serve compared to what people in Baltimore County and surrounding jurisdictions get,” Bealefeld said. “If we’re really gonna get serious about it, we need many, many more people to get really serious about this one issue.”