Prosecutors ban Baltimore officer from testifying after years of complaints

Justin Fenton

The Baltimore Banner

April 17, 2025

Baltimore Police Detective Calvin Moss’ case file on a brutal 2016 robbery of a woman in Fells Point went missing. That much is clear.

But, after Moss was accused for years of false arrests, excessive force and other misconduct, the lost file became the last straw for the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office, which placed the detective on its “do not call” list for officers who it says it can’t trust in court.

The public defender’s office says the move is overdue.

The victim of the robbery says Moss is getting a raw deal.

Moss’ inclusion on the courtroom ban list makes him the latest of nearly a dozen officers so mistrusted by prosecutors they cannot be counted on to help bring criminals to justice in court.

The case spotlights the debate over the effectiveness of the list designed to call out wayward officers.

Supporters of the list say it provides an outside accountability tool for police misdeeds. But critics in the public defender’s office say that, in practice, State’s Attorney Ivan Bates hasn’t made enough use of the list or disclosed enough about officers’ discipline histories after being outspoken about police misconduct as a defense attorney.

On the other end of the spectrum, police leadership and the officers’ union have complained over the years that the list oversteps due process and the authority of the agency to dictate the future of its officers.

In Moss’ case, the incident at issue began in the early-morning hours of July 22, 2016, when Lauren Hayden was returning home from a night out when a man attacked and robbed her. She later underwent surgery to fix two skull fractures and bleeding on her brain. She was unable to work full time for months.

A friend with her at the time gave a description of the suspect to police. After that, she saw a media release showing a man suspected in a different crime, and the friend believed it was the same person. Police discovered that the suspect had used Hayden’s debit card, and his image from a video of the transaction was circulated.

An officer subsequently identified the man as Kurt Fletcher, and he was arrested not far from the crime scene. Hayden’s friend picked Fletcher out of a photo lineup, and he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

But the case was later overturned. An appellate court ruled there had been improper jury instruction related to cross-racial identification.

Fletcher’s case returned for a retrial. This time, Assistant State’s Attorney Stephanie Bryant was at a disadvantage: The case file had been lost. So she sought to impeach the credibility of Moss, her own witness, telling the court the police detective told her his case file was lost in a flood, an account Moss denied.

“I never ever uttered those words,” Moss countered, according to a transcript.

Baltimore Circuit Court Judge LaZette C. Ringgold-Kirksey, a former prosecutor, said she believed Bryant.

“I do not for one second believe that Ms. Bryant just woke up one day and conjured up the idea about a flood. Like who — that sounds crazy to me,” Ringgold-Kirksey said. “And so, based on that, there does seem to be plausible credibility issues in this case.”

With key evidence missing, prosecutors dropped the robbery case. They concluded that, based on the judge’s comments, Moss had credibility issues on the witness stand so substantial that they merited including him on the “do not call” list.

Officers on the list are sidelined from making arrests or investigating cases because they can no longer be called to court to vouch for their work. But they can continue to work in other capacities.

Moss joined the Police Department in 2004. Earlier in his career, he was a member of one of the department’s rough-and-tumble plainclothes units. In 2010, a woman sued Moss and Detective Daniel Hersl for battery, false arrest and false imprisonment, alleging that she was selling church raffle tickets when they accused her of selling drugs. The case was ultimately settled for $100,000.

Hersl would later be swept up in the federal investigation of the Gun Trace Task Force for robbing citizens, planting evidence and lying in probable cause statements. He was convicted by a jury and sentenced to 18 years in federal prison.

Moss has faced at least six other lawsuits, according to court records. When he was a private attorney, Bates brought one of them against the officer. It was settled in 2012 for $150,000. The most recent one in 2020 was eventually dismissed by a federal judge.

“Complaints made against Detective Moss have been investigated, and discipline has been administered in sustained complaints in accordance with established policies and applicable laws,” a police spokesperson said when asked why Moss remained in an investigative capacity despite the complaints. “BPD has worked, and continues to work, with multiple external oversight bodies to review these investigations and ensure transparency and fairness for all.”

In the city, prosecutors have placed 11 officers on their “do not call” list in addition to Moss. Bates said in a recent statement that his office is reviewing other pending cases that were investigated by Moss to see if they can proceed without him.

Though he had a history with Moss, Bates said that upon taking office he “dedicated myself to setting aside any personal biases and offering all BPD officers a fresh start” but observed “a concerning pattern of his investigatory techniques … which could impair our office’s ability to successfully prosecute cases he investigates and appears to violate BPD’s investigative policies directly.”

Bates said it wasn’t just the missing file but a “totality of questionable behavior” and “overall circumstances related to this officer’s conduct.”

“I do not believe relying on his testimony in future prosecutions would be appropriate,” he added.

Moss declined to comment, citing department policies prohibiting communication with the media. His attorney, Adam Davey, said he and his client were assessing the situation.

But Hayden, the victim of the robbery, is speaking up on Moss’ behalf. She said she had worked well with Moss and the two prior assistant state’s attorneys assigned to the case.

But Bryant, she said, was different.

Hayden said Bryant failed to communicate with her and another friend who was a witness, and was combative or unreliable when she did. They’ve complained to her supervisors.

“I’ve said from the beginning, it would be disappointing if the end result of a retrial was that he got let out of jail. That would be a miscarriage of justice, but at least it would have played out in the justice system,” Hayden said. “This time around, it’s even more disappointing because it doesn’t feel like she [Bryant] tried.”

Hayden and the witness, Jessica Velky, shared emails with The Baltimore Banner sent between Moss and members of the State’s Attorney’s Office dating to 2023. In those emails, Moss did not assert that the file was lost in a flood, contrasting Bryant’s account in court.

In a 2023 email, Moss told another prosecutor he had been reassigned within the police department in the years since the conviction and didn’t know what happened to the file.

“The original file should be in the possession of the Southeast DDU [District Detective Unit] but there are no existing files from that time period. I had held on to some files of ongoing cases and maintain a cabinet here with those files that I had brought with me. The case file is not in the cabinet and I checked at least three times,” Moss wrote.

He also noted that “case is one that means a lot to me, as the crime was especially egregious and the victim very undeserving.”

Later, in 2024, when Bryant emailed seeking evidence from the case file, Moss replied that he was not responsible for the missing file.

“There is no missing evidence. The office of the states attorney lost it. Everything I had was kept by your office due to anticipated appeals,” he wrote to Bryant. “I had my own file in storage at the SED and it was removed from the filing cabinet when I was reassigned to City Wide robbery.”

The State’s Attorney’s Office declined to respond to questions about the emails.

Fletcher’s defense attorneys, Janine Meckler and Nora Fakhri, said their client didn’t have a fair trial.

“The investigation was flawed from the beginning,” they said in a statement. “We maintain that he is innocent and this [the case being dropped] was the right result.”

The public defender’s office, which handled Fletcher’s case, said the State’s Attorney’s Office did not provide it with Moss’ internal affairs files, which they deemed essential to defending their client appropriately.

“We cannot emphasize enough their responsibility to seek this information and disclose it without the need for costly litigation in every single case,” Deborah Katz Levi, chief of strategic litigation for the public defender’s office, said in an interview. “The Office of the State’s Attorney has to do a better job.”

Moss remains in the Baltimore Police Department, but on April 5 he was charged in Harford County with second-degree assault after parents of two children in his neighborhood said he attacked a 14-year-old and used racial slurs and threats.

Police there wrote in court papers that Moss intervened to break up a fight involving a group of youths that jumped his son. A sheriff’s deputy wrote that the involved youths were also charged, though the sheriff’s office later clarified that only one youth was charged. The case is set to return to court next month.