Midday

Today on Midday, a discussion about a far-too-common injustice in this country – the wrongful imprisonment of men and women who are innocent of the crimes for which they’ve been convicted.

Experts say between 6- and 15% of the people sentenced to prison time in the United States are wrongly convicted. With approximately 2.3 million people currently behind bars in America, that works out to between 138,000 and 354,200 people who may have been wrongly imprisoned at any given time.

 

Since 1992, a non-profit organization called the Innocence Project has been working to address these miscarriages of justice by working to free or exonerate hundreds of wrongfully convicted people, and to advocate for a more equitable system of justice.

Erica Suter joins Tom in the studio. She is a practicing attorney who has been actively supporting the Innocence Project’s mission here in Maryland. Recently, she represented Adnan Syed in his successful bid for freedom from a life-sentence for a 1999 murder he says he didn’t commit. Ms. Suter serves as an assistant public defender with the Maryland Office of the Public Defender, and she has directed the MOPD-sponsored Innocence Project clinic at the University of Baltimore Law school, where law students are getting hands-on training in how to pursue justice for the wrongly convicted.

Baltimore city is taking steps to revise an agreement with its major nonprofit institutions over how much they pay annually to the budget.

As nonprofits, these 14 institutions do not pay property taxes but instead have a PILOT or payment-in-lieu-of-taxes. Combined they pay $6M annually for city services like policing, snow removal, road maintenance and more. That agreement expires and comes up for renegotiation next year.

A 2024 report from the Office of the Comptroller estimated that if taxable, the properties in question would generate over $108M and that in turn, they use about $47M.

"With Us, For Us” is a coalition of labor unions and Baltimore-based community groups demanding these institutions pay more to the city. WUFU's Tracy Lingo, President of Unite Here Local 7, and Musaab Ibrahim, Senior Research Assistant at Maryland Center on Economic Policy, join Midday to discuss their initiative.

Baltimore City Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming leads her office in investigations into waste, fraud and abuse in city government. Cumming joins Midday to discuss her office's work.

In the past year, her office launched high-profile investigations into poor working conditions at the Department of Public Works, a cyber-theft of more than $1.5 million dollars, and cost overruns in the redesign of the city’s website. According to the the office's annual report, Cumming and her team uncovered nearly $11 million in savings for the city.

Recently, her team revisited work sites at DPW and found improvements to conditions, including access to clean water and sanitary bathrooms. What did workers there tell her team?

Midday theater critic J. Wynn Rousuck reviews the lively Scottish musical "Ceilidh" (pronounced KAY-lee) now playing at the M&T Bank Exchange performance space next to the Hippodrome Theater.

Vocalist Limmie Pulliam and pianist Mark Markham will perform a program of gospel songs and arias as part of the free "Community Concerts at 2nd" series at the Second Presbyterian Church Sunday September 14, 2025.

On today's NewsWrap, Tom surveys some of the week's top state and local developments with reporter Pamela Wood, who covers Maryland politics and government for the Baltimore Banner.

With the killing of the charismatic conservative activist and podcast host, Charlie Kirk, America has once again been rocked by what could be another act of political violence.

There is, as of Thursday morning, no suspect in custody, and no motive for the shooting is known.

At the age of 18, Charlie Kirk founded “Turning Point Action,” a conservative get-out-the-vote and fundraising organization. Kirk was close to President Donald Trump and other members of the Trump family. Last night, Trump released a video commenting on Kirk’s shooting where he called him, “a martyr for truth and freedom.”

Dr. Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, studies political partisanship. She joins Midday to discuss political polarity in the context of several high-profile instances of political violence in recent years.

After a lengthy legal process, a massive amount of settlement money is flowing into Baltimore City to combat the opioid epidemic. 

Several opioid companies have settled with the city for more than half-a-billion dollars in a series of high-profile cases.

How that money will be spent is the responsibility of Sara Whaley, the Executive Director of our city’s Overdose Response team. Mayor Brandon Scott named her to that role in February. She also co-chairs the Restitution Advisory Board.

Sara Whaley joins Midday to discuss the city's plans for that money.

Midday is also joined by WYPR’s health reporter Scott Maucione, who has been following this story closely.

Last week, Gov. Wes Moore issued an executive order entitled, “Housing Starts Here,” a four-pronged order Moore hopes will spur construction or renovation to address an estimated housing deficit of 96,000 units here in Maryland.

Maryland is by no means alone in facing housing challenges. Up for Growth, a network of advocates that tracks housing data, reports that national housing underproduction stood at nearly 4 million units for renters and owners as of 2021.

Jake Day, the Maryland Secretary of Housing and Community Development, joins Midday to discuss efforts to built more housing and address home affordability.

Later, CEO of Healthy Neighborhoods Bob Pipik joins Midday to give us a look at his organization's targeted approach to improve housing in Baltimore’s “middle” neighborhoods.

It’s Midday on Ethics.

Dr. Jeffrey Kahn is the director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

In addition to directing the Berman Institute, Dr. Kahn teaches in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Jeff Kahn joins us from time to time to talk about some of the thorny ethical issues facing scientists and people throughout society.

We begin today with a conversation about organ donation. Nearly 105,000 people are on waiting lists for organs. The United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, which manages part of the U.S. transplant system, reports that on average, 13 people die each day while waiting for a transplant. So the demand for organs is strong.

With the advent of new surgical techniques for improving the viability of donor organs, however, some truly frightening problems have arisen while organs are being harvested.