06-05-2022 Hall of Fame - Flipbook - Page 8
8 Baltimore Sun Media | Sunday, June 5, 2022
BALTIMORE SUN’S 2022
BUSINESS AND CIVIC HALL OF FAME HONOREE
ANDRE DAVIS
W
hen he was a 9th grader at Booker T.
Washington Junior High School in Baltimore, Andre Davis became a candidate
for admission to an elite New England
prep school. It was 1964, the time of the
civil rights movement, and the headmasters of 23 private schools vowed to offer
scholarships to bright students of color
from urban school districts. Mr. Davis was
one. The opportunity loomed large. But
how would his parents feel about sending their teenage boy to all-white Phillips
Andover 420 miles away?
Not a problem: Andre Davis was already an entrepreneur and world traveler.
By age 14, he had established one of the largest newspaper delivery routes in
the city, and the Hearst Corp., publisher of The News American that Mr. Davis
delivered daily to Baltimore households, rewarded him with a two-week trip to
Australia. Mr. Davis was one of Hearst’s most enterprising paperboys, and in the
summer of 1963, he and 19 others made the trip Down Under.
After that, his parents figured, Mr. Davis could handle Massachusetts prep
school life. So off to Andover he went. “It was really head spinning,” Mr. Davis
says of that time. “I was ready to come home after two weeks. But I’ve never been
one to quit something. I’ve always been a risk taker, and I had demonstrated independence and an ability to take care of myself.”
Mr. Davis thrived at the academy,
graduating in 1967. He went to the
University of Pennsylvania for his
undergraduate degree, then came
back to Baltimore to study law at the
University of Maryland.
After earning his degree, he
worked as an appellate attorney
in the Civil Rights Division at the
Justice Department, then as an
assistant U.S. Attorney in Baltimore.
For three years, Mr. Davis was a fulltime instructor at his alma mater,
teaching civil and criminal procedure to law students.
In 1987, he was named a Maryland District Court judge. At that
entry level of justice, Mr. Davis
earned a reputation for fairness. “In
those days,” says Ken Thompson,
a partner at Venable LLP, “a lot of
District Court judges were pro-state
and, let’s put it this way, the reasonable doubt standard didn’t apply
with a lot of those judges. Andre was
a real student of the law, and he was
disciplined and eminently fair. The
state had to prove its case.”
Mr. Davis moved up to the
Baltimore Circuit Court in 1990.
Marcella Holland, who later served
as administrative judge of the court,
calls Mr. Davis “the consummate
professional with high integrity and
a compassion for justice.”
In 1995, President Bill Clinton
nominated him to the federal bench
and Mr. Davis served on the U.S.
District Court in Baltimore for the
next 14 years.
It was during that time that Mr.
Davis confronted something he
found disturbing — mandatory
minimum sentences imposed by
Congress on judges, especially
in drug cases. Mr. Davis became
an outspoken critic of mandatory
minimums; he and many other
opponents saw them as a direct
cause of the nation’s world-leading per capita incarceration rate.
“The wholesale use of mandatory
minimum sentences has been the
source of immeasurable injustice in
this country,” Mr. Davis once said.
He continued to be a critic of
mandatory minimums even after
taking a seat, in 2009, on the United
States Court of Appeals for the
Fourth Circuit.
In 2017, two years after the civil
unrestsparkedbythedeathinpolice
custody of Freddie Gray, Mr. Davis
left the bench to accept a mayoral
appointment to be city solicitor. He
did this as the police department,
criticized for civil rights violations,
embarked on meeting the broad
reforms prescribed in a consent
decree with the U.S. Justice Department.
Mr. Thompson, who serves as
a consent decree monitor, praises
Mr. Davis’s work at a challenging
time, with scandal in City Hall and
turmoil in police leadership. “The
one anchor we could all count on
was Andre,” Mr. Thompson says.
“He was stable, smart, honest and
very helpful in the early days of the
consent decree because there was
so much dysfunction. He did a good
job of stabilizing a rocky ship.”
But Mr. Davis resigned after two
and a half years in the job, saying
he felt “out of fuel” from numerous frustrations and disappointments. That included the corrupt
practices and eventual resignation
of the mayor, Catherine Pugh, who
had convinced him to take the job.
“The political environment in
and surrounding City Hall was so
debilitating that I couldn’t stay, even
to continue working on the consent
decree,” Mr. Davis says. “I hated
walking away from that.”
Mr. Davis was 70; aside from a
relatively short stint in private practice in the 1980s, his entire career in
law had been one of public service.
“I grew up in a household of
mom, stepdad, sister, brother,
grandmother and grandfather,”
he says. “My grandfather became
a double amputee as a result of
a motorcycle accident. He was
confined to the first floor of our
small East Baltimore rowhouse
for the next 13 years, when he died.
For all of that time, I witnessed my
mom and grandmother take care of
him. So that the idea of caring about
and being attentive to the needs of
others was truly imprinted on me
from my earliest memories of life on
this earth. I think that accounts for
a large part of whatever contributions I have made on behalf of those
needing the help of others, and it no
doubt informs my lifelong investment in public service.”
“The one anchor we
could all count on was
Andre. He was stable,
smart, honest and very
helpful in the early days
of the consent decree
because there was so
much dysfunction.
He did a good job of
stabilizing a rocky ship.”
— Ken Thompson,
a partner at Venable LLP
AT A GLANCE
Age: 73
Hometown: Baltimore
Current residence: Fells Point
Education: University of
Pennsylvania; University of Maryland
School of Law.
Career highlights: Maryland
district and circuit court judge; U.S.
District Court judge; judge of the
United States Court of Appeals for
the Fourth Circuit; Baltimore City
solicitor.
Civic and charitable activities:
President and chair, Big Brothers Big
Sisters of Central Maryland; board
member: Baltimore Urban League,
Legal Aid Bureau, Goucher College,
Walters Art Gallery; founding
director, Baltimore Urban Debate
League; advisory board member,
Open Society Institute-Baltimore,
ROCA Baltimore.
Family: Married to Jessica Strauss;
they have five combined children
and eight combined grandchildren.