The mother of an 18-year-old black man accused of two rapes in Carroll is asking the NAACP to investigate his $1 million bail, saying it’s excessive and a product of racism. “I’m asking help for them to get the bail reduced,” Bless Queen said. “I want his bail reduced, and I want him out.”

She is sending letters to the Carroll County NAACP and federal lawmakers Thursday after her son, Nicholas, signs them at Carroll County Detention Center.

Queen noted the victim of one of the alleged rapes is a 16-year-old white girl and said racism led to her son’s high bail.

Kelley Galvin, an assistant state’s attorney, requested Nicholas Queen be held without bail but said the $1 million was legitimate. Because rape is a significant crime, Queen has a motive to flee, she said.

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Queen’s bail was set in July in District Court and upheld in September when his lawyers tried to reduce it.

The day the lawyers sought reduced bail, prosecutors charged Queen with the rape of a 15-year-old Taneytown girl and said that it occurred in mid-July.

Queen’s attorneys, Bradley Bauhof and Jill Swerdlin, say he was not present when the second rape allegedly took place.

Phyllis Hammond, a former Carroll County NAACP president, said racism has infected the county’s judicial system for years.

“I definitely think that the state’s attorney, the judges and even the officers, I think they have had unfair practices,” Hammond said. “It’s blatant racism there.”

Her son, Jason Butler, is serving a 10-year sentence at Roxbury Correctional Institution in Hagerstown for multiple-misdemeanor thefts, which supported a drug addiction.

In conservative Carroll County, the racial climate is an issue that should be considered with such a case, said Byron Warnken, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law.

“I don’t know anything here to say if anything racial were involved, but where I see a generally rural county with a rape between a white girl and an African-American man, it certainly raises questions,” Warnken said.

msilvestri@baltimoreexaminer.com