She waited years for Baltimore County to prosecute her alleged rapist. Now, a judge will weigh in.

She was ready for court: hair curled, a herringbone dress, flowered notebook in hand. Flanked by her best friend and her sister, with her lawyer and advocates in a semicircle around her, she walked into court Tuesday hoping Baltimore County would finally prosecute the man she said raped her eight years ago.

But District Court Judge Leo Ryan Jr. would disappoint her. She had asked the judge, a former deputy state’s attorney, to appoint a special prosecutor to look into her case because of what she and her attorney said are conflicts of interest and racial bias. Instead, Ryan questioned whether she had standing to bring the matter before him.

Ryan told the woman’s attorney, Robbie Leonard, to research the question and report back in two weeks. After that, he said, Deputy State’s Attorney John Cox will have two weeks to respond.

At that point, the judge said, he’ll issue a written opinion. If he declines to appoint a special prosecutor, the woman can appeal to the Circuit Court.

The judge said he didn’t know of a provision allowing a victim to petition for a special prosecutor. In nearly 17 years on the bench, he said, he’d never granted such a motion.

“This is an extraordinary case, and I can’t recall this happening before,” the judge said. “It’s so complicated and so unprecedented.”

Leonard said in court that the case included unusual circumstances in that his client — whom The Banner is identifying only by her middle name, Shukura, because she is a victim of sexual assault — was discriminated against because of her gender and her race.

Assistant State’s Attorney Lisa Dever, top deputy to Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger, told Shukura years ago that she’d lost a sexual assault case because one juror convinced the 11 others that Black women lie about assault.

Leonard said Tuesday that’s the crux of his argument.

“She is a Black victim of a Black rapist, and given what was said to her by the prosecutor, there is a specific denial of due process under the Equal Protection Clause,” Leonard said. “She’s being discriminated against because of her race.”

Cox said after the hearing that Leonard and his client misconstrued what Dever said — it was a snippet of “a lengthy conversation with a victim.” His office brought the case in July 2024 to a grand jury, which declined to indict the accused rapist.

At a public meeting in 2022, where Shukura asked Shellenberger why he didn’t prosecute her case, he responded: “I do not believe the facts that you revealed the first time to the police amount to a crime in the state of Maryland.”

Shukura said last week that every day since June 2018 has been a “waking nightmare” as she navigates the court system in a state where she no longer lives. She relies on Leonard — who challenged Shellenberger for his job in 2022 and narrowly lost — as well as Amanda Rodriguez from Turnaround, Inc., the county’s rape crisis center, to guide her.

The assault was hard enough, she said, but the decision not to prosecute has been devastating.

“They treat me like I’m not even a human, like I am absolutely worthless,” she said. “That level of cruelty, it’s one of the absolutely worst things that has ever happened to me.”

In multiple interviews, Shukura described how her former housemate raped her inside the Randallstown home where they rented separate rooms on June 19, June 21 and July 3 in 2018.

She told Baltimore County Police about the assaults on July 22. Dever and Shellenberger told her they wouldn’t charge him.

Shellenberger’s opponents in next month’s primary for the state’s attorney race have raised his reluctance to prosecute sexual assault cases. His office also declined to prosecute three University of Maryland, Baltimore County, baseball players accused of raping other students. One of the women in that case, Anna Borkowski, asked a district court commissioner to file charges, just as Shukura did. These commissioners can issue charges in cases where a prosecutor has declined to do so.

Shellenberger has told The Banner that sexual assault cases are among the toughest to prosecute. Victims often wait days, even months, to report a crime. Often there are no witnesses and the parties involved offer conflicting accounts. These are the issues that juries have raised after he’s lost those kinds of cases, he said.

In Borkowski’s case, the district court commissioner contacted Dever, who directed him to decline to issue charges. Borkowski pressed forward, and Shellenberger sent police officers to her home to dissuade her. Shellenberger has said he sent the officers to Borkowski’s home to offer “friendly advice” because he was concerned she’d be charged with filing a false report.

Borkowski sued, and the county settled with her for $100,000.

Baltimore County NAACP President Roland Patterson Jr. said after Tuesday’s hearing that his organization has long been concerned about Shellenberger’s approach to sexual assault.

“There is a history in general of women not getting a fair shot in this county,” he said. “Though it is a Black woman who brought me here today, we have had concerns about this office before we ever heard her name.”

Outside the courtroom, Shukura’s semicircle again gathered around her. She said she felt numb, but vowed to fight on.

“Rape victims are worth fighting for. Black women are worth fighting for. I am worth fighting for.”