Count Lauren Lipscomb among those who say the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office is stuck in the past in a county that’s increasingly not.

Baltimore County has elected two different state’s attorneys since 1975.

Scott Shellenberger, 66, has been in the job since 2007, and with the office since 1983. Shellenberger eked out a victory in the last election, besting Robbie Leonard, a progressive Democratic attorney, by only 1,000 votes. Leonard, who wanted to curb police misconduct and seek alternatives to incarceration for low-level offenders, may have been too progressive for the state’s third-largest county.

Lipscomb — who’s running on a tough-on-crime platform that also prioritizes victims’ rights — is betting she isn’t.

Asked why she was running, Lipscomb said: “There’s actually one word — victims. I’ve been a prosecutor for my entire career, coming out of law school, and over the last 10 years or so, I’ve noticed that the concerns and priorities of our victims have become less and less in any criminal justice conversation.”

Lipscomb’s platform focuses on locking up violent repeat offenders; focusing on “quality-of-life” crimes like package theft and disruptive juvenile conduct; holding juveniles accountable for their crimes; and understanding the larger community that is victimized when crimes happen and not just the individual who is attacked.

In Towson, low-level crime seems to occur every day and some residents talk on social media about being afraid to visit the mall or the area’s downtown. Both have been the scenes of shootings and violent crime, but more commonly they are known for nuisances like large groups of juveniles misbehaving or inebriated, rowdy college students.

For the last several years, Lipscomb has headed Baltimore City’s Conviction Integrity Unit, where she pushed for the exoneration of incarcerated individuals convicted of crimes they did not commit. Among her most high-profile exonerations were the Harlem Park 3 — the West Baltimore teenagers who spent more than 30 years in prison for a crime someone else committed. The city’s Conviction Integrity Unit lists a dozen other men freed due to Lipscomb’s team’s work with several innocence projects.

Lipscomb’s office has come under some criticism because some of those seeking exonerations fabricated evidence to sue the city for larger payouts after they were freed.

Maurice Possley, a senior researcher with the National Registry of Exonerations who chronicles wrongful convictions, said prosecutors generally resist revisiting and freeing convicted felons, so it’s rare for prosecutors to miss falsified documents or evidence of bribery.

Lipscomb declined to comment about those cases, other than to say she was proud of her unit’s work and would set up a Conviction Integrity Unit in Baltimore County within her first 100 days in office.

It was a Baltimore County case that prompted prosecutors all over the country to establish exoneration units. In 1984, prosecutors convicted Kirk Bloodsworth of murdering a 9-year-old girl. Bloodsworth was sentenced to die, and maintained his innocence. In 1993, he became the first death row inmate exonerated by DNA testing.

Shellenberger worked for the office when the case was tried and when Bloodsworth was exonerated. And though his office has a conviction integrity unit, he said its purpose is to make sure dangerous suspects are not released on technicalities or paroled early. The unit has not exonerated anyone, he said, but they do investigate wrongful conviction claims.

Lipscomb, who lives in Owings Mills with her husband and two sons, is not the only challenger in the race.

Deputy State Prosecutor Sarah David also is running for state’s attorney on a platform of modernizing the office and taking sexual assault reports seriously.

The county had to pay a Towson University student $50,000 after Shellenberger dispatched police officers to her home in an attempt to dissuade her from pursuing charges against college baseball players she said sexually assaulted her and her friend.

David, like Lipscomb, supports a unit within the state’s attorney’s office that focuses on exoneration as part of her effort to instill what she calls “modern, evidence-based changes” to the county.

“A conviction integrity unit ensures that we don’t have innocent people serving sentences for crimes they didn’t commit,” David said.

David is calling for more transparency with data, particularly on juvenile crimes, and more communication.

Unlike the Baltimore City state’s attorney’s office and the Maryland state prosecutor’s office, Shellenberger’s office does not have its own website to tout convictions, warn the public of dangers or otherwise share messages. It has a static page that is part of the county website, as all departments do.

Shellenberger said his office has kept citizens safe and he wants to stay on the job he’s been elected to five times. He does not think the Leonard vote total shows he’s vulnerable.

“In 2022, there was a movement throughout the country to elect ‘progressive prosecutors,’” he said, referring to the protests surrounding the murder of George Floyd and the support for Black Lives Matter. “I think that movement has very much ended, and it’s a very different time.”

David has raised the most money in the three-way race, with $105,096, according to the Maryland Campaign Finance Database. Shellenberger has about half of that, at $50,054. Lipscomb’s totals won’t be available until the next deadline.

Lipscomb, whose father is Black, would be the first biracial county prosecutor. She ran for state delegate in 2018 and lost.