Articles Posted in First-Degree Murder

“A violation of your Fourth Amendment rights.” People often associate this phrase with an impermissible search without a warrant, but that’s not the only scenario. An arrest itself can be a constitutional violation if the foundation underlying the arrest warrant isn’t adequate to establish probable cause. Whether you’re under suspicion or under arrest, don’t delay in retaining an experienced Maryland criminal defense lawyer to provide you with the skillful representation you need.

A homicide case from Prince George’s County is a real-life example of how an arrest warrant can be fatally flawed. The case flowed from an unsolved 2005 murder in which 2-3 armed intruders entered an apartment in Landover, tied up one man, and fatally shot a second man inside the unit.

In late December 2017, a detective filed an application for a statement of charges in connection with that murder.

Earlier this week, Maryland’s highest court issued a new opinion that made national headlines. The decision imposes necessary new standards on how prosecutors in this state can (and cannot) use ballistics experts. This ruling potentially represents a major aid for people in Maryland who stand accused of crimes involving guns. Whether or not your case involves firearms, a skilled Maryland criminal defense lawyer with fully up-to-date knowledge can be crucial to getting the best possible outcome.

The origin of the case was a murder in Riverdale. Police found the victim dead, having suffered five gunshot wounds, including one to the back of the head. A few days earlier, the police had responded to a disturbance at the same property. The police testified that the accused appeared to be “agitated” and “very aggressive,” and that the other man seemed “terrified.”

After the shooting, the police seized both of the guns belonging to the victim’s roommate — a Glock and a .38 Special. At the roommate’s murder trial, an examiner with the police department’s Firearms Examination Unit testified that, based on markings found on the bullets recovered from the crime scene, the bullets came from the exact .38 that the accused owned.

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Television has popularized and glamorized the work of police crime lab workers. However, just like the actors on your favorite crime scene investigation shows, workers in real-life police crime labs come and go. This means that, sometimes, the person who creates a DNA analysis report may not be the one whom the state uses to testify in a criminal trial. When that happens, it creates the potential for a violation of the accused’s constitutional rights to occur… specifically, the accused’s right to confront witnesses. Whether your case calls for examining a report author or challenging a Confrontation Clause violation (or both), a skilled Maryland criminal defense lawyer can be crucial to protecting your rights fully, and putting on the most effective defense possible.

A homicide case from Prince George’s County illustrates what you can do when the process does not function correctly.

The victim was an 18-year-old whom police officers found shot dead inside a Greenbelt apartment. No witnesses saw the shooting. Nevertheless, the state brought first-degree murder charges against T.B. The prosecution asserted that, when the gun went off, the shooter suffered a nick and left his blood at the scene…and that the DNA sample from that blood matched T.B.’s DNA.

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Television and print media love “true crime” stories. While these crimes are often played for the particularly sensational aspects they possess, the coverage of them may still offer information that is highly educational for the rest of us. Sometimes, that educational lesson is the importance of making sure that, if you’re a suspect or a person of interest in a crime, the very first thing you do — before anything else — is retain a skilled Maryland criminal defense attorney.

A January 2019 death in East Baltimore and its aftermath teach that important lesson and more. In the case, police found a woman dead in the apartment she shared with her husband, having endured 55 stab wounds, some going all the way to the bone, according to the Baltimore Sun.

Police sought to question the husband, but he was gone. He had fled the state, traveling first to D.C., then to New York and Vermont. Police believe he was headed to Canada, according to the report.

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Chances are pretty high that you’re rarely heard the phrase “statement against penal interest,” if you’ve heard it at all. Chances are also very, very high that your knowledgeable Maryland criminal defense attorney knows exactly what this is and how to use it.

A “statement against penal interest” is one of the exceptions to the general rule of evidence that says hearsay statements are not admissible at trial. That’s a big deal because if you can establish that a statement meets the criteria of this exception, you can use an otherwise inadmissible piece of evidence at trial to strengthen your defense.

An example of this kind of statement might be an ex-girlfriend who testifies, “He told me he killed that old couple.” As you can see from that example, the “statement against penal interest” exception is something that often will be used by the prosecution. Sometimes, though, as a recent case highlights, this kind of statement can be a helpful element of an accused person’s defense.

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Many people frequently make the mistake of thinking that the key to success in a criminal case lies within some evidence produced at trial or some argument made during the trial itself. In TV courtroom dramas, the “a-ha!” moment almost always happens at or near the end of the trial. In real life, however, it’s more complicated than that. Each phase of the process can potentially be the one that makes the difference between acquittal and conviction. The question that tips the outcome in your favor may be one asked during voir dire, long before anyone even makes an opening statement at trial. This, among many other things, is why you need to be sure you have a skilled Maryland criminal defense attorney working for you from the very beginning of your case.

Not a lot of people know much about voir dire other than as a badly mispronounced phrase in the 1990s courtroom comedy film, My Cousin Vinny. In reality, voir dire is an essential process in any criminal case. When it comes to a jury, voir dire means a process where the judge and the attorneys asked potential jurors a series of questions. Voir dire is very, very important because it can go a long way toward identifying people who will be willing to look at all the evidence and render a fair verdict, and also identify people who might be predisposed toward returning a guilty verdict, even when the state hasn’t fully met its burden.

In a recent first-degree murder case, the defense was looking for those kinds of potential jurors, hoping to identify and exclude them. The defense wanted to ask several questions designed to achieve that goal, including spotting potential jurors who would be unwilling or unable to follow jury instructions related to the defendant’s presumption of innocence, the state’s burden of proof and the defendant’s right not to take the stand in his own defense. The trial judge, however, refused to allow those questions to be posed to the potential jurors.

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In the recently released movie Just Mercy, the audience gets to see some of the many ways in which a criminal case can be unfairly manipulated to help enhance the odds of a conviction. This can involve various means, including the inclusion of perjured testimony at trial. The wrongful Alabama conviction of the defendant in Just Mercy was fueled largely by racism. In Maryland, there are lots of reasons why defendants may still receive trials that are less than fair, even today. This is one of the many reasons you need an experienced Maryland criminal defense attorney on your side: to use his experience to spot those flaws that deny you a fair trial and help you take the proper actions in response.

In Just Mercy, the crime was the shooting death of a young woman that had stoked public sentiment. Those facts were also true of another murder that happened a few years later in Baltimore. J.K. was accused of the victim’s murder. The prosecution’s theory was that J.K., a married man, was having an extramarital affair with the victim and sought to silence her a few days before the two were to appear in court on a child support case.

The state’s case relied heavily on several pieces of circumstantial evidence. For one thing, the state used the science of comparative bullet lead analysis to establish that the bullet that killed the victim came from the accused’s gun. Additionally, the state called a firearms examiner from the Maryland State Police to testify as a ballistics expert and back up the state’s theory of the shooting.

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If you’re watching your favorite courtroom drama show, you may hear a lawyer say to a judge, “Objection! Hearsay!” That’s because, most of the time, hearsay evidence is inadmissible at trial. The law considers general hearsay to be lacking the degree of reliability needed for admissible evidence in a court of law. Some hearsay is admissible, though. That’s the hearsay that falls into one of the exceptions carved out by the law. An “excited utterance,” for example, is one of the exceptions in Maryland.

In your criminal trial, the difference between success and defeat may be your ability to win an admissibility argument about one or more pieces of hearsay evidence. To be sure you have the best chance of winning these and other arguments against the prosecution, be sure you have an experienced Maryland criminal defense attorney protecting you.

An excited utterance is an immediate statement made in a state of shock or extreme excitement due to a “startling event or condition.” The idea is that the speaker is so stressed that she is speaking spontaneously and sincerely, and her words “may be taken as particularly trustworthy.” A recent case originating in Baltimore shines a light on just how far the boundaries of “excited utterance” do – and do not – go.

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Criminal trials can be full of many nuances and “shades of gray.” For example, some kinds of evidence are generally inadmissible, but may occasionally be admissible under specific special circumstances. As an accused person standing trial, the difference between success and defeat may be your ability to persuade the court that certain pieces of potentially harmful information are inadmissible as opposed to admissible. Winning these smaller battles within the larger context of your trial can be vital, and often requires in-depth knowledge of the law, so be sure you have a capable and knowledgeable Maryland criminal defense attorney advocating for you.

As an example of the concept discussed in broad stokes above, the case of N.H. is very educational. The crime that triggered N.H.’s prolonged legal proceedings was a murder outside a Baltimore bar. D.C., who was a friend of N.H., had gotten ejected from the bar by at least four bouncers, including M.C. and T.M. Eventually, T.M. and M.C. became involved with a physical confrontation with N.H. M.C. suffered a non-lethal knife cut to the face, but T.M. got slashed in the throat and died from blood loss.

The state put N.H. on trial for first-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder. N.H. asserted he was just defending himself. In his opening statement, N.H.’s defense lawyer told the jury that N.H. was at bar to find new customers for his tattoo business that, according to the lawyer, was N.H.’s main source of income. Later in the trial, the state tried to admit part of a statement where the accused man stated that he was in the bar to sell cocaine.

Immigration, and particularly the issue of undocumented individuals, is very much a “hot button” issue these days. That is even true in civil and criminal trials, where a party in the case may seek to make an issue of a witness’s immigration status in order to diminish the witness in the eyes of the jury. Sometimes, Maryland law says that you can’t bring up a witness’s immigration status as a means of attacking that witness’s credibility (which is something the law calls “impeaching a witness”). In some specific circumstances, though, you may be able to use a prosecution witness’s immigration status against her in order to make her less believable in the eyes of the jury. As always, it helps to have an experienced Maryland criminal defense attorney on your side who knows all the “ins and outs” and nuances of the law, and how to use them to maximum advantage in your defense.

A recent case involving an undocumented witness provides some useful knowledge about how this process works. In the case, the state put T.K. on trial for murder. T.K. was a man who resided on the street where the shooting occurred. One the state’s key witnesses was M.L., a 15-year-old boy and a neighbor of T.K., who allegedly saw the accused shoot the victim. Another prosecution witness was M.L.’s mother, who allegedly saw T.K. running away from the scene of the shooting with a gun in his hand.

M.L. and his mother, however, were undocumented immigrants. The defense wanted to use that information to attempt to persuade the jury that the boy and his mother were not always honest and therefore not trustworthy. The trial judge didn’t allow the line of questioning and the jury convicted T.K. The Court of Special Appeals upheld that ruling on appeal.

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