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This past Wednesday I got a call from a former client, JT, who is from a state where it is legal to travel with a handgun in the car, to help his employee, AJ, who had just been arrested in West Virginia and was awaiting extradition to Maryland. Unlike the state they were from, in Maryland it is illegal to possess or transport a handgun in a car, with very few exceptions. I had represented JT on a handgun charge in Prince George’s County, Maryland and obtained a good result. Prince George’s County takes a hard line on people found illegally possessing a handgun and prosecutes them very aggressively. JT, and his employee, AJ, were driving to a construction job in another state when JT got tired and asked AJ to drive. He did, but when he was pulled over for speeding, police found AJ didn’t have a drivers license. A search of the car yielded the handgun. The gun belonged to JT, it was JT’s car, and AJ didn’t even know it was there.

Initially in District Court at the time of their arrest and release, in late October, 2011, JT was charged with illegally transporting the handgun and AJ was charged with speeding and driving without a license. In early December, both JT and AJ were indicted in Circuit Court for illegally possessing and transporting the handgun. In Maryland when someone who is initially charged in District Court is indicted in Circuit Court, the District Court loses jurisdiction to the Circuit Court and any initial bond that is posted to gain release is supposed to transfer to the new Circuit Court case. In this case when the indictments were returned a Circuit Court judge issued bench warrants and set a $25,000 bond for each as if there had been no District Court bond set and satisfied. That should not have happened.

Since I represented JT, I arranged for a “walk in arraignment,” where the judge recalled the warrant and let him out on his original terms of release. Ultimately JT pleaded guilty to illegally transporting a handgun and received probation before judgment. However, AJ and his lawyer appeared in District Court in February, where he pleaded guilty to speeding and the driving without a license was stetted (postponed indefinitely). Apparently no one ever realized AJ had an outstanding warrant since early December in the same case in Circuit Court, because if they had, they also would have known that the indictment deprived the District Court of jurisdiction over at least one of the charges, driving without a license. Although, as JT’s lawyer, I knew AJ had also been charged, I gave it no thought, because AJ had a lawyer who I assumed was on top of it. This Wednesday when AJ was stopped for a traffic offense in Berkeley County, West Virginia he received a rude awakening. There was an unserved bench warrant for him from Maryland for the gun charges. AJ was jailed pending extradition to Maryland. JT called me to see what I could do.

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There has been quite a bit of litigation in the past few years on the subject of what witnesses must be produced by the government to prove the results obtained for scientific testing for drugs and/or alcohol. The Supreme Court has taken a case a year on this question, starting with Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, 557 U.S. 305 (2009)(no chemist), Briscoe v. Virginia, 130 S. Ct. 1316, 175 L. Ed. 2d 966 (2010)(who must subpoena the witness), Bullcoming v. New Mexico, 131 S. Ct. 2705, 180 L. Ed. 2d 610 (2011)(substitute chemist), and Williams v. Illinois, 132 S. Ct. 2221 (2012)(underlying opinion in DNA match). The government usually claims that it is unnecessary to bring these chemists to court because what they are doing is very routine, in the regular course of business, that the results are not really used for their truth (huh?), and that it would be too burdensome to bring these witnesses to court. But as is reported in the following disturbing article, sometimes chemists lie, and lie a lot.

The story, which is reported in the Boston Globe on September 30, 2012, is titled “How chemist in drug lab scandal circumvented safeguards.” According to the article, state drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan has been charged with two counts of obstruction of justice, for falsifying drug test results and for falsifying her academic record. Dookhan is accused of skipping necessary tests (dry-labbing) altering records, contaminating samples, and signing other chemist’s names, placing in jeopardy between 34,000 and 60,000 convictions.

This sad story simply illustrates what we all already know, witnesses are human, and sometimes humans lie. While confronting the lying witness in court may not always or even frequently uncover the lie, to allow a witness who supplies testimony that is critical for a conviction to avoid appearing in court is unfathomable and cannot be justified by simple cost benefit analyses.

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Today the Supreme Court granted certiorari sought by Missouri in Missouri v. McNeely. McNeely was suspected of DUI when police had blood withdrawn without a warrant. The Supreme Court of Missouri held that a warrant was required when the facts fell outside the narrow exception created in Schmerber v. California. See State v. McNeely.

Schmerber allowed a seizure of blood without a warrant due to the exigency created by dissipation of alcohol in the blood where an accident occurred and the suspected driver was taken to the hospital. The Supreme Court said:

We thus conclude that the present record shows no violation of petitioner’s right under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. It bears repeating, however, that we reach this judgment only on the facts of the present record. The integrity of an individual’s person is a cherished value of our society. That we today hold that the Constitution does not forbid the States minor intrusions into an individual’s body under stringently limited conditions in no way indicates that it permits more substantial intrusions, or intrusions under other conditions.

Since McNeely was not in an accident and was not taken to the hospital the Supreme Court of Missouri affirmed the trial court’s holding that a warrant was required.

The question to be addressed by the Supreme Court is whether to uphold the Missouri Supreme Court’s conclusion:

The patrolman here, however, was not faced with the “special facts” of Schmerber. Because there was no accident to investigate and there was no need to arrange for the medical treatment of any occupants, there was no delay that would threaten the destruction of evidence before a warrant could be obtained. Additionally, there was no evidence here that the patrolman would have been unable to obtain a warrant had he attempted to do so. The sole special fact present in this case, that blood-alcohol levels dissipate after drinking ceases, is not a per se exigency pursuant to Schmerber justifying an officer to order a blood test without obtaining a warrant from a neutral judge.

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The National College for DUI Defense (NCDD) just completed its 3 day summer session, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the facilities of Harvard Law School. The College’s mission is to educate lawyers to become more proficient in defense of persons accused of drunk driving. The College’s motto is “Justice Through Knowledge.” The session was attended by some of the most skilled lawyers in the country, and featured presentations and workshops of the highest quality. The session exemplified what is best about the legal profession.

The session featured presentations by Robert Hirschhorn on jury selection, Leonard Stamm and Peter Gerstenzang on the Top 20 Guidelines for Bench Trials, Mimi Coffey on trial strategy and breath testing, Gary Trichter on the Bill of Rights, Erin Gerstenzang on Ethics, Tyrone Moncrief on the Art of Persuasion and Closing Argument, John Webb and Felipe Plascencia on closing argument, Dr. Sunwolf on Innovations in Jury Selection: Harvesting Skewed Venires; Juiced Jurors; Mental Blind Spots and Perfecting a Challenge for Cause, Michael Hawkins on Cross-Examination – A Performance, Justin McShane on Basic Gas Chromatography for Blood Alcohol Content, and Stephen Jones on The Real Field Sobriety Tests. Workshops were conducted on jury selection and closing arguments. The keynote address was delivered by the Honorable Joseph Johnson.

The session was conducted under the auspices of Dean George Stein who turned the reins over to Troy McKinney, the incoming dean, at the culmination of the session. The current slate of officers includes Peter Gerstenzang, Assistant Dean, Stephen Jones, Secretary, and Leonard R. Stamm, Treasurer.

Over 160 lawyers were in attendance including Regents not mentioned above James Nesci, Bill Kirk, Don Ramsell, Virginia Landry, Andrew Mishlove, Paul Burglin and Doug Murphy and Fellows James Campbell, F.K. Whited, Les Hulnick, Tommy Kirk, Phil Price, George Bianchi, Doug Cowan and Steven Oberman.

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Yesterday the Supreme Court announced its opinion in Williams v. Illinois. The decision was anxiously awaited by those of us who have followed the Supreme Court’s recent Confrontation Clause cases, namely Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts and Bullcoming v. New Mexico. Melendez-Diaz had held that the chemist in a drug case must be brought to court by the government for cross-examination, and Bullcoming held that another chemist in a lab who had nothing to do with a test cannot take the place of the actual analyst who reported a blood alcohol reading in a DUI case.

In Williams v. Illinois, Williams was convicted of rape based on a DNA match. DNA was collected from semen found during the victim’s rape exam and the profile identified at Cellmark Laboratories in Germantown, Maryland. A different lab analyzed William’s DNA and identified a genetic profile. Illinois did not call anyone from Cellmark to testify, but rather called an expert who testified that the two samples were a DNA match.

The Supreme Court decided in an unusual plurality – 4-1-4 – that the expert could give the opinion of a match, even though no one from Cellmark testified to the underlying profile that was the basis for the opinion. What is unusual about the opinions issued in the case is that the five justices who voted to affirm the Illinois Supreme Court (and the rape conviction) did not agree why and that a majority of five agreed the plurality’s reasoning was wrong.
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The Star Tribune newspaper in Minneapolis has published allegations that as part of a program training police officers to become Drug Recognition Experts, officers gave Occupy Wall Street protesters marijuana. “Trooper put on leave as probe of drug-training tactics widens.” This has resulted in the suspension of the DRE program and investigation of a number of police officers. “Minnesota police giving Peavey Plaza Occupy-ers drugs as part of impairment study, report says [VIDEO].”
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On March 5, 2012, the Circuit Court for Carroll County, Maryland released its opinion in the case of State v. Brightful, et al., granting the defendants’ pre-trial motions to exclude the opinion of a drug recognition expert (DRE) in each of the consolidated cases. The case was litigated by defense attorneys Brian DeLeonardo and Alex Cruikshank. The court heard 10 days of expert testimony from both sides between September, 2010 and February, 2011. The State presented six expert witnesses: Dr. Karl Citek, Ms. Michelle Spirk, Mr. William Tower III, Officer William Morrison, Lt. Thomas Woodward and Dr. Zenon Zuk. The defendants called three experts: Dr. Francis Gengo, Dr. Neal Adams, and Dr. Jeffrey Janofsky. The court concluded that the DRE program is not generally accepted within the relevant scientific communities and that therefore would be excluded under the cases of Frye v. United States and the Maryland case of Reed v. State, as well as under Maryland Rule 702.

Specifically, the court said:

Findings of Fact

The DRE Protocol fails to produce an accurate and reliable determination of whether a suspect is impaired by drugs and. by what specific drug he is impaired. The DRE training police officers receive does not enable DREs to accurately observe the signs and symptoms of drug impairment, therefore, police officers are not able to reach accurate and reliable conclusions regarding what drug may be causing impairment.

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I recently read a disturbing opinion piece in the New York Times – My Guantánamo Nightmare. The author, Lakhdar Boumediene, wrote the following:

On Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as “undeliverable,” and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost.

Some American politicians say that people at Guantánamo are terrorists, but I have never been a terrorist. Had I been brought before a court when I was seized, my children’s lives would not have been torn apart, and my family would not have been thrown into poverty. It was only after the United States Supreme Court ordered the government to defend its actions before a federal judge that I was finally able to clear my name and be with them again.

We are brought up to believe that such things cannot happen in our country. They can. And they are happening right now. Our criminal justice system is designed to place a premium on due process – notice of charges, the presumption of innocence, requiring the government to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, the right to a jury of one’s peers. A delicate balance exists that prevents persons accused of committing crimes from being held incommunicado without charges filed, supported by probable cause.
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A recent news story disclosed that Howard County police officers were required to write a predetermined number of tickets each shift. Judge throws out DUI case, saying police had quotas – Howard County police chief calls ruling a bad decision. According to the story the Howard County Police Chief was quoted saying that a federal grant to aide enforcement of traffic laws required officers average 2-4 citations per hour on the street.

McMahon said the grant “mandated that an average of 2-4 citations must be written per hour on each of these details by each officer or future funding may be withheld.”

As a result the District Court for Howard County granted a defense motion to dismiss the charges.

In future cases, defense lawyers must find out if their clients’ stops were made by officers operating under a quota, as reported by a follow up story. Drunk-driving quota case may lead to similar efforts elsewhere – Prosecutors look at possible appeal as defense lawyers suspect issue may affect other cases.

Leonard Stamm, a Prince George’s County lawyer who wrote a legal handbook called “Maryland DUI Law,” said the case puts lawyers who defend people charged with drunken driving on notice for a potential avenue for defense.

Though as a District Court ruling it has no bearing on other cases, defendants coming before other judges can bring it up. “Now that it’s out there, it’s something you have to look for,” Stamm said.

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