Category: courts


‘Endless’ sentencing hearings in Maryland take toll on victims, families

April 28th, 2012 – 6:32pm

The Washington Examiner

By Emily Babay

In January, Carolyn Hoover sat in a packed Montgomery County courtroom to watch a judge sentence the young man who drunkenly crashed his car into a telephone pole and trees, killing her son and two others.

Less than four months later, her family was back in court for another sentencing hearing, and a three-judge panel cut 21-year-old Kevin Coffay’s prison term from 20 years to eight.

“I felt sick inside,” said Hoover, whose 20-year-old son, John, was killed. All involved in the crash attended Magruder High School or were recent graduates. “Every time we have to go to another hearing, it sets us back months.”

The case has raised questions about an unusual and little-known Maryland law that lets defendants ask for a new sentence from a three-judge panel, even if there was nothing illegal about their original punishment. The result can be an agonizing process for victims and their families, who are often taken by surprise and must endure numerous court dates yet never feel like a case has reached its end.

“There’s almost no finality in a criminal case,” said Russell Butler, executive director of the Maryland Crime Victims’ Resource Center. “Victims want justice, and you want justice to be final.”

It’s difficult to tell how often panels review sentences and reduce them.

David Soule, executive director of the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, said the commission does not keep data on sentencing review panels. A Maryland courts spokeswoman and local state’s attorney’s offices also could not provide that data.

In addition to the panels, defendants can also ask their sentencing judge to reconsider a sentence.

It’s routine for defendants to request a new sentence through at least one of those avenues, said Seth Zucker, spokesman for the Montgomery County State’s Attorney’s Office.

Most requests for sentencing panels are denied without a hearing and the sentences remain unchanged, said Byron Warnken, a Maryland lawyer who specializes in post-conviction work. But when a hearing is granted, the sentence is reduced about three-quarters of the time, he estimated.

The three-judge panels are most likely to reduce lengthy sentences, Warnken said.

“They can throw you a bone without letting you walk away from prison,” he said.

Several other recent high-profile cases that appeared to have been closed are still ongoing, as the defendants have asked review panels to take up their cases.

Brittany Norwood, serving life in prison without parole for the brutal killing of a co-worker at a Bethesda yoga store, and Keith Little, sentenced to the same punishment for stabbing his boss to death at Suburban Hospital, have both asked panels to review their sentences. Both are waiting to learn whether hearings will be granted.

Deontra Gray, one of four teenagers who pleaded guilty in the slaying of D.C. school principal Brian Betts in Silver Spring, was sentenced to 30 years in prison. He requested a sentence review panel, and a hearing is scheduled for September.

Combined with parole and other appeals, prosecutors and victims advocates say, there’s often no end in sight.

“Our concern here is the virtually endless review process for even legal sentences,” Zucker said.

Hoover said the process has made it nearly impossible to move forward after her son’s death.

“I would rather have had a lighter sentence to begin with and not go through what we had to go through,” she said.

ebabay@washingtonexaminer.com

 

Sidebar: Panels created to quell controversy

The sentencing review panels now under fire in Maryland due to a recent drunken-driving case in Montgomery County were created in hopes of quelling controversy over sentences.

A law creating the three-judge panels was enacted after a 1965 report on criminal sentences in the state found “alarmingly disparate” penalties, according to Maryland Court of Appeals opinions that address the act and its history.

It’s rare to have a separate review process — like the three-judge panels — solely for sentences, said Douglas Berman, a sentencing law expert at Ohio State University. Local officials said a handful of other states have some form of sentencing reviews, but no other state appears to have a system directly comparable to Maryland’s, according to the National Center for State Courts.

Sentencing review panels might be an effective way to correct for extreme sentences, Berman said.

“There’s some value in having a panel double-check whether that’s not just permissible, but a good judgment,” Berman said.

In recent years, 70 percent to 80 percent of sentences in Maryland are within guidelines, according to the State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy.

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Five Fairfax gang members accused of prostituting girls

March 29th, 2012 – 8:27pm

The Washington Examiner

By Emily Babay

A 17-year-old girl who responded to a Facebook message saying she was pretty and could make money told police that she ended up being forced to give oral sex at knifepoint and coerced into having sex with 14 men in one night.

The person named “Rain Smith” who sent that Facebook message was actually 26-year-old Justin Strom, the leader of the Underground Gangster Crips — a Fairfax County-based division of the Crips gang — and had sent more than 800 similar solicitation messages to other girls, according to authorities and a criminal complaint unsealed Thursday.

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Supreme Court weighs warrantless GPS surveillance in D.C. case

November 8th, 2011 – 5:40pm

The Washington Examiner

By Emily Babay

The Supreme Court heard arguments Tuesday about police use of GPS tracking without a warrant, appearing deeply disturbed by unlimited use of the technology but uneasy about whether and how to regulate it.

The justices likened their concerns to George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” in oral arguments in the case of Antoine Jones, a District nightclub owner was arrested in 2005 on cocaine-distribution charges after police placed a GPS device on his vehicle without a valid warrant and tracked the car for a month.

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Suspect ‘lost it’ and killed yoga store victim, defense admits

October 26th, 2011 – 5:36pm

The Washington Examiner

By Emily Babay

Jayna Murray died in a “horrific” argument with her co-worker at a Bethesda yoga store — but the killing was not a premeditated murder, an attorney for the woman charged in Murray’s death says.

Brittany Norwood “lost it” and “unfortunately and stupidly” killed Murray at the Lululemon Athletica where the pair worked, Douglas Wood, an attorney for Norwood, said in his opening statement at her trial.

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Live tweeting: Carmela Dela Rosa murder trial

October 6th, 2011 – 6:12pm

Live tweets from the courtroom during jury deliberations, the verdict and sentencing for a woman charged with murder in the death of her 2-year-old granddaughter.

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Grandma admitted ‘terrible thing’ in killing 2-year-old

September 27th, 2011 – 5:29pm

The Washington Examiner

By Emily Babay

Carmela Dela Rosa told detectives she “did a terrible thing” when she flung her 2-year-old granddaughter to her death off a six-story walkway at Tysons Corner Center, according to a taped interrogation played in court Tuesday.

Dela Rosa, 50, is charged with murder in the November 2010 killing of Angelyn Ogdoc. Her attorneys are presenting an insanity defense at her trial, which began Monday in Fairfax County Circuit Court.

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Drug mules often blame economic woes

September 18th, 2011 – 5:23pm

The Washington Examiner

By Emily Babay

The methods they use to get drugs into the United States range from soup packets to suitcases to their own bodies. But many drug smugglers nabbed at local airports have at least one thing in common: They say they turned to the drug trade because of financial hardships.

In court papers, attorneys for drug couriers cite myriad economic woes that befell their clients, leading them to work as drug mules to recoup lost funds. A few of their stories:

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Couriers get creative in drug-smuggling attempts

September 18th, 2011 – 5:21pm

The Washington Examiner

By Emily Babay

These weren’t clams you’d want to serve on the dinner table. The juice boxes weren’t what you’d put in your child’s lunch box. The soup wasn’t what you’d use to nurse yourself back to health. And the statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph definitely weren’t fit for a church.

They’re all methods used by drug smugglers trying to get their contraband into the United States through Washington-area airports, sending couriers on flights with cocaine-stuffed clams, soup packets and statues, or with stomachs full of ingested heroin pellets.

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Accused abusers now being tracked

June 19th, 2011 – 5:05pm

The Washington Examiner

By Emily Babay

Three years after a government report uncovered that abuse of domestic workers by diplomats was more pervasive than expected, officials and advocates say progress is being made in preventing such cases.

A Government Accountability Office study found 42 likely trafficking cases between 2000 and 2008. Since then, programs have been set up to inform diplomats’ domestic workers about human trafficking before they arrive in the United States and better track abuse allegations.

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Few consequences for diplomats accused of abusing domestic workers

June 17th, 2011 – 5:03pm

The Washington Examiner

By Emily Babay

A maid or nanny alleges that her employer has raped her, taken her passport, made her shovel snow in shorts, refused to pay her or beat her unconscious.

In most cases, this is what would happen next: Police would investigate. If the allegations were true, the employer would face criminal charges and a potential civil lawsuit for emotional and monetary damages.

Unless the employer is a diplomat.

All of those allegations have been made against high-level foreign officials in Washington in recent years. They foreshadowed the sexual assault accusations from a New York hotel maid facing Dominique Strauss-Kahn, now the former chief of the International Monetary Fund. But unlike Strauss-Kahn, D.C.-area diplomats have largely escaped criminal courtrooms and serious consequences.

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