Point & Glick

JOSE GARCIA-PERLERA

v.

STATE OF MARYLAND

http://​mdcourts​.gov/​o​p​i​n​i​o​n​s​/​c​o​s​a​/​2​0​1​1​/​1​3​7​1​s​0​9​.​pdf

This opin­ion by the Court of Spe­cial Appeals is almost refresh­ing. Of course I’ve found almost any opin­ion writ­ten by Retired Judge Moy­lan an excel­lent read; they are typ­i­cally chock-full of infor­ma­tion regard­ing crim­i­nal procedure.

This opin­ion is no dif­fer­ent, and Judge Moy­lan gives a primer on search war­rant lan­guage lim­i­ta­tions, sev­er­abil­ity, and sen­tence merger. It helps enor­mously that the facts of the case (at least the facts as deter­mined at trial) reflect a crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem that was work­ing as it it sup­posed to.

The appel­lant in this case was accused and con­victed of mul­ti­ple home inva­sions and rob­beries, all per­formed using very sim­i­lar meth­ods. Dur­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion of the most recent rob­bery, the inves­ti­gat­ing offi­cers “imme­di­ately sus­pended the search” pur­suant to the first war­rant that was very lim­ited in scope and “sub­se­quently obtained a sec­ond search war­rant” to fit the inves­ti­ga­tion for all of the rob­beries when an offi­cer “found a bronze medal­lion com­mem­o­rat­ing the NASA Mer­cury astro­nauts on appellant’s cof­fee table” that the detec­tive on scene “imme­di­ately sus­pected” was related to a pre­vi­ous home invasion. The trial court actu­ally gave seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion to the appellant’s motion to sever, at least on the record.

I’ve got­ten so used to hear­ing about the hor­rors of our crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, that read­ing an opin­ion where the record doesn’t read like a laun­dry list of police and judi­cial atroc­i­ties seems like a treat.