BASHAWN MONTGOMERY RAY v. STATE OF MARYLAND
Court of Special Appeals, Moylan, Sept. 29, 2016,
Motion to Correct Illegal Sentence- Where defendant’s plea deal explicitly called for a “cap of four years on any executed incarceration,” it was not an illegal sentence subject to Rule 4-345 where the judge sentenced to ten-years with all but four suspended and the defendant did not object for over three years.
Moylan does an artful job describing the wayward Rule 4-345 and its path to the ruin of finality paved with questionably good intentions.
There’s no real point summarizing the opinion, since the Court of Appeals has taken the lead in creating new swaths of territory for 4-345 to inhabit. But hopefully the opinion will appeal to the CoA…
The opinion also described a letter before the 1950 Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure:
“The county judges were practically unanimous in their view that it could not be done, but the city judges seem to be doing it without any definite authority.”
It’s somewhat reassuring that things haven’t changed much over the years…