STATE OF MARYLAND v. ANDREW DANIEL BAKER
Court of Appeals of Maryland, Getty, May 22, 2017,
Double Jeopardy- A defendant cannot be retried when a judge declares a mistrial over defense objection because immunity issues make a State witness unavailable
Dissent (Barbera with Adkins- “caselaw does not require—nor should it—that a trial judge consider and reject on the record every alternative that, in hindsight, a party or a reviewing court might identify as ‘reasonable'”)
Facts:
Darrell Ellis and Andrew Baker were involved in two criminal cases with the other. In one, Ellis claimed that Baker shot at him. In the other, Baker claimed that Ellis assaulted him (two days after the alleged shooting).
The morning of trial, Ellis informed the prosecutor handling the case that he was going to exercise his right not to incriminate himself by testifying. The prosecutor believed that he would be able to compel the testimony by giving Ellis immunity, so he proceeded to trial without first informing the trial court of the issue.
When the issue arose at trial, it was discovered that Ellis’s defense attorney (in the second case) was the prosecutor’s brother. When it learned of this, the court held a recess and all parties went to chambers to hold an off-the-record conversation about what to do in the case. When the trial resumed, the judge declared a mistrial over Baker’s objection in that there was a “conflict of interest” where the state offered a witness represented by his brother immunity.
On retrial, Baker claimed double jeopardy. The trial court overruled his objection, but Baker appealed.
The Court of Appeals agreed with Baker. Unavailability of a state’s witness (not brought on by the defendant) is not generally an excuse for a mistrial.
Mistrial- There exists “manifest necessity” for a mistrial only if 1) there was a “high degree” of necessity for the mistrial; 2) the trial court engaged “in the process of exploring reasonable alternatives” to a mistrial and determined that none was available; and 3) no reasonable alternative to a mistrial was, in fact, available.
Mistrial- While the circuit court’s failure to utter the words “manifest necessity” in its mistrial ruling does not automatically render the ruling constitutionally defective, the absence of this phrase anywhere in the trial transcript is an additional indication that the circuit court did not “accord[] careful consideration to [Mr. Baker’s] interest in having the trial concluded in a single proceeding.”
Mistrial – a deficiency in the prosecution’s evidence, whether or not it should have been expected by the prosecutor and whether or not the prosecutor was at fault, ordinarily does not constitute ‘manifest necessity’
The court also noted that “there are four recognized spellings of the word “impanelled,” (impanelled, impaneled, empanelled, and empaneled)”