BALTIMORE (CN) - Plaudits inundated the office of Baltimore’s top prosecutor last month when State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced she would right the wrong of jailing thousands of people, usually black, for pot possession.
As the dust settles on the historic shift in criminal justice, however, experts question the implications of Mosby’s bid to erase 4,800 marijuana convictions.
To succeed with her rarely used legal maneuver, a petition known as “writ of error coram nobis,” Mosby will need to prove that the conviction caused significant collateral consequences, such as a deportation, that the defendant could not have foreseen when he pleaded guilty.
Complicating this effort, however, is the chance that individuals with marijuana convictions faced other charges in the same prosecution. In the 1,050 circuit court marijuana cases that Mosby has petitioned, moreover, nearly half are violent offenders.
“In a real coram case, everything that’s part of that guilty verdict goes out, but she’s single-shooting [the pot pleas],” said David Plymyer, a former assistant state’s attorney and county attorney in Anne Arundel, in an interview. “She’s way out on the frontier, way out in front of what coram nobis is thought to be able to accomplish.”
One type of successful coram showing could involve a decades-old plea that resulted in deportation proceedings, but Mosby noted several more “collateral consequences that flow from a criminal conviction: denial of eligibility for government benefits, significant social and psychological difficulties, public housing eligibility, use of criminal history by private landlords as a screening device, convictions operating as a de facto basis for job denial, and for those convicted individuals who are employed, much lower earnings than individuals without a conviction.”
Courthouse News checked a randomized 10 percent of the 1,050 cases listed in the circuit court petition, and then searched the criminal records of those defendants, ultimately examining more than 1,000 criminal cases.
Of 105 coram nobis cases from the initial review, seven had already been expunged, and one defendant appeared twice. The remaining 97 defendants have been arrested, on average, more than 10 times each, with an average of 4.2 criminal convictions. Almost half of those checked (48) had at least one conviction for a violent crime either prior or subsequent to pleading guilty to pot possession. Several defendants are currently imprisoned for violent crimes. Others have serious criminal charges pending.
If this sample from circuit court is representative, about 480 violent offenders could be getting a break from the city’s prosecutor. Many of the cases CNS checked originated as drug-dealing cases, which were plea-bargained down to possession. Four of the cases involved gun charges and at least two of those were gun convictions.
Apart from the 1,050 convictions identified by Mosby’s petition in city circuit court, a twin filing in district court, where less serious cases are adjudicated, targets 3,778 cases.
Prosecutors compiled the cases by running a computer code through the case-search database, and Mosby’s chief deputy Michael Schatzow said that to stay efficient the office has not undertaken individual case examinations.
“I think there are probably all kinds of cases in the pile,” Schatzow said. “In the district court they are probably primarily straightforward possession of marijuana.”
Schatzow called the coram nobis route a creative — if more complicated — way to accomplish the goal of a bill pending before the Maryland Legislature that would make it easier for state’s attorneys to vacate convictions,
“We acknowledge that we’re seeking an extraordinary remedy, and we’re doing it in a way that it not typical,” Schatzow said. “We are very proud of our creativity.”
Though Schatzow said he has not heard any criticism, lawyers note that a vacated pot conviction could have unintended repercussions on related cases — as when a weed case triggers a probation violation, for example.
