Maryland Certiorari Statistics, 2020 Term
By Steve Klepper (Twitter: @MDAppeal)
For the fourth straight year, I’ve tracked the Court of Appeals’ petition docket. The judiciary’s annual statistical reports give the overall grant rate for civil and criminal certiorari petitions. Because unrepresented (pro se) parties file the majority of petitions each year, however, the overall statistics are not terribly helpful for lawyers in advising their clients regarding the odds of certiorari.
Below are the statistics for the Court’s 2020 Term (petitions filed 3/1/2020 to 2/28/2021), alongside the statistics for the 2019 Term (petitions filed 3/1/2019 to 2/29/2020) and the 2018 Term (petitions filed 3/1/2018 to 2/28/2019).
Read More…Meet the Applicants for the Court of Appeals (Montgomery County)
Six applicants (two appellate judges, three trial judges, and one private practitioner) have applied for the Court of Appeals vacancy created by the upcoming retirement of Chief Judge Mary Ellen Barbera, who reaches mandatory retirement age this September. Applicants must be residents of Montgomery County.
The Appellate Judicial Nominating Commission will meet on August 2, 2021, and forward nominees to Governor Larry Hogan.
Read More…The Future of Daubert in Maryland
I revisit my favorite Maryland Appellate Blog topic, the admissibility of expert testimony in Maryland courts, because it continues to generate fresh, important questions for judges and practitioners. With the Court of Appeals formally adopting Daubert as the standard for construing Maryland Rule 5-702 in all state courts, see Rochkind v. Stevenson, 471 Md. 1 (2020), Federal Rule of Evidence 702 has become, for all intents and purposes, as relevant as Maryland Rule 5-702. This is so because courts cannot adopt Daubert without adopting FRE 702.
But the unusual historical interplay between the Supreme Court’s 1993 Daubert decision and the original FRE 702 can obscure FRE 702’s primacy in a Daubert analysis. The 2020 Rochkind decision—by nominally adopting “Daubert” rather than FRE 702—similarly risks confusion if Maryland courts try to “apply Rochkind/Daubert.” Maryland courts and practitioners must be clear-eyed that, in all expert challenges, they are now applying Maryland Rule 5-702 and FRE 702. And both rules continue to evolve.
Read More…June 2021 Maryland Certiorari Grants
The Court of Appeals today granted certiorari in three criminal appeals and three civil appeals.
Read More…Recoverable damages for killing a pet.
The Court of Appeals was recently faced with a tragic case involving the senseless slaying of a dog and the resulting spirited debate over the interpretation of a statute that addresses damages for the injury or death of a pet. In Anne Arundel Cty. v. Reeves, No. 68, Sept. Term, 2019 (Md. June 7, 2021), Chief Judge Barbera authored the majority opinion, holding that the statute unambiguously limits compensatory damages to the amount specified by that statute and does not allow recovery of noneconomic compensatory damages for the tortious injury or death of a pet. In a forceful dissent, Judge Hotten urged a broader reading of that statute that would allow recovery of noneconomic compensatory damages for the grossly negligent killing of a pet.
Read More…In-Person Appellate Oral Arguments Ended Suddenly with a Bang, and are Restarting Slowly with Anticipated Full Strength in the Fall.
By: Michael Wein
What happened in March 2020 was an abrupt departure for everyone, and a surprisingly long segue from normal. This post provides an update. As outlined in detail in previous posts for this Blog, the Maryland and Federal Appellate Courts (which include Maryland), suddenly postponed Oral arguments in March 2020. They also had the unenviable task transitioning to Remote Oral Arguments for the first time. It’s been that way for about a year.
Assuming T.S. Eliot is a legal authority (he’s not, but fun to quote) and as a matter of transitive logic, a “bang” wouldn’t signify the end of the world…only a whimper. Thus, there will be a resumption of normal. [1]
Read More…The Institution of the Judiciary and Judicial Review, American Democracy’s Lifeline
Until recently, the social and political institutions of the United States long enjoyed, largely, the respect and the fealty of its citizenry. Though their raison d’etre vary, our institutions – our schools, houses of worship, courts, legislatures and more – all serve a common and fundamental function. They facilitate the conduct of orderly and rational discourse aimed at achieving consensus of purpose, in, importantly but not exclusively, matters of education, worship, governance, and commerce. Plainly, however, institutions do not guarantee discourse having such quality and effect. That depends, instead, on the character of each institution’s members. Given their essential function and the vital purposes, how is it that our most important institutions, those of government, have fallen so far in function and repute? Certainly bearing responsibility, at the federal and even state levels, has been the Supreme Court’s insensitivity to, if not abdication of, the unique position it occupies to protect our democratic form of government, which judicial proclivity is the subject of this post. We start first, though, with some political theory.
Read More…Divergence Between the Fourth Circuit and Maryland in Extending Arizona v. Gant to Non-Vehicular Searches Incident to a Lawful Arrest
Arizona v. Gant, 556 U.S. 332 (2009) involved the search of a vehicle after the driver had been lawfully arrested, handcuffed, and locked in a patrol car. The Supreme Court rendered two holdings, the first, which is relevant for this post, held that the police may not use the search incident to a lawful arrest exception to the warrant requirement to search a vehicle incident to a recent occupant’s arrest after the arrestee has been secured and cannot access the interior of the vehicle.
Gant’s first holding was premised upon Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 (1969), a non-vehicular search case in which it was determined that police may search incident to arrest only the space within an arrestee’s “immediate control”, meaning “the area from within which he might gain possession of a weapon or destructible evidence.” The Chimel holding was then applied to vehicle searches in New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454 (1981).
However, the Gant Court limited Belton’s reach, based upon Chimel, since the purpose of allowing a search to prevent a suspect from gaining possession of a weapon or destroying evidence would be rendered nugatory where the suspect has already been secured and cannot access the interior of the vehicle.
For the past decade, in Maryland and in the Fourth Circuit, the holding in Gant has been applied exclusively to vehicle searches.
But on May 7, 2021, in United States v. Howard Davis, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit joined three other federal circuits in concluding that the holding in Gant applies to searches of non-vehicular containers as well. Now, police can conduct warrantless searches of non-vehicular containers incident to a lawful arrest, but “only when the arrestee is unsecured and within reaching distance of the [container] at the time of the search.”
Read More…Scent of Marijuana Alone Does Not Provide Reasonable Suspicion to Seize a Person in Maryland
Since Maryland decriminalized possession of less than 10 grams of marijuana in 2014, Maryland’s appellate courts have been tasked with determining how this non-criminal, but non-legal substance, factors into the reasonableness of warrantless searches and seizures where evidence of marijuana is present.
On April 28, 2021, the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland decided In re: D.D., holding, as a matter of first impression, that the odor of marijuana, by itself, does not provide reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, and therefore, a stop based on this circumstance alone is unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
Read More…Modern Family Law: Who Gets the Frozen Pre-Embryos?
With the increasing use of cryogenic preservation in fertility treatments (and thousands of Maryland divorces every year), it was only a matter of time before Maryland’s appellate courts would need to create a framework for resolving custody disputes over frozen pre-embryos. That time arrived last month when the Court of Special Appeals handed down its reported decision in Jocelyn P. v. Joshua P., No. 2125, September Term, 2019. It is the first Maryland appellate decision to “examine how to determine the rights of parties, upon dissolution of their marriage or partnership, in a pre-embryo that they jointly created and cryopreserved.”[1]
The court adopted a hybrid test that first looks to the intent of the parties in any relevant prior agreement—focusing on their actual intent instead of boilerplate recitations in form contracts prepared by fertility-treatment centers and storage labs—before applying a multi-factor balancing test. If the parties did not have a (non-boilerplate) “express agreement, courts should seek to balance the competing interests under the following factors: (1) the intended use of the frozen pre-embryos by the party seeking to preserve them; (2) the reasonable ability of a party seeking implantation to have children through other means; (3) the parties’ original reasons for undergoing IVF, which may favor preservation over disposition; (4) the potential burden on the party seeking to avoid becoming a genetic parent; (5) either party’s bad faith and attempt to use the frozen pre-embryo as leverage in the divorce proceeding; and (6) other considerations relevant the parties’ unique situation.[2]
Read More…
Maryland Appellate Blog 