No need to explain the relief on Elijah Snow's face in September when a jury acquitted him of carrying a deadly weapon - a kitchen knife - through downtown Baltimore. A guilty verdict would have landed the twice-convicted armed carjacker back in prison. Now he appeared to be home free.
That may explain his confused expression when he stood in another city courtroom in November, listening as another judge sent him off to prison on the basis of the very same evidence that had failed to convince the jury two months earlier.
"I was found not guilty," Snow complained to Circuit Judge John Miller. "I don't know what's going on."
FOR THE RECORD - A headline on Page 1A of yesterday's editions of The Sun erroneously referrred to defendants being sentenced for parole violations. The article instead involved violations of probation.
THE SUN REGRETS THE ERROR
It may have seemed to Snow a case of double jeopardy - trying him twice for the same crime. But it wasn't.
The evidence that wasn't sufficient to convict him on the deadly-weapon charge was enough, in Miller's mind, to conclude that he had violated probation on his earlier prison sentence for carjacking. So even though he beat the weapons charge, the effect was the same: He was going to do time.
Increasingly - even in cases when Baltimore prosecutors have lost at trial or dropped charges - they are sending ex-convicts back to prison by using evidence of the new crimes in probation-violation hearings. This week, four more cases are scheduled for such hearings in city courtrooms.
Prosecutors say the practice is a way to get particularly violent offenders off the streets. Defense lawyers counter that authorities are really finagling a way to put someone behind bars when a jury has refused to do so.
"It's patently unfair, and it screams injustice," said Margaret Mead, a Baltimore-area defense attorney for 17 years. "They're basically sneaking people into jail through the back door."
The practice is controversial in part because it is far easier for a prosecutor to win a conviction on probation violation than a conviction on new criminal charges. The standard of proof is lower, and violation cases are decided by judges rather than more unpredictable city juries that are often skeptical of police evidence.
Despite protests by defense attorneys, the practice has stood up to challenge. In 1992, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled in a Baltimore drug case that a conviction on a new crime is not necessary in order to find an ex-convict in violation of probation. High courts in other states - including Illinois and Pennsylvania - have also recently upheld the practice.
