Nicholas Browning admitted walking home from a friend's house - about three miles - in the early-morning hours of Feb. 2 and fatally shooting each member of his family, one by one as they slept, before returning to the friend's house to play Xbox.
He was in court yesterday for a hearing at which lawyers in the case were to argue whether a digital recording of Browning's interview with police - and confession - could be played at trial. The case was scheduled to be tried in December.
Lawyers and legal experts said that the timing of Browning's guilty plea was not surprising and that the likely motive was avoiding a sentence with no hope of release.
"It may well have been that the state said to the other side, 'If we've got to do all that work and go through the suppression hearing, if you lose this suppression hearing - and you're going to lose - we're withdrawing our [plea] offer,' " said Byron L. Warnken, an attorney and law professor at the University of Baltimore Law School.
He noted that prosecutors did not concede much in the plea, reducing the sentence they are seeking from four counts of life without parole to two consecutive life terms and two concurrent life terms.
"My guess is the state's case was so incredibly strong that they had to give up very, very little," Warnken added.
Nevertheless, attorneys said, a paroleable sentence remains a more appealing option for defendants - despite the fact that no convicted killer serving life has been released on parole in Maryland since 1994, according to state officials.
"Having a sentence that admits the possibility of parole - even if it's far into the future - is preferable to one in which your only possibility of getting out is feet-first," said Andrew D. Levy, a trial lawyer who also teaches criminal law at the University of Maryland Law School. "It may be that the practical effect is the same. But this was a young man who was choosing among several unpalatable alternatives."
Because he is younger than 18, Browning was not eligible for the death penalty. Although his lawyers presented evidence that the teenager suffered from a dissociative disorder and that he might have been the victim of abuse, a court-imposed deadline for filing Maryland's equivalent of an insanity plea passed without action by defense attorneys.
Yesterday's guilty pleas followed hours of back-and-forth discussions between Browning and his attorneys and between the lawyers and the teenager's relatives. Just before noon, sheriff's deputies led Browning into the courtroom for the plea hearing.
