A Baltimore judge has thrown out a city jury's murder conviction and ordered a new trial in the case of a man accused of stabbing a friend with whom he was peddling stolen tools.
Circuit Judge Gale E. Rasin told a stunned prosecutor last week that she was setting aside the jury's Sept. 19 verdict at the defense's request because the witnesses had radically changed their stories from one hearing to the next - a fact that the jurors couldn't grasp without watching a recording of the previous hearing.
The reversal was "extraordinarily rare," said longtime Baltimore defense attorney Michael Kaminkow, who was not involved in the case. The decision is also noteworthy because Baltimore juries are often criticized for doing the exact opposite - acquitting too many people who are later found to be guilty.
A videotape of the proceeding reveals that prosecutor Robin Wherley believed she was appearing in court Monday for the sentencing of Willie Ferguson for the second-degree murder of Richard Ray, 38. Instead, Rasin told the prosecutor that "in the interest of justice" she would have to start over. Rasin said her decision was unappealable.
In a statement, Margaret T. Burns, a spokeswoman for State's Attorney Patricia C. Jessamy, wrote that Wherley was "understandably stunned" and that homicide prosecutors had not determined their "next steps." She declined to comment further.
After the jury convicted Ferguson, his attorney filed a common request for a new trial, which Wherley opposed.
In her written argument, Wherley wrote that Rasin was not "at liberty" to reverse a jury "merely because" she disagreed with the verdict. Quoting a court decision, Wherley wrote that such reversals should be granted "only in exceptional cases" where letting a jury's verdict stand would "be a miscarriage of justice."
Rasin said in court that she believed jurors would have reached a different verdict had they been shown a digital video recording of two witnesses' testimony from an earlier hearing.
At that pretrial hearing, one witness said he couldn't identify Ferguson as the killer and was even "loath to identify" his picture in a photo array, Rasin said.
But on the witness stand during trial - merely a day later - the same man identified Ferguson in a scene "a la Perry Mason," Rasin said. The judge also said that testimony from a second eyewitness was so conflicting from one day to the next that it "left her head spinning."
