MD court orders new trial in PG shooting case due to warrantless seizure of evidence

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The Maryland Appellate Court last month ordered a new trial in a Prince George’s County shooting case because certain evidence was obtained without a warrant.

Kimery Darren Martin was charged with attempted murder and eventually convicted of attempted voluntary manslaughter, assault and firearms charges for an April 2023 shooting in Temple Hills that left a man paralyzed from the neck down.

Martin was also shot, in the leg, during the conflict, and his appeal questioned how police obtained evidence while he was at George Washington University Hospital in Washington.

A detective from the Prince George’s County Police Department, Jonathan Marks, arrived at the hospital while Martin was in the operating room; an officer from the Metropolitan Police Department, who was already there, handed Martin’s ID to Marks, and pointed him to a bag of blood-soaked clothing in the hallway.

It’s not clear if the MPD officer obtained the evidence legally.

A three-judge panel of the Maryland Appellate Court ruled Nov. 21 that Martin’s motion to suppress evidence should have been granted by the Prince George’s County Circuit Court. The appellate court remanded the case for a new trial consistent with the ruling.

“In sum, the evidence (presented at a hearing on the motion to suppress) raised concerns that the clothing’s placement in the hallway — where Detective Marks later observed and ultimately seized it — might have resulted from a prior warrantless seizure by the MPD officer,” Judge Rosalyn Tang wrote.

Tang was joined by Judge Dan Friedman and Senior Judge Alexander Wright Jr., who was specially assigned.

The Maryland Office of the Public Defender, which represented Martin, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did the Maryland Office of the Attorney General, the Metropolitan Police Department or the Prince George’s Police Department.

In denying the motion to suppress and allowing the evidence into the record, the lower court agreed with the state that the “collective knowledge” of the MPD and the PGPD justified the seizure.

That doctrine, Tang wrote, “allows courts to measure probable cause in terms of the collective information within the possession of the entire police team.” Tang wrote that the doctrine has limits, and is intended to cover the conduct of an officer acting on the information and instruction of another officer.

“(T)he collective knowledge doctrine did not resolve the appellant’s argument,” Tang wrote, because the evidence may have been obtained unlawfully before the PGPD detective collected it.

The state also argued police obtained the evidence lawfully because of a “plain view exception” to the warrant requirement. Tang wrote there was “no merit” to that argument.

“In other words,” she wrote, “the plain view doctrine cannot justify the seizure of an object if it was put in plain view as a result of unlawful police conduct.”