Belton v. State
| Decision Date | 28 December 2021 |
| Docket Number | 0290-2020,0720-2020 |
| Court | Court of Special Appeals of Maryland |
| Parties | TERRENCE BELTON v. STATE OF MARYLAND SHAKIEA WORSLEY v. STATE OF MARYLAND |
Circuit Court for Baltimore City Case Nos. 119015009-10
Leahy Shaw Geter, Moylan, Charles E., Jr. (Senior Judge, Specially Assigned), JJ.
In the Old English epic of Beowulf, the peace and tranquility of Hrothgar's Hall was initially shattered by the unexpected appearance of the monster Grendel. It was even more direly, terrorized by the subsequent arrival of Grendel's Mother. In the case now before us, the peace and tranquility of South Monroe Street at McHenry Street was ruptured on December 6 of 2018 by the simultaneous appearances of both the son, Terrence Belton, and the mother, Shakiea Worsley. Literary scholars tell us that Hrothgar's Hall was situated in Geatland in what is now the southwestern corner of modern-day Sweden. Police experts tell us that the intersection of South Monroe Street and McHenry Street is an open-air drug market in what is now the southwestern corner of Baltimore City.
The appellant, Terrance Belton ("Son"), was convicted in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City by a jury of manslaughter and of two handgun offenses. The appellant, Shakiea Worsley ("Mother"), was convicted by the same jury in a joint trial of being an accessory after the fact to the manslaughter committed by the Son. Each appellant has filed a separate appeal raising separate issues. Because both appeals arose out of a single criminal incident, however, and because both sets of convictions were rendered in a single trial, we have consolidated the two appeals for present consideration.
Each appellant has raised a single contention. The contentions are completely unrelated. Although the legal analyses diverge widely and could easily have given rise to and, in effect, are two separate appeals, the two tightly interwoven factual narratives need to be told as a single tale.
The Son raises a single contention:
THE COURT ERRED IN EXCLUDING APPELLANT'S TESTIMONY REGARDING THE VICTIM'S STATEMENT, "THIS IS MY BLOCK," WHICH WAS NOT HEARSAY AND CRITICAL TO APPELLANT'S SELF-DEFENSE AND DEFENSE-OF-OTHERS DEFENSES.
The issue is not the admissibility of hearsay. It is rather the definition of hearsay. All parties including the Son, agree that hearsay is inadmissible. Maryland Rule of Procedure 5-802. Nor is there any quarrel over the basic, and universally accepted, definition of hearsay. Hearsay is an out-of-court assertion offered in court for the truth of the thing asserted. Maryland Rule 5-801(c). "[A]ppellate review of whether evidence is hearsay and, if so, whether it falls within an exception and is therefore admissible is de novo." Hallowell v. State, 235 Md.App. 484, 522, 178 A.3d 610 (2018).
In this case, the out-of-court declarant was Edward Calloway, the ultimate manslaughter victim, now dead. He was speaking to several of his friends and associates as the Son, the auditor of the assertion, approached to within hearing distance. The Son testified that Calloway spoke the words, "This is my block." The State objected on the ground that the words were hearsay. After some wrangling at the bench, the State's objection was sustained. Both the State and the Son now agree that the assertion, "This is my block," was not offered to prove the truth of the thing asserted, to wit, that Calloway enjoyed an entrepreneurial monopoly over the selling of drugs sold in the Monroe-McHenry open-air market. That, of course, is the last thing in the world that the Mother and Son, as entrepreneurial rivals of Calloway, would have wished to prove.
The Son maintains that as non-hearsay, the words spoken were not, per se, inadmissible. He argues that he heard them and that they had an effect on his state of mind as he concluded that Calloway was hostile both to him and to his Mother and that Calloway, therefore, posed a danger to both him and his Mother. Burgess v. State, 89 Md.App. 522, 538, 598 A.2d 830 (1991); Brown v. State, 80 Md.App. 187, 194, 560 A.2d 605 (1989). An appraisal of the admissibility of this particular instance of arguably pertinent non-hearsay depends, of course, upon the context. Banks v. State, 92 Md.App. 422, 434, 608 A.2d 1249 (1992). That context is the entire narrative of the criminal episode now before us.
A Case Not Of "Whodunnit?" But Of "Whyhedunnit?"
The issue before us is a limited one. We are spared the usual Big-W questions of WHO?, WHAT?, WHEN?, and WHERE? WHO? The appellant, Terrence Belton (the "Son"). WHAT? The Son shot and killed Edward Calloway. WHEN? December 6, 2018. WHERE? The intersection of South Monroe Street and McHenry Street in Southwest Baltimore. Those answers were all undisputed. There remains only the little-W question of WHY? This case against the Son posed the single question: WHY did the Son kill Edward Calloway?
In appellate brief, the Son advances two reasons for killing Calloway - self-defense and the defense of others, to wit, his Mother. At trial, he offered evidence as to one of those defenses - self-defense. The presence of the other defense - the defense of his Mother - was largely taken for granted, but even its unspoken presence permeated the trial.
Demythologizing "Mother" With the only question before the jury being WHY?, the Son's apparent answer was that he had no choice but to kill because he was protecting his Mother from the imminent and immediate threat of death. That defense packs a heavy emotional punch. It is this defense of his mother, therefore, that creates the necessity for the following admonitory caveat. Before an appropriately neutral analysis of the hard facts could even begin to emerge, there was a potentially distracting ambience hovering over the trial that had to be dissipated. The intersection of South Monroe Street and McHenry Street was not the Hallmark Hall of Fame. The appellant Belton, however, cast his very presence at that crime scene as the fulfilment of his filial duty to protect his mother in a potentially dangerous and violent environment. That was why he was there. He defended his ultimate shooting of Edward Calloway as necessitated by his defense of others, to wit, his Mother, from the imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm. Those, of course, are exemplary qualities, calculated to engender a sense of juror sympathy.
The Son's arguably dubious guilty verdict of mitigated voluntary manslaughter rather than of unmitigated second-degree murder may almost certainly be attributed to such sympathies in the minds of the jurors. The skimpy factual predicate advanced for this defense of others may, to be sure, have permitted such an extenuated verdict, but the case for it was certainly not compelling. "The homicide victim was, after all, only a dope dealer" (forgetting the inconvenient fact that the mother whose life and limb were ostensibly being protected was also a dope dealer).
In this case particularly we must remove the sentimental stereotype. We must forgo any temptation to think of the appellant Shakiea Worsley as Whistler's Mother[1], calling out from her decrepitude for protection from the slings and arrows of the Monroe-McHenry open-air drug market. Far from being decrepit, the appellant Worsley was a young and vigorous 35-year-old. Two years earlier, she had lost her license to practice as a nursing assistant because of her conviction in the District Court for the unlawful possession of narcotic drugs. She received a suspended sentence. It was then that she turned to selling drugs for a living, heroin and crack cocaine. To put her age in generational perspective, she lived with, and was charged with taking care of, her own grandmother, who was suffering from Alzheimer's disease. We must remember, therefore, that the appellant Worsley in this case was not the grandmother in that household but the granddaughter. In terms of physical prowess, moreover, the appellant Worsley was not the fragile victim of a physical assault, but was unquestionably the initial aggressor (see infra) who actually precipitated the fist-fight with her rival drug dealer that turned into the catalyst for the ultimate killing.
Indeed, just several weeks earlier, the Mother had herself been the victim of a robbery at gunpoint, at night and in an alley just off McHenry Street. Her drugs had been taken from her by force. She did not even report the robbery to the police because she did not want to compromise her own drug-selling activity. She did, however, notify her fellow drug dealers. This was why both Calloway and "Nut," a close associate of Calloway, first armed themselves. Their guns were deliberately on open display thereafter at the drug market to deter other would-be robbers from interfering with the orderly transaction of their unlawful business. That presumably traumatic incident, moreover, did not deter the Mother from continuing to sell drugs on a daily (nightly) basis.
It finally behooves us to remember that far from being imperiled by slings and arrows, the Mother was herself the source of many of the slings and arrows that randomly pervaded the Monroe-McHenry open-air drug market. She had been a regular drug peddler of heroin and crack cocaine there on a daily (actually a nightly) basis for over two years. She held her own in that largely male-dominated criminal venue for all of those two years.
In making our mental appraisal of the cold hard facts therefore, we must scrupulously avoid looking at the scene through the sentimentally distorting lens of James Abbott McNeill Whistler or of Norman Rockwell or of Currier and Ives. We must appraise the legal status of the two co-appellants essentially as if they were unrelated. The...
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