Grandison v. State
| Decision Date | 29 November 2017 |
| Docket Number | No. 2039, Sept. Term, 2014,No. 2822, Sept. Term, 2015,2039, Sept. Term, 2014,2822, Sept. Term, 2015 |
| Parties | Anthony GRANDISON v. STATE of Maryland Anthony Grandison v. State of Maryland |
| Court | Court of Special Appeals of Maryland |
Argued by Pro Se (in Prison), for Appellant.
Argued by Ryan R. Dietrich (Brian E. Frosh, Attorney General on the brief), Baltimore, MD, for Appellee.
Panel: Woodward, C.J., Leahy, Charles E. Moylan, Jr. (Senior Judge, Specially Assigned), JJ.*
In 1983, Anthony Grandison, appellant, for a fee of $9,000, hired his friend, Vernon Lee Evans, to murder Scott Piechowicz and his wife, Cheryl Piechowicz, to prevent them from testifying against him in a then-pending criminal trial in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland. Grandison v. State , 305 Md. 685, 697, 506 A.2d 580, cert. denied , 479 U.S. 873, 107 S.Ct. 38, 93 L.Ed.2d 174, and reh'g denied , 479 U.S. 1001, 107 S.Ct. 611, 93 L.Ed.2d 609 (1986). Pursuant to their unlawful agreement, Evans succeeded in murdering Scott Piechowicz but failed in killing Cheryl Piechowicz, instead murdering her sister, Susan Kennedy, by mistake.1 Id.
Later that year, Grandison, Evans, and two others2 were tried in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland on charges of conspiracy to violate civil rights resulting in death, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 241, and witness tampering, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1512. United States v. Grandison , 780 F.2d 425, 428 (4th Cir. 1985), vacated sub nom. Kelly v. United States , 479 U.S. 1076, 107 S.Ct. 1270, 94 L.Ed.2d 132 (1987), aff'd on remand , 885 F.2d 143 (4th Cir. 1989), cert. denied , 495 U.S. 934, 110 S.Ct. 2178, 109 L.Ed.2d 507 (1990). All four defendants were convicted of both charges, id. , and Grandison, in particular, was sentenced to life imprisonment and a consecutive term of ten years' imprisonment. Grandison , 305 Md. at 698, 506 A.2d 580.
The following year, after removal of the Maryland case to Somerset County at Grandison's request,3 he was convicted, by a jury sitting in the Circuit Court for Somerset County, of conspiracy to murder, two counts of first-degree murder, and use of a handgun in the commission of a crime of violence. Id. He was thereafter sentenced, by the jury, to death sentences for both first-degree murders, and the court imposed a sentence of "life imprisonment for the conspiracy conviction and twenty years for the handgun violation consecutive to the life sentence." Id. Both of the latter sentences "were imposed to run consecutively to the life plus ten years sentence previously imposed in the federal case." Id.
Grandison subsequently filed a post-conviction petition, in the Circuit Court for Somerset County, and, in 1992, that court, relying upon the Supreme Court's decision in Mills v. Maryland , 486 U.S. 367, 108 S.Ct. 1860, 100 L.Ed.2d 384 (1988),4 vacated his death sentences but otherwise denied his claims. Grandison v. State , 341 Md. 175, 194, 670 A.2d 398 (1995), cert. denied , 519 U.S. 1027, 117 S.Ct. 581, 136 L.Ed.2d 512 (1996), and reh'g denied , 519 U.S. 1143, 117 S.Ct. 1021, 136 L.Ed.2d 897 (1997). At resentencing, a jury in Somerset County reimposed the two death sentences for the murders of Scott Piechowicz and Susan Kennedy. Id.
Grandison thereafter lodged repeated challenges, in both state and federal court, to those sentences, finally gaining a temporary reprieve when, in 2006, the Court of Appeals enjoined the State from carrying out the death penalty against his co-defendant, Evans, because the protocols governing the method of administering that penalty, lethal injection, had been adopted, held the Court, in a manner that violated the Maryland Administrative Procedure Act. Evans v. State , 396 Md. 256, 344–46, 350, 914 A.2d 25 (2006), cert. denied , 552 U.S. 835, 128 S.Ct. 65, 169 L.Ed.2d 53 (2007).5
That injunction was to remain in effect until new protocols were promulgated in accordance with the Maryland Administrative Procedure Act, id. at 350, 914 A.2d 25, but such new protocols were never promulgated. See Fiscal and Policy Note (Revised), S.B. 276, at 3–5 (2013). Instead, the General Assembly repealed the death penalty in 2013. 2013 Md. Laws, ch. 156, § 3. Meanwhile, on June 6, 2013, Grandison filed, in the Circuit Court for Somerset County, the first of two motions to correct an illegal sentence (which he supplemented several times) that are the subject of the present appeals. Following two hearings, the circuit court, on November 13, 2014, issued a memorandum opinion and order granting relief, at the State's own concession, on a single claim—that the twenty-year sentence imposed for use of a handgun in the commission of a crime of violence was illegal, because, at the time Grandison committed that offense, its maximum penalty was fifteen years' imprisonment.6 Accordingly, the circuit court vacated Grandison's twenty-year sentence for that crime and imposed a fifteen-year term of imprisonment, consecutive to his life sentence for conspiracy as well as to Grandison'sfederal sentences. But it denied all of his other claims. Grandison noted a timely appeal from that order, raising the following questions:
Then, in 2015, Governor Martin O'Malley, exercising his pardon power, commuted Grandison's death sentences to sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Executive Order 01.01.2015.05 (Jan. 20, 2015). Thereafter, Grandison filed, in the Circuit Court for Somerset County, a second motion to correct an illegal sentence. The circuit court subsequently issued a written memorandum opinion and order denying that motion. Grandison noted a timely appeal from that order, raising two question for review, which we have slightly rephrased as follows:
On this Court's own motion, we consolidated these appeals.
Grandison claims that the circuit abused its discretion in ruling that his convictions for first-degree murder did not merge with his conviction for use of a handgun in the commission of a felony or crime of violence under the required evidence test. This claim is without merit.
Although the Court of Appeals held, in State v. Ferrell , 313 Md. 291, 297, 545 A.2d 653 (1988), that use of a handgun in the commission of a felony or crime of violence and the predicate felony or crime of violence are the same offense under the required evidence test, that holding addressed a different circumstance—whether the predicate offense and the handgun offense could be tried in successive prosecutions. Ferrell held that they could not be tried in successive prosecutions. Id. Ferrell said nothing about whether separate sentences may be imposed for those crimes if they are brought in the same trial.
The question before us was squarely addressed by the Supreme Court in Missouri v. Hunter , 459 U.S. 359, 103 S.Ct. 673, 74 L.Ed.2d 535 (1983). There, the Court held:
Where, as here, a legislature specifically authorizes cumulative punishment under two statutes, regardless of whether those two statutes proscribe the "same" conduct under Blockburger ,[7 ] a court's task of statutory construction is at an end and the prosecutor may seek and the trial court or jury may impose cumulative punishment under such statutes in a single trial.
At the time the offenses at issue were committed, the statute proscribing unlawful use of a handgun stated as follows:
Unlawful use of handgun in commission of crime .—Any person who shall use a handgun in the commission of any felony or any crime of violence as defined in § 441 of this article, shall be guilty of a separate misdemeanor and on conviction thereof shall, in addition to any other sentence imposed by virtue of commission of said felony or misdemeanor ... be sentenced to the Maryland Division of Correction[.]
Md. Code , Art. 27, § 36B(d).8
It is manifest that the General Assembly intended that a separate sentence be...
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