Robbins v. State
| Decision Date | 17 April 2023 |
| Docket Number | 644-2022 |
| Parties | ALAINA JEAN MARIE ROBBINS v. STATE OF MARYLAND |
| Court | Court of Special Appeals of Maryland |
Circuit Court for Cecil County Case No. C-07-CR-19-000726
OPINION [**]
Just because you can Doesn't mean you should Just because you can Doesn't mean you should Just because you can Doesn't mean you should If it don't do nobody Don't do nobody no good[1]
This is Alaina Jean Marie Robbins's second appeal from convictions arising from incidents occurring on April 16 2019. As we explained the first time the case was here, Robbins v. State, No. 651, Sept. Term 2020 (App. Ct. Md. filed Sept. 13, 2021) (unreported opinion), Ms. Robbins, while suffering from "an acute episode of mental health crisis," "took a knife and rifle, and ran out into a Cecil County roadway." Id., slip op. at 1. After the situation was resolved, she was taken to the Cecil County Sheriff's Office, detained there for about twenty-five minutes, then transported to the hospital. The Sheriffs defused the situation in the roadway well and nobody was hurt or threatened.
While inside the Sheriff's Office, officers alleged that Ms. Robbins-a small woman who, again, was in mental health crisis-assaulted them as they moved her through the Sheriff's Office and to the hospital. She was charged with thirty-five counts (not a typo) including assault, reckless endangerment, malicious destruction of property, illegal possession of a rifle, attempted escape, and possession of controlled paraphernalia. She was convicted of ten counts and sentenced to concurrent terms of fifteen years for each count of first-degree assault and ten years for each count of second-degree assault. And in her first appeal, we reversed the convictions-we reversed the four counts of first-degree assault on the ground that the evidence was insufficient as a matter of law to support them, and we reversed the rest, and remanded for further proceedings, because the State withheld the surveillance video that captured her time in the Sheriff's Office, in violation of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963).
The State tried Ms. Robbins again, and after a one-day bench trial, she was convicted of eight counts: resisting arrest, one count of second-degree assault against the arresting officer on the roadway, five counts of second-degree assault that occurred in the Sheriff's Office against five individual officers, and malicious destruction of property for damage to the doorframe of a police cruiser during her transport to the hospital. She was sentenced to concurrent terms of time served for resisting arrest and second-degree assault on the roadway. For the second-degree assault convictions inside the Sheriff's Office, she received five five-year sentences, to run consecutively, and all suspended, plus a five-year term of probation.
In this appeal, Ms. Robbins asks us to reverse her convictions again for three reasons: first, because the trial court erred in accepting her jury trial waiver; second, because the evidence was insufficient to sustain her convictions for resisting arrest and second-degree assault; and third, because the trial court erred in returning a guilty verdict on both resisting arrest and second-degree assault against her arresting officer on the roadway. For the reasons we explain, we are constrained to affirm the court's acceptance of Ms. Robbins's jury trial waiver and to affirm the convictions for resisting arrest in the roadway and all five counts of second-degree assault at the Sheriff's Office. We vacate Ms. Robbins's conviction for second-degree assault against the officer during her arrest on the roadway because it should have been merged into the resisting arrest conviction.
But although the result after her second trial is better for Ms. Robbins than it was after the first, that doesn't mean that the final result here is humane or good. It isn't. This case was grossly overcharged and over-prosecuted from the start, and the (admittedly legal) convictions and sentences that now hang over Ms. Robbins effectively criminalized her mental health crisis for no legitimate public safety purpose. Once the situation was defused-as it was, quickly and effectively-the public safety focus should have been on getting her help, not punishing the minor impacts the officers sustained in fulfilling their duties. We are affirming the convictions and sentences because the law requires us to do so, not because we view them as the right outcome.
The context of this appeal warrants a brief review of Ms. Robbins's first trial and our unreported opinion in her first appeal.
A few years before the incidents at issue, Ms. Robbins was the victim of a brutal sexual assault that involved a gun. That assault left her with post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), and it triggered the mental health crisis underlying the events of April 16, 2019:
On April 16, 2019, around 3:00 pm, Ms. Robbins was cleaning the house she shared with a friend when she found a gun hidden in a stack of blankets. This discovery triggered her PTSD, and she instantly wanted to remove it from the house. She picked up the gun and ran into the road.
Robbins, slip op. at 2.
Again, the deputies arrived and persuaded Ms. Robbins quickly to drop her weapons. But as she was being arrested in the roadway, Ms. Robbins believed that the deputies weren't actually police; she "became combative, and the deputies had to restrain her after she started kicking." Id. at 3. Once at the Sheriff's Office, Ms. Robbins testified that she felt trapped and thought the deputies were going to kill her. Id. at 4. Based on her behavior in the Sheriff's Office cell, the deputies "became concerned for her safety and welfare" and decided to transport her to the hospital. Id. And as they attempted to remove Ms. Robbins from her cell and take her to the hospital, she "resisted having handcuffs put on her again." Id. at 5. She had a syringe in her hand, id., and "yelled that she had hepatitis and AIDS," id. at 6.
Ms. Robbins was indicted on thirty-five counts of first-degree and second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, use of a firearm on the commission of a crime of violence, resisting arrest, malicious destruction of property, unlawfully possessing a shotgun, attempted second-degree escape, and possession of drug paraphernalia. After a two-day jury trial on January 21 and 22, 2020,[2] Ms. Robbins was convicted of ten charges-four counts of first-degree assault, three counts of second-degree assault, resisting arrest, attempted escape, and malicious destruction of property. Her convictions "were grounded entirely in . . . trial testimony." Id. at 18. Then, ten days after trial, the State produced surveillance video of the events that occurred at the Sheriff's Office, after claiming all along that the video didn't exist. Ms. Robbins moved for a new trial, but the circuit court denied the motion.
In her first appeal, we reversed her first-degree assault convictions for legal insufficiency, reversed her remaining convictions because of the Brady violation, and remanded the case for further proceedings. Id. at 20. We held that "Ms. Robbins's first-degree assault convictions were based solely on the testimony and credibility of the police officers, and the testimony didn't establish harm or intent," id. at 9, not least because the State conceded that none of the officers involved suffered any serious physical injury. As a result, we held, the evidence was insufficient to allow "a rational juror to have reached the conclusion that Ms. Robbins intended to cause the officers serious physical injury." Id. at 14.
We then reversed her remaining convictions because the video evidence was Brady material that the State had failed to produce. Id. at 14. We held as well that the "video would have been favorable to Ms. Robbins":
[I]t is not our role to weigh the evidence, but we struggle to square the officers' description of events with the video we watched; it may be that a new jury would reach the same conclusion after viewing the video as the first one did without seeing it, but we cannot say with any confidence that that would have to be the case. And to the extent that the video cast doubt on the credibility of the officers' testimony about the events it captured, as it absolutely could, a jury readily could doubt the officers' testimony on other matters as well. We hold, therefore, that the prosecutors violated Brady by failing to produce the Sheriff's Office video to defense counsel before trial.
Id. at 18. Because her second-degree assault, resisting arrest, attempted escape, and malicious destruction of property convictions relied solely on officer testimony, we reversed all of them given the impeachment value of the surveillance video. Id. at 18 n.5.
Although the whole situation flowed from an acute episode of mental health crisis, and despite the questions about whether the deputies suffered any discernible injuries, the State elected nevertheless to re-try Ms. Robbins on the remaining charges (our insufficiency holding precluded re-trial for first-degree assault). The case was set to be held a second time before the same trial judge. But on January 19, 2022, Ms. Robbins filed a motion for recusal "in order that [she] might get a fresh start with a new tribunal who could hear the case anew." Her case was reassigned to a new trial judge.
At a May 2, 2022 pretrial hearing, the court found that Ms Robbins waived her right to a jury trial and her bench trial proceeded the next day. The State called seven officers to testify. This time, each officer took pains to describe their attempts to arrest or...
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