Stanley v. State
| Decision Date | 16 December 2020 |
| Docket Number | No. 521, Sept. Term, 2019,521, Sept. Term, 2019 |
| Citation | 242 A.3d 1126,248 Md.App. 539 |
| Parties | DeAngelo Montier STANLEY v. STATE of Maryland |
| Court | Court of Special Appeals of Maryland |
Submitted by: Helki Philipsen (Paul B. DeWolfe, Public Defender, on the brief), Baltimore, MD, for Appellant.
Submitted by: Andrew J. Dimiceli (Brian E. Frosh, Atty. Gen., on the brief), Baltimore, MD, for Appellee.
Panel: Nazarian, Arthur, J. Frederick Sharer, Senior Judge, Specially Assigned, JJ.
On August 5, 2018, two strangers assaulted Johnata DeCastro on a Salisbury street, permanently disabling him. Crediting evidence that appellant DeAngelo Stanley was one of those assailants, a jury in the Circuit Court for Wicomico County convicted him of first- and second-degree assault and reckless endangerment. The court sentenced him to imprisonment for 18 years.
In this timely appeal, Stanley presents the following questions:
We conclude that the trial court did not err or abuse its discretion in restricting the cross-examination. We also conclude that the evidence, viewed in the light most favorable to the State, was sufficient to support Stanley's convictions. Consequently, we shall affirm the convictions.
At some point after 1:00 a.m. on August 5, 2018, Johnata DeCastro and his wife, Raquel Queiroz, were driving along Church Street in Salisbury, heading to her sister's house to pick up their child. DeCastro had gotten extremely drunk at a party, and he and Queiroz were arguing. Three blocks from their destination, DeCastro got out of the car, shouted back at Queiroz, and walked away.
When her husband was approximately 25 to 30 feet away from the corner of Church Street and Davis Street, Queiroz saw that two men, one white and the other a "dark-skinned," "skinny" African American with dreadlocks, were walking with DeCastro. One of the men put his hands on DeCastro's shoulder and said something, which Queiroz could not hear. By the time Queiroz rounded the block and circled back, she did not see anyone.
According to DeCastro, two men came up to him while he was walking away from his car. They started grabbing at his bag. When they rounded a corner, the men hit him on the head, and he fell to the ground. He remembers nothing else.
At 1:41 a.m. on August 5, 2018, police officers and paramedics responded to a report of a "man down" behind 700 East Church Street, at the intersection of Church and Davis Streets. They found DeCastro behind a garage or shed in the back of the house. He was unconscious and bleeding, with head wounds that included a basal skull fracture
, a "brain bleed" (apparently a hemorrhage of the blood vessels in the brain), and "scalping" injuries consistent with being kicked. His wallet was nearby, but $100 in cash was gone.
Felipe Perez had called 911 to report the altercation in which DeCastro was assaulted. At the scene, Perez, who has a mental disability
, told the police that he saw a couple of people arguing out on the corner.
Although many of the neighbors came out to watch the police officers and EMTs, no one gave any information about what had occurred. Porsha DuPont, who lived at 700 East Church Street, told the investigators that she "didn't see anything."
DeCastro was in a coma for three days and was unable to be interviewed for several weeks. Even then, he was unaware of his surroundings or of the year, and he seemed to believe he was back in his native Brazil. His traumatic brain injuries
have left him with epilepsy, impaired language and motor skills, and personality changes. He remains unable to work.
On August 28, 2018, a Salisbury police detective received an anonymous call from a woman who reported that she had information about the assault that happened on Church Street. The police traced the call to Cotrenna Drayton. She denied making the call and refused to talk to the detective.
On September 13, 2018, Drayton was arrested on unrelated charges. She initially refused to make any statement about the Church Street assault, but she changed her mind when the investigators told her that the State's Attorney had "options" to address her concerns about her safety.1 Although Drayton was initially tearful and reluctant to talk, she eventually gave a recorded statement, in which she told the police that on August 5, 2018, she was driving on Barclay Street in Salisbury, toward its intersection with Church Street. She pulled up at the stop sign, from which she could look toward 700 East Church Street and the intersection of Church Street and Davis Street. She said that she "caught the end" of the assault and saw "DeAngelo" (i.e. Stanley) kicking the victim.
Drayton identified Stanley from a photo array. Next to the photograph of Stanley, Drayton wrote, "[T]hat's the person that we talked about earlier."
At trial, Drayton gave a different account, refusing to implicate Stanley. She testified that she and Stanley had a relationship that ended "back around August 2018[,]" that she did not see Stanley "kick anybody in the head[,]" and that she did not tell the police that she saw Stanley at the scene of the assault. Admitting that she did not want to be in court, she claimed that she could not see the assault while stopped on Barclay Street. A Salisbury police detective had previously testified on cross-examination that a person could not see the location where the victim was found (behind a shed or garage at the back of 700 East Church Street) from the intersection of Church and Barclay Streets.2
After reviewing a transcript of the recorded statement that she gave to the police, Drayton claimed that she did not recall identifying Stanley. She continued to claim that she knew nothing about the assault. She nevertheless admitted that her handwriting was on the photograph of Stanley in the photo array. The court admitted the recorded statement under Md. Rule 5-802.1(a)(3), the hearsay exception for prior inconsistent statements recorded in substantially verbatim fashion by stenographic or electronic means contemporaneously with the making of the statement.
A second informant, Glay Kimble, also implicated Stanley in the assault on DeCastro. Kimble told the investigators that, when he and Stanley were incarcerated on unrelated charges on August 30, 2018, Stanley had admitted his involvement in multiple crimes, including an assault on Church Street in which Stanley believed that the victim "did not make it." During a police interview earlier that same month, Kimble had implicated others in unrelated crimes.
At trial, Kimble testified that Stanley had approached him while they were both in jail. Stanley inquired whether Kimble was the father of Drayton's son. When Kimble answered that he is, Stanley warned him that he "needed to get [his] son" because Drayton "knew some things" that Stanley had done and was threatening to call the police about them. In response to Kimble's question about what Drayton knew, Stanley said that he had beaten someone up on Church Street, that he was not sure whether the person had died, but that he did not think that the person had made it. According to Stanley, the beating occurred near a white house where "Dave" and Porsha DuPont lived.
On cross-examination, the defense established that Kimble initially told the investigators that Stanley had described the victim as a woman. Kimble tried to explain away that statement by saying that Stanley was "beating on" Drayton, and he did not know whether Stanley was referring to her as a person who knew about the assault or as the victim.
Although Kimble had received a benefit for testifying in other cases (he got into a drug-rehabilitation program), he insisted that he did not receive anything for testifying against Stanley in this case.
David Cutler, a resident of 700 East Church Street, testified that he had seen Stanley "a lot in Salisbury" and that Stanley would hang out on the porch of Cutler's house "[o]ff and on." Cutler recalled seeing Stanley on the porch earlier on the day of the assault. On cross-examination, Cutler stated that had never seen Stanley with dreadlocks.
Porsha DuPont, called by the defense, testified that she was living at 700 East Church Street on August 5, 2018, but "really didn't know" DeAngelo Stanley. She said that she "didn't see him all that day or night." Like Cutler, she testified that she had never seen Stanley with dreadlocks.
The defense also called Darrell Mainor, who had been in an intimate relationship with Cotrenna Drayton when she was arrested in September 2018. Mainor testified that when he picked Drayton up from jail after she had been arrested, she told him that she had falsely accused Stanley in order to obtain favorable treatment. According to Mainor, Drayton said: "I lied on him whatever, saying, basically, that he really did it, but he really didn't."
On cross-examination, Mainor admitted that he had "just recently" been housed with Stanley "on lockup[.]" When asked why he had not come forward earlier with exculpatory information that he had had since last September, Mainor claimed he "was working or ... had warrants out." Mainor acknowledged that, even though he had been incarcerated for the last four months, he did not notify anyone in law enforcement that Drayton had told him about her false accusation against Stanley. Instead, he waited until "about three or four days" before trial, to tell defense counsel what Drayton had allegedly said.
In closing argument, defense counsel argued that there was reasonable doubt about whether Stanley assaulted DeCastro because neither Drayton nor Kimble were reliable witnesses. Counsel maintained that Drayton falsely accused Stanley and recanted her accusation and that Drayton could not have seen the assault from the intersection where she claimed to have stopped. Counsel also...
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