State v. Martin

• Decision Date: 20 September 2019
• Docket Number: No. 3209,No. 3207,3207,3209
• Parties: STATE OF MARYLAND v. CHARLES BRANDON MARTIN
• Court: Court of Special Appeals of Maryland

STATE OF MARYLAND v. CHARLES BRANDON MARTIN

No. 3207

No. 3209

COURT OF SPECIAL APPEALS OF MARYLAND

September Term, 2018

September 20, 2019

Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County

Case No. 02-K-09-000831

UNREPORTED

Fader, C.J., Graeff, Eyler, James R., (Senior Judge, Specially Assigned), JJ.

Opinion by Graeff, J.

*This is an unreported opinion, and it may not be cited in any paper, brief, motion, or other document filed in this Court or any other Maryland Court as either precedent within the rule of stare decisis or as persuasive authority. Md. Rule 1-104.

In 2010, appellee, Charles Brandon Martin, was convicted of attempted first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. On October 5, 2018, the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County granted appellee's petition for postconviction relief and ordered that he be granted a new trial.

On appeal, the State presents the following questions for this Court's review, which we have rephrased slightly, as follows:

1. Did the postconviction court err in ruling that the State committed a Brady¹ violation in failing to give the defense a forensic computer analysis report performed on appellee's computer?

2. Did the postconviction court err in ruling that appellee's trial counsel was ineffective in not objecting to compound questions posed during voir dire?

3. Did the postconviction court err in ruling that appellee's trial counsel was ineffective in failing to object to the State's closing argument?

Appellee filed a cross-appeal, in which he presents an additional question for our review, which we have rephrased slightly, as follows:

Did the postconviction court err in concluding that appellee was not prejudiced by his trial counsel's failure to timely object to a Confrontation Clause violation?

For the reasons set forth below, we agree with the State's contentions of error, and therefore, we shall reverse the judgment of the circuit court.

FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND

The factual background of the underlying offense was summarized by this Court in its opinion on direct appeal of appellee's conviction. Martin v. State, 218 Md. App. 1, 8-14 (2014). We adopt this summary as follows:

On October 27, 2008, Jodi Lynne Torok, the victim, was found at her home in Crofton, Maryland, with a gunshot wound to her head. Having survived that wound, the victim testified, at the trial below, that she had been in a romantic relationship with Martin, who was married to someone else, and that about eight or nine weeks before the shooting, she had become pregnant with his child. After the victim informed Martin of her condition, he angrily demanded that she obtain an abortion. Although she had, at first, agreed to do so, she later changed her mind and decided to have the baby. Upon informing Martin of her change of mind, the victim advised him of her intention "to go to court and take him for child support." Predictably, that advisement led to cooling of their relationship.

Subsequently, on the day of the shooting, at about 3:00 p.m., the victim was talking on the phone, at her home, with a close friend, Blair Wolfe, when a man, purporting to be a salesman, knocked on her front door. She then ended the call to respond to the "salesman," but thereafter never called Ms. Wolfe back or answered any of Wolfe's subsequent telephone calls. Growing increasingly concerned but unable to take any action on her own,⁵ Ms. Wolfe telephoned Jessica Higgs, the victim's roommate, and requested that she leave work and return home to make sure that the victim was safe. Upon arriving at the residence that she shared with the victim, Ms. Higgs found the front door unlocked and the victim lying on the foyer, unconscious and bleeding from a gunshot wound to her head. Higgs immediately called "911."

When the first police officer arrived at the victim's residence, he secured the scene. Then, upon entering the residence, he found the victim, Ms. Torok, "laying in the doorway," "fully clothed," still breathing, but unresponsive. There were no signs of forcible entry or that the victim's personal property had been disturbed.

⁵ At the time of this telephone call, Ms. Wolfe was living in Pittsburgh.

When paramedics arrived at the scene, they transported the victim to the Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Hospital in Baltimore City, where she remained for nearly a month. As a result of the gunshot wound, the victim's pregnancy was terminated, and she suffered severe and disabling injuries. Neither during that time nor thereafter could she recall the events that took place, from the end of her telephone conversation with Ms. Wolfe on October 27th until Thanksgiving, one month later.

The evidence recovered by the police at the scene of the shooting included a Gatorade bottle, which appeared to be fashioned into a home-made silencer;⁶ a spent projectile as well as a spent shell casing; and the victim's Blackberry cell phone.

Gatorade bottle/silencer

From the Gatorade bottle, police evidence technicians extracted "a human hair" of "Negroid origin"⁷ and saliva from the mouth of the bottle. DNA testing of both linked the bottle to Martin.⁸

⁶ The mouth of the Gatorade bottle was wrapped with two layers of tape, and at the bottom of the bottle was a hole. The tape exhibited a distinct, rectangular shape, a shape suggesting that the mouth of the bottle had been pressed against the barrel of a semi-automatic handgun. Furthermore, sooty residue lined the bottle's inside surface at the location of the hole, indicating that that opening at the bottom of the bottle had been made by an exiting bullet. It appeared, to police, to be a home-made silencer.

⁷ Martin is an African-American male.

⁸ Martin's mitochondrial DNA profile was the same as that derived from the hair strand. One of the State's expert witnesses testified at trial that only about 0.06 per cent of the population of North America shares the same mitochondrial DNA profile as that derived from the hair fragment found on the Gatorade bottle.

DNA testing of a swab of saliva taken from the mouth of the bottle revealed that it contained "a mixture of DNA from at least three individuals," at least one of whom was female and another a male. The test results excluded "approximately 94 percent of the Caucasian population," as well as "approximately 96 percent of the African-American population," but among the males, who could not be excluded, was Martin. And, among the females, who could not be excluded, was the victim, Jodi Torok.

The victim testified that neither she nor [the victim's roommate] drank Gatorade, but that Martin did and often.⁹ Martin's fondness for Gatorade was later confirmed by the officer who drove him to the Anne Arundel police station, who testified that, on the way to the station, he and [appellee] stopped at a convenience store, where Martin purchased a bottle of Gatorade to drink.

Granted immunity from prosecution for the shooting and possibly for other unrelated charges, Michael Bradley testified that, on the day of the shooting, he; his brother, Frank Bradley; Martin; and Jerry Burks, an acquaintance of Martin, were together at Maggie McFadden's house "about noon" and that he observed Frank Bradley carrying "some white ... medical tape" and a Gatorade bottle upstairs to McFadden's bedroom, where he was joined by Martin. Then, according to Michael Bradley, Martin and Burks left together, "approximately 1:30, 2:00" p.m., and returned after 3:00 p.m. but before 6:30 p.m. the same day.¹⁰

* * *

Ballistic evidence

The bullet recovered by police, a .380 caliber bullet, and the shell casing that was found, could have been fired, according to a State's expert witness, from a semi-automatic firearm. Such a firearm could have been manufactured by any one of sixteen different manufacturers, which was consistent with Martin's purchase, in 2003, of two .380 caliber semi-automatic handguns made by Bryco Arms, one of those sixteen manufacturers.¹¹ Moreover, Sheri Carter testified that, in September and October of 2008, the time period just

⁹ The victim stated that Martin drank Gatorade "a lot."

¹⁰ The State's theory was that Burks was the shooter and that he had been solicited by Martin. Burks was tried separately, six months before Martin's trial, on charges that included attempted first- and second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. He was acquitted by a jury on all counts. Five days before Martin's trial, the State moved in limine to "exclude from trial any evidence that Jerold Burks was acquitted of the charges" in that case, and, on the day trial commenced, the court granted that motion. Thereafter, the State nol prossed the conspiracy charge against Martin.before the shooting, she had observed Martin carrying a "small, silver, [black-handled], semi-automatic" handgun.

The firearm itself was never found. The testimony of Michael Bradley suggested why that was so. According to Michael Bradley, when Martin returned to McFadden's home the evening of the shooting, he saw Martin give a brown paper bag to Frank Bradley and tell Bradley to "get rid of this."

Victim's cell phone

Finally, the last of the four items found at the victim's residence was her Blackberry cell phone. Text messages extracted from that phone by police confirmed that Martin had exchanged several text messages with the victim on the day of the shooting.¹²

Martin's statement

The day after the shooting, Martin gave a statement to police. During the interrogation, Martin downplayed his relationship with Ms. Torok, the victim, telling detectives that he did not know her last name and that he was unsure where she lived, but he conceded that he had previously been to her house. And, although he was "highly doubt[ful]" that he was the father of the victim's baby, since they "hadn't had any contact," he admitted to police that he had agreed to provide money to her to "help her out." Finally, Martin claimed that, on the day of the shooting, he was at home with his wife and children until mid-day and that later

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