Jones v. State

915 A.2d 1010, 172 Md. App. 444, 2007 Md. App. LEXIS 8
CourtCourt of Special Appeals of Maryland
DecidedJanuary 30, 2007
DocketNo. 166
StatusPublished
Cited by8 cases

This text of 915 A.2d 1010 (Jones v. State) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Special Appeals of Maryland primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Jones v. State, 915 A.2d 1010, 172 Md. App. 444, 2007 Md. App. LEXIS 8 (Md. Ct. App. 2007).

Opinion

EYLER, DEBORAH S., J.

A jury in the Circuit Court for Baltimore County convicted Charnard Demon Jones, the appellant, of first-degree sexual offense, second-degree sexual offense, sodomy, and second-degree assault. The court sentenced him to 30 years’ impris[447]*447onment on the first-degree sexual offense conviction and merged the other convictions for sentencing.

Before this Court, the appellant poses two questions for review, which we have rephrased slightly:

I. Did the trial court err in rejecting his territorial jurisdiction argument as a matter of law, instead of submitting that issue to the jury for decision?
II. Did the trial court err in ruling that the evidence was legally sufficient to establish a proper chain of custody of the DNA evidence taken during the SAFE examination of the victim?

For the following reasons, we shall affirm the judgments of the circuit court.

FACTS AND PROCEEDINGS

The events central to this case occurred in the early morning hours of December 4, 1998. Sometime around midnight on December 3-4, the victim went to a bar called Nick’s Place, which is located in the Savoy Plaza in the 8500 block of Liberty Road. That address is in the Randallstown area of Baltimore County. The victim planned to meet her sister there. She had been drinking heavily for much of the day. Before going to Nick’s, the victim and a friend of a neighbor had been drinking at a bar in Baltimore City. The neighbor’s friend gave the victim a ride to Nick’s bar and dropped her off there.

The victim’s sister never showed up at Nick’s. The victim drank two mixed drinks and then, around 1:30 a.m., left the bar and sat outside on the street curb. For a while, she talked to a man she knew as Claudis. She started to feel “woozy” and decided to use the nearby pay telephone to make a call. She tripped and fell on her way to the telephone booth and hit the back of her head on the ground. She sat back down on the curb and someone “came up next to [her] and was talking to [her],” but she could not remember who the person was or “picture the face.”

[448]*448The victim remembered being put in a car and “being in a car.” The car was moving and it was dark. She was in the back seat with another person and was saying, “Let me out this car.” The person in the back seat then “just started beating [her] in [her] face.” She felt sick and dizzy and wanted to get out of the car because her “head was spinning.” She described what she remembered happening while she was being beaten:

I don’t remember too much. I remember being beaten in the face, and then when the car stopped it’s, like — I don’t know, the person must have got out of the car. I know I was still wanting to fight and trying to get away, and I just felt somebody, like, turn me over on my stomach and pull my pants down, and I felt a penis penetrate into my rectum.
I was, like, passed out again after that. It [sic] kept beating me in the back of my head. I was so scared because I know it was a rape thing going on, and I was really just blanking out.

After testifying that she was positive that she was sodomized, and not vaginally raped, and describing the clothing she had been wearing that night, the victim continued in her recitation of events:

The next thing I remember is somebody turning me over, but I still couldn’t see nothing because I was so drunk. I started throwing up. I was leaning back throwing up this way, and I heard the person, I guess, whose car it was, “Get this bitch out my car, because she hurling.” Then the person in the back seat who did whatever they had to do, dragged me out of the car, and that was it.

Sometime during the beating and being dragged out of the car the victim’s ear “was sliced in half’ and her chin and one of her eye sockets were injured.

The victim testified that she believes she passed out or fell asleep where she was left, which turned out to be in Leakin Park, in Baltimore City. At some point, she woke up, thinking she was in bed having a bad dream, but found herself outside [449]*449lying on the ground in the dark. Eventually, she got up and started walking until she saw a light, which was the streetlight at the intersection of Windsor Mill Road and North Forest Park Avenue. She followed the light to a gas station on that corner.

The only clothes the victim was wearing at that time were a shirt and socks. The rest of her clothing (jeans, boots, and a leather jacket) and her purse and its contents were gone. When she reached the gas station, she “[j]ust stood there in shock[.]” She tried to tell the people there her name. She remembered that her sister lived nearby, and gave the gas station workers a piece of paper with her sister’s telephone number on it. Her sister came to the gas station to get her. The next thing she remembers is waking up at Mercy Medical Center.

The initial call from the gas station was made to the Baltimore City Police Department, at 5:50 a.m. Soon thereafter, when the Baltimore City police realized that the victim had been accosted outside of Nick’s Place in Baltimore County, the case was transferred to the Baltimore County Police Department.

That same day, at 1:00 p.m., the victim was examined by Leslie Crimy, R.N., a SAFE (Sexual Assault Forensic Examination) nurse at Mercy Medical Center. During the examination, anal swabs were obtained. We shall discuss that examination and the physical evidence when we address the appellant’s second question presented.

Detective Debra Milholen-Tribull of the Baltimore County Police Department was in charge of the criminal investigation of this case. The investigation was closed after two months because it had failed to produce a viable suspect. For six years, the case remained dormant. Then, in 2004, DNA evidence from the swabs taken from the victim was sent to the Bode Technology Group, an independent laboratory, for analysis.1 When the results of the analysis were entered into the [450]*450State’s DNA database they matched the appellant’s DNA. The appellant was indicted on January 18, 2005.

Expert testimony introduced at trial revealed that the likelihood that the source of the DNA found on the anal swab obtained from the victim was someone other than the appellant was between one in 71 quadrillion and one in 260 quadrillion.

We shall include additional facts as relevant to our discussion of the issues.

DISCUSSION

I.

Territorial Jurisdiction

On cross-examination, the victim testified that for at least part of the time she was in the back seat of the car, where she was sodomized, the car was being driven, at times at a high speed. She knew that she was put in the car in front of Nick’s Place, on Liberty Road, in Baltimore County, and that she was dragged out of the car and deposited in Leakin Park, in Baltimore City. She testified that, between those two times, she did not “know where I went, how we got there on the road, how we got in the park or none of that.... ”

The following exchange between defense counsel and the victim then ensued:

Q: The driver could have taken you on the Beltway?

A: I don’t know. I don’t remember.

Q.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
915 A.2d 1010, 172 Md. App. 444, 2007 Md. App. LEXIS 8, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/jones-v-state-mdctspecapp-2007.