INSIGHT: CLINIC PROFILES
Insight: Clinic Profiles Criminal Appeals and Post-Conviction Services Clinic
(Pictured from left): Professor Anne Olesen, Ariel Glickman, JD ‘16, Laura Ferguson, JD ‘16, and Adjunct Professor Wyatt Feeler stand outside courthouse after the students presented their oral argument to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals.
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tudents in the Criminal Appeals and Post-Conviction Services (CAPS) Clinic (formerly known as the Federal, Criminal, and Appellate Clinic) represent clients in criminal appeals before the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. Taught and supervised by Professor Anne Olesen and Adjunct Professor Wyatt Feeler, LLM ’13, CAPS students litigated 10 cases in 2015-16, and Professors Olesen and Feeler continued to litigate a 2014-15 clinic case when the Maryland Court of Appeals granted certiorari. In the first CAPS victory of the year, Joshua Labat, JD ’16, and Douglas Strauss, JD ’16, won reversal of their client’s convictions because the trial court had failed to poll the jury as required by the Sixth Amendment. The clinic achieved another victory when Mr. Labat and
Caitlin O’Donnell, JD ’16, persuaded the court to reverse their client’s conviction because the prosecution had not disclosed pre-trial an oral statement that they attributed to the defendant and admitted into evidence against him. In a case of first impression, Jennifer Hose, JD ’16, and Mark Formichelli, JD ’16, argued that Maryland’s mandatory breath test law is unconstitutional as applied to criminal cases because it creates a per se exception to the warrant requirement where alcohol is suspected in cases involving life-threatening accidents. In the context of blood alcohol testing, the U.S. Supreme Court had found in 2013 that the natural metabolism over time of alcohol in the body does not create a per se exigency that justifies an exception to the warrant requirement. The students argued that the Maryland
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statute violates this holding because it allows warrantless breath testing without a case-specific exigency analysis. In another case of constitutional significance, Ariel Glickman, JD ’16, and Ejaz Baluch, JD ’16, argued that their client’s Fifth Amendment rights were violated when a detective testified before a jury that the defendant had invoked his right to counsel and remained silent when the detective attempted to interview him. Other clinic cases raised issues such as insufficiency of evidence (O’Donnell and Yaniv Nahon, JD ’16), prosecutorial misconduct during closing argument (Strauss and Hose), an erroneous jury instruction that failed to define an element of the crime (Glickman and Laura Ferguson, JD ’16), improper lay witness narration of a surveillance video (Ferguson and Stephanie Williamson, JD ’16), the erroneous admission of documents containing highly prejudicial evidence of other crimes (Baluch and Williamson), and the trial court’s failure to adequately address potential jury bias after a juror asked police witnesses about employment opportunities at the police department (Formichelli and Nahon). In late 2015, the Maryland Court of Appeals granted certiorari in a 2014-15 clinic case where the Court of Special Appeals had upheld a frisk of the defendant during a consensual search of the car in which he was riding. A dissenting judge had found that the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated because the police had no reason to suspect that he was armed and dangerous other than he was riding late at night through what they viewed as a high-crime area and that he appeared nervous when he saw the police. In the spring semester, Professors Olesen and Feeler filed briefs in the Court of Appeals, and on August 24 they received notice that they had won the case and that the client’s conviction would be overturned. n