Posted on January 31, 2015 in Environmental Law

Like many Eastern states, historically Maryland has not been a large producer of oil and gas. But that could change in the not so distant future. In the West, proponents of “fracking” are anxiously eying the new Hogan government to see what it will do while offshore, the Department of the Interior has announced that it will publish for public comment a draft proposed Five-Year Program for oil and gas leasing in the Mid-Atlantic. Development in either or both sectors could have a large impact on Maryland’s economy.

Out West, Maryland has had a de facto ban on “fracking,” a process that allows for the development of natural gas that otherwise cannot economically be removed from the ground, since the O’Malley administration began assessing the risks associated with fracking in 2011. Three long years later, the group doing the study published a report with proposed regulations that would allow for drilling but which set the “gold standard” for how to do so. But that report now has a new administration at the helm, that of Republican Governor Larry Hogan, who has endorsed fracking so long as it can be done safely. All eyes are on Governor Hogan to see if he moves forward with the proposed regulations in their current form.

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 Posted on January 26, 2015 in Internet Law

Over the law few months, we have been getting calls every week from Internet subscribers who think they’re about to lose their homes, their entire life savings, or in one particular instance, their freedom (one woman was terribly afraid that she and her husband were going to be sent to prison).

It has been over a year since we last addressed the Malibu Media issue in our post Malibu Media Makes Marylanders Miserable, but the onslaught of copyright infringement cases filed by Malibu Media in the mid-Atlantic has not slowed. At last count, Malibu Media had filed over two thousand alleged copyright infringement cases in the United States, with over 355 cases right here in STSW’s home state of Maryland. The semi-boilerplate “Complaint” that Malibu Media files with the Court in these cases is usually a frightening, lengthy, confusing document that seeks hundreds of thousands in dollars in supposed damages from the Internet subscriber, who is the “Defendant.” Each Malibu Media Complaint has an “Exhibit A” attached that lists sexually graphic video titles, and Malibu Media alleges the Defendant unlawfully downloaded and watched these sexually graphic videos with lewd titles.

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 Posted on January 16, 2015 in Contracts

Courts across the country haven’t taken too kindly to insurers using technicalities or blaming their insureds to deny coverage and Maryland is no exception. Legislatures’ displeasure with insurers’ knack for finding devils in details sharpens where insurers deny coverage even though the insured’s mistakes caused no real problems. The Maryland General Assembly has therefore encoded (and the state courts have adopted) the so-called “prejudice rule” – an insurer can’t deny coverage without showing it was actually prejudiced by whatever the insured supposedly didn’t do.

Specifically, Md. Code, Ins. (“IN”) § 19-110 states:

An insurer may disclaim coverage on a liability insurance policy on the ground that the insured or a person claiming the benefits of the policy through the insured has breached the policy by failing to cooperate with the insurer or by not giving the insurer the required notice only if the insurer establishes by a preponderance of the evidence that the lack of cooperation or notice has resulted in actual prejudice to the insurer.

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 Posted on December 29, 2014 in Bicyclists Accidents

Sadly, another bicycle rider has been killed by a driver, this time in Roland Park.

I have handled two high-profile bicycle death cases in Maryland in the last few years, and both of them were tragic. The first involved a bicyclist who was run over by a commercial vehicle in Baltimore City. That case also involved a hit and run, though the driver in that case never came back to the scene.

The second involved a Johns Hopkins student who was run over by an elderly woman.

These two cases were complicated matters on the issues of liability. What often can seem like clear cut cases to clients at first, often turn out to be more complicated, requiring the skills of someone seasoned at handling catastrophic injury cases. For example, the defense in these cases usually raise questions about whether the cyclist was properly and lawfully riding his bicycle, even when in a bicycle lane. This requires a reconstruction of the events to demonstrate that bicycle riders were not at fault. In these cases, we rely upon collision reconstruction experts and expect bicyclists to testify on such issues.

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 Posted on November 11, 2014 in Assault

As a Baltimore Maryland Criminal Attorney, I regularly represent defendants who are charged with Assault in the First Degree and Assault in the Second Degree. These are extremely serious offenses under Maryland Law carrying maximum sentences of 25 year for the felony and up to 10 years for the misdemeanor charge.

As I have discussed in previous blogs, it is a common misperception amongst many of my clients that the doctrine of self defense is not recognized under Maryland Law. This is simply untrue. The doctrines of self-defense, and its close cousin, “defense of others”, are recognized in Maryland as well as every other State in the Union. In fact, I successfully defended a client in Baltimore City District Court utilizing both of these defenses just last week. My client was charged with Second Degree Assault resulting from an altercation he had with another motorist after a traffic incident. Here are the facts:

My client traveling eastbound on Boston Street in Baltimore City one afternoon this past summer. His wife was driving and he was seated in the front passenger seat. My client’s mother in law was traveling behind them in her vehicle. At some point, he noticed a large pick up truck in his rear view mirror pass his mother in law in a very aggressive manner. The pick up crossed the double yellow lane and accelerated to a high rate of speed. Once it overtook his mother in law’s vehicle, it swerved sharply back into the eastbound travel lanes nearly striking her. The vehicle then began to tailgate my client and his wife and made several attempts to pass them in the same aggressive manner. After the second such attempt, my client instructed his wife to pull over and allow the truck to pass, which she did.

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 Posted on November 07, 2014 in Constitutional Violations

As a Baltimore Maryland Criminal Attorney for almost 20 years I have long recognized that when defending people you must not let the perfect result become the enemy of the good result, particularly when dealing with serious felonies such as possession with the intent to distribute controlled dangerous substances. I watch far too many inexperienced or simply ineffective attorneys treat criminal defense as if it is a zero sum game in which every case must result in either total vindication or total devastation for the client.

The truth of the matter is that in many cases, a properly prepared defense attorney with a well analyzed and prepared defense, can negotiate a resolution that is more than satisfactory to the client without exposing her to the risks of taking the case to trial. In many cases, if the prosecutor can be convinced that there are legitimate defenses to the case that may cause her to lose her case entirely, she may reduce her plea offer to something the defendant is willing to accept or even dismiss the case altogether. I had an excellent example of just such a situation play out last week in the Circuit Court for Baltimore County. Here are the facts:

My client is a young woman in her early twenties. She came from a troubled background living most of her teen years in foster care. Predictably she got into some trouble as a juvenile and found herself both a mother and a drug addict before her twenty first birthday. She was charged with possession with the intent to distribute CDS and related offenses resulting from a traffic stop last spring. She was pulled over in what is known as a “pretext stop”. This term describes a situation in which a police officer uses a minor traffic violation as the basis to pull someone over when the actual reason for the stop is to conduct a drug investigation. Pretext stops are legal under both Maryland and Federal law.

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 Posted on November 06, 2014 in Other Torts

On October 14, 20014, prominent D.C. Rabbi and religious scholar Barry Freundel was arrested by the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and charged with various offenses relating to voyeurism. According to charging documents, Rabbi Freundel installed recording devices in the changing/shower area connected to a Jewish ritual bath known as a “mikvah.”

Rabbi Freundel was affiliated with Kesher Israel in Washington, D.C., he was a Jewish studies professor at Georgetown Law and he served on the faculty at Towson University in Maryland. Preliminary information suggests Rabbi Freundel encouraged his female students to participate in the mikvah and thousands of women who used the mikvah face the very real prospect that Rabbi Freundel captured and/or distributed the women’s images without their knowledge or consent. Media accounts indicate that several of the institutions with which Rabbi Freundel was affiliated are currently investigating other potential misconduct and MPD’s investigation in that regard is ongoing.

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 Posted on November 04, 2014 in Murder

As an Aggressive Maryland Criminal Attorney for almost 20 years I have handled hundreds if not thousands of criminal cases in which my client is alleged to have made an incriminating statement or a confession to the police. For obvious reasons, these statements are devastating to the defense and under most circumstances all but ensure a conviction.

Typically the only available strategy in these situations is to file a motion to suppress the statement alleging some violation of the defendant’s Constitutional Rights in the taking of the statement. Unfortunately for criminal defendants, these statements are rarely suppressed by trial judges, particularly when they are given after the defendant is advised of his Miranda rights and the statement is recorded. But that is exactly what happened in this case. Here are the facts:

In March of last year the Baltimore City police were called to the scene of a single car accident. The responding officers found a car crashed into a telephone pole with the unresponsive driver slumped over the steering wheel. An examination of the driver revealed that he had been shot in the back and had apparently subsequently driven from the scene of the shooting to the scene of the crash. He was transported to the hospital where he later died from the gunshot wound. There were no witnesses to the shooting.

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 Posted on October 24, 2014 in Attorney Qualifications

As a Baltimore Criminal Attorney with 20 years of experience I have represented thousands of people charged in criminal cases in District and Circuit Courts throughout the State. As a result of my experience, reviews of my clients and industry recognition – that is, recognition from other experienced criminal attorneys, I have earned very high ratings from attorney rating services such as Avvo and Superlawyers.

Unfortunately, I was shocked to recently learn that some inexperienced lawyers, have managed to game the system to get ratings similar to those given to highly experienced attorneys. I will discuss how specifically how I found this out below but, anyone who searches for an attorney using a rating service should carefully scrutinize the attorney qualifications of the attorney starting with how long the attorney has been practicing. This information should also be cross checked by searching the attorney on Maryland Judiciary Case Search. This website is maintained by the State and contains accurate information concerning an attorneys appearances in court. In other words, this is the court record and it doesn’t lie. Here is how I found out about this situation:

About a month ago I was checking my profile on one of the rating services. I decided to browse through the competition and as expected, found many highly experience criminal attorneys that I knew listed along with me at the top with the highest ratings. But I also saw a few names and faces that I had never seen before. This made me curious so I looked a little more carefully at a few of their profiles and was shocked to see that several of them had been practicing for less than two years but had still received ratings of “Superb” with a 9.9 on a 10 point scale! ( I have a perfect10.0 Superb rating from Avvo and am ranked as one of the Top 100 lawyers in the State by Superlawyers – only one other criminal attorney in the entire state was named among the Top 100).

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 Posted on October 01, 2014 in Handgun Offenses

Most Criminal Attorneys in Baltimore County Maryland are familiar with the so call “gun range cases” that have been charged in Balitmore County for the last several years. These cases are viewed as controversial by many, including the writer, as they tend to look more an effort to build gun prosecution statistics than legitimate efforts by the police to protect the community from gun weilding convicted criminals. As I have described in the past, these are very serious offenses that can in certain circumstances subject the person charged to minimum mandatory 5 year prison terms.

This past week I was able to successfully resolve two serparate matters involving husband and wife co-defendants, one in which the duo were charged in two separate jurisdictions. The facts of the two cases were nearly identical:

Detectives of the Baltimore County Police Firearms Unit have for several years been aggressively monitoring the patrons of both the Continental Arms Range in Timonium and the Freestate Range in Middle River. For those who are unfamiliar with how gun ranges operate, when a patron enters a range and requests to shoot at the facility, they are required to provide a driver’s license and to fill out a questionnaire regarding the person’s experience with firearms and the person’s criminal history, if any.

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