Court Opinion

ID: 9649741
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 15:07:42.125416+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:14.461269
License: Public Domain

COLE, Judge,
concurring.
I concur with the Court in its holding that Harris’s sentence must be vacated because he was denied his common law right of allocution. However, I write separately to reaffirm my dissenting opinion in Harris v. State, 303 Md. 685, 724, 496 A.2d 1074, 1089 (1985). In that dissent, I indicated that Harris was denied his sixth amendment right to effective assistance of counsel for two principal reasons: (1) his lawyer entered a guilty plea to a charge of first degree murder as a principal in the first degree, notwithstanding the availability of a viable defense based upon the distinction between first and second degree principals in death penalty cases; and (2) Harris’s counsel accepted an Agreed Statement of Facts in which Harris admitted to being a principal in the first degree, without extracting some meaningful quid pro quo from the State.
Today, the Court holds that this same Agreed Statement of Facts is admissible before the sentencing body to determine whether Harris lives or dies. Thus, the consequences of defense counsel’s mistake as to the Agreed Statement of Facts become all the more obvious.