Off-duty D.C. police officer Oliver Wendell Smith Jr. was fatally shot in Prince George’s County 14 years ago. The killers were caught and sentenced to long prison sentences. But Smith’s family and other survivors of violence in Maryland say they are being repeatedly victimized by an obscure law that allows offenders to ask the trial judge to reopen their cases in an effort to have their sentences reduced.
Judges can choose to release offenders or drastically reduce their sentences even if they’ve been denied parole and have lost all court appeals.
“Every time I get one of these letters, I think, ‘When will we get our reconsideration?’ ” said Oliver Smith Sr. “We were sentenced to life, life without my son, with no possibility of parole or reconsideration.”
Murders, kidnappers and child molesters are among those who have gotten their time behind bars reduced under the Maryland law.
The results can sometimes be devastating.
Shawn M. Henderson stabbed three people yet had his sentence of 12 years shaved to 10. The judge’s action, plus good-time credits, allowed Henderson to get out of prison after six years, despite the fact he had been denied parole. Two years after he was released in 2008, he shot and killed a Gaithersburg woman.
Of the 100 persons convicted of violent crimes whose sentences have been reduced since 2002, 78 were in Prince George’s County, according to documents provided by the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy. Ten more came out of Montgomery County.
Among the area cases: Michael W. Sears pleaded guilty to killing his girlfriend in Greenbelt in 2003. Less than two years earlier he was released from prison after being convicted of murdering his wife. He gained his release after a judge cut 10 years off his 30-year murder sentence.
A judge cut 14 years from a 30-year sentence for Jason Lay, convicted in 2005 of molesting a 4-year-old girl in Germantown. His lawyers argued that their client had been stabbed in prison. But in a letter to the judge, the girl’s grandfather wrote, “Jason is far more capable of defending himself than was my granddaughter at age four.”
In 2004, Maryland reduced to five years the amount of time trial judges had to reconsider a sentence, but the new rule does not apply to anyone sentenced before July 1, 2004. And there is no evidence that the rule change has reduced the amount of reconsiderations.
“It’s horrible,” said Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Angela Alsobrooks. “Bringing closure is a part of bringing justice to these families. And they can’t get closure.”
Defense attorney Gary Bair, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law whose firm handles about a dozen reconsideration cases each year, said Maryland’s rule allows judges some control over the conduct of the offenders. Judges often will start with a stiff sentence and use the rule as an incentive to reward offenders for good behavior, he said. “The judge becomes his own parole board,” Bair said.
But Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy said, “We don’t need pretend sentences, we need real sentences.”
