Maryland’s fast-growing Hispanic population is about to have its first male representative in judicial robes, as Governor O’Malley has chosen of defense lawyer Ricardo D. Zwaig for a Howard County District Court judgeship.

There are two female Hispanic judges and O’Malley named Audrey Creighton, a third, for a Montgomery County District Court judgeship along with Zwaig.

“I feel proud I’ve been selected,” said Zwaig, 57, the father of three. “It speaks very clearly to the community,” he said about his selection. “Governor O’Malley understands the need to be inclusive and broaden the face of the court.”

Zwaig, who practices with his younger brother Michael at offices in Baltimore’s Highlandtown neighborhood and Ellicott City, is a former state and federal public defender who has applied twice before to be a circuit judge. He withdrew his application in 2005 and was passed over in 2007. Now he is to replace the retired Judge Alice P. Clark as soon as he can wind up his private practice and schedule his swearing in. His practice is mostly criminal defense, personal injury, and immigration plus some civil work, he said.

He is eager to be a judge because “I’ve been committed to community service forever,” he said, adding that he likes dealing with people rather than doing administrative jobs. “My kids say to me, ‘Dad, you know everybody. You talk to everybody.’ I really enjoy talking to people.”.

Though Zwaig has previously applied for circuit Court positions, he is looking forward to District Court.

“District Court is pretty much the face of the judiciary” to the vast majority of people, he said, and although cases in traffic court may seem routine and repetitive, “every single person who comes to court on every single case believes that case is important,” and so does he. The judgeship pays $127,252.

Zwaig’s Baltimore office is on Eastern Ave. in the midst of the Hispanic community and he often defends Hispanics, sometimes pro bono. Perhaps his highest profile criminal case, which was not pro bono, was his defense of Lazara Arellano de Hogue, the woman convicted in 2007 of driving her pickup truck into a woman walking her three-year old grandson, Elijah Cozart, in a stroller across Goucher Boulevard in Dec. 2006. De Hogue drove away, dragging the little boy for a mile to his death before crashing. She got a 10-year prison term. It was a “terrible” case” Zwaig said this week.

A native of Argentina, he moved to the Baltimore area at age 10, he said, when his family came north to join European cousins who had survived the Holocaust in a concentration camp during World War II. He attended what was then Milford Mill High School in Baltimore County and then graduated from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in 1977. He graduated from the University of Maryland School of Law in 1982, passing the bar the following year.

Zwaig worked as a state public defender until 1990, and then became a federal public defender before taking an administrative federal court job he quickly began to dislike. In 2002 he returned to the courtroom in private practice with his brother.

Lawyer Jason Shapiro, who headed the Howard County judicial selection panel that forwarded four names to the Governor, said Zwaig “has fantastic experience and a wonderful demeanor and would make an outstanding judge.”

Mayda Colo’n Tsaknis, the 1993 founder and first president of the Maryland Hispanic Bar Association, said there were few Hispanic applicants for judgeships over the years, but believes it is important to have the courts begin to mirror society more accurately. “when I started [in 1977], there were no Hispanics in private practice,” she said. That has changed, with about 200 members of the association now, but the judiciary has moved much more slowly.

Judicial selection commissions that send nominations to the governor “were not ready” for years to recommend Hispanics, she said.

State planning figures show the Hispanic population grew faster than any other group in Maryland during each of the last five years through July, 2009, and they now make up about 7.7 percent of the state’s population — nearly doubling their numbers since 2000.

Colo’n Tsaknis said she has known Zwaig for more than two decades and feels he’ll make a great judge.

“I find him extremely, extremely competent, with a wonderful personality. He’s fair, He listens, and when you are in some kind of debate over issues, he’s able to keep his cool. What I like most is that I know Ricardo is going to treat all who come before him in the same manner,” she said.

Howard District judge Neil David Axel, one of four current Howard district judges and a veteran of more than 13 years in the job, said he’s known Zwaig for years as a defense attorney. He too is confident of Zwaig’s ability to bring his life experiences to the bench, but also to adapt to his new role.

He’s going to be a wonderful addition to this bench,” Axel said.

CASE DISMISSED!

BY: Tresa Baldas

New York Law Journal

May 19, 2010

Winning over jurors is tough enough for criminal defendants. Being ugly may make it tougher.

That is the conclusion of a new Cornell University study that found unattractive defendants are 22 percent more likely to be convicted and are likely to receive sentences that average 22 months longer than their better-looking counterparts. The study, “When Emotionality Trumps Reason,” was based on responses from 169 Cornell psychology students.

No surprise, said Jack King, spokesman for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, noting that defense lawyers have long taken looks into account when trying cases.

“We usually want our clients in a suit, with their hair combed and trying to appear as clean-cut as possible,” Mr. King said. “It bears out what many of us knew in our gut, or just believed, because we think we know human nature.”

James Reams, president-elect of the National District Attorneys Association, conceded that looks “could have a little bit of impact” in weaker cases. But he said, “This study may say more about the kids at that college than anything else.”

If looks were truly important, Mr. Reams said, “we’d hire nothing but attractive prosecutors and send them up there.”

The study, scheduled to run in an upcoming issue of “Behavioral Sciences and the Law,” was conducted by Justin Gunnell, a Cornell Law School graduate and commercial litigator in New York, and Stephen Ceci, professor of developmental psychology at Cornell.

Based on personality tests, the Cornell students were broken down into two groups of hypothetical jurors: those who reason rationally based on facts, analysis and logic, and those who reason emotionally and may consider such legally irrelevant factors as a defendant’s appearance, race, gender and class. The two groups were then given a case study with a photograph of an actual defendant and his or her general profile. They read real jury instructions and listened to the cases’ closing arguments.

While the two groups convicted attractive defendants at similar rates and were less biased in the face of strong evidence or very serious offenses, the jurors’ reasoning style tended to lead them to divergent conclusions in cases where the evidence was ambiguous and the charged offense somewhat minor, said Mr. Gunnell.

In other words, when a weak case presented itself with an unattractive defendant, the emotional jurors were more likely to convict and to hand down harsher sentences.

Mr. Gunnell said he believes the study could help lawyers fine-tune jury selection techniques. Those with the evidence strongly on their side might want to identify rational jurors. But lawyers relying on the emotional tug of a case might try to screen out those same jurors, he said.

As far as prosecutors are concerned, the rational juror is probably the ideal one, said Mr. Reams. Besides, he added, “How do you define attractive?”

@|Tresa Baldas is a reporter for the National Law Journal, an ALM affiliate of the New York Law Journal. She can be contacted at tbaldas@alm.com.

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N.Y. man serving triple life sentence freed from downtown Baltimore facility

State prison officials said a 26-year-old New York man serving a triple life sentence for attempted murder was accidentally released from a downtown Baltimore prison Thursday.

Officials said Raymond Taylor, who was sentenced to life in prison on an attempted first-degree murder charge in 2005, was erroneously released at 2 p.m. from the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center. The Baltimore Sun reported at the time that Taylor tried to kill his ex-girlfriend and her two daughters at their Pentland Drive home in Northeast Baltimore.

Taylor pleaded guilty to shooting Tammie Johnson and her teenage daughters, Cierra Johnson and Shatera Brooks. Each was shot multiple times in the head and body with a .22-caliber handgun, prosecutors said.

Taylor was arrested in New York City days after the shooting, police said. The victims survived but have had multiple surgeries.

Anyone with information on Taylor’s whereabouts is asked to immediately call 911. The Internal Investigative Unit of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services is assisting law enforcement with the case and is conducting an investigation into the circumstances of Taylor’s release.

Correctional services spokesman Mark Vernarelli said it was unclear how Taylor was released.

“We’re working as hard as we can to find out,” he said.

Breaking news brought to you by Maryland’s Premier Law firm Shapiro & Mack. Focusing in all areas of Criminal Defense, Personal Injury, and Collections.  “Service, Service, Service”

those lying eyes!

By: Gene Weingarten – Washington Post

In my mind, it came down to a simple, unsettling question: Is it worse to let a drug dealer go free, or to reward the police for lying under oath?

As it turned out, my question became moot. At the end of criminal trials in D.C. Superior Court, but before deliberations, the judge discloses to the 14-person jury which two of them had been randomly selected to be alternates. I was one of the two, so I was dismissed. I never got to do what I had planned, which was to hold out for acquittal. I’d assumed my stubbornness would hang the jury, because I assumed the others would want to convict. Manifestly, the guy did it.

The case involved a routine “buy-bust” operation; according to the testimony, hundreds of these occur each month in Washington under almost identical circumstances. In this case, an undercover officer drove to a street corner in Northeast D.C. that is known for being an open-air narcotics market. He was approached on the street by a woman who was acting as an intermediary for the dealer. She took his order and his money, and then walked away from the car to meet the dealer out of sight of the buyer. It’s a system designed to stymie any police surveillance.

For that reason, in buy-bust operations, at least one other undercover officer is usually staked out elsewhere in the vicinity; in police jargon, he is the “eyes.” His job is to try to see what happens out of sight of the purchaser. Once the eyes has witnessed the transaction and can identify the seller, he radios his description of the suspect to the arrest team, which then moves in to do its job.

That’s how it worked in this case: The arrest team descended, located someone matching the radioed description and cuffed him. In the suspect’s pocket was a $10 bill with the same serial number as the bill the undercover buyer had given the intermediary. Open and shut.

At trial, the defense didn’t deny that the defendant had been caught with the incriminating money. The explanation they offered was feeble: Moments before the arrest, the defense contended, someone had asked the defendant to make change for a $10 bill. This mystery person was named but never produced or further identified. The defendant never testified, which was his right, but the only person who gave him an alibi — and his only real character witness — was his best friend, who arrived in court in police custody and testified, unconvincingly, in an orange prison jumpsuit and manacled in chains, hand to foot.

As I saw it, the defendant was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But there was a complication.

The “eyes” officer in this case — the only person who claimed to have seen the cash and drugs change hands — testified that he had radioed the following description of the suspect: black male, black jacket, royal blue baseball hat, v-necked white t-shirt, sneakers, key on a chain around his neck, carrying a bottle of ginger ale. He said his view had been unobstructed, on a clear day, from a distance of 50 to 60 feet.

Defense lawyer Jon W. Norris produced aerial photographs to prove that this was wrong. Between the place that the eyes said he was sitting and the place the police said the transaction occurred was a full-length basketball court — 80 feet — plus a lot more pavement. Norris sent an investigator to the scene to measure the total distance: It was, the investigator testified, 172 feet. The prosecutor never contested this. He couldn’t. The discrepancy was verified by satellite imagery.

So the eyes had seen a ginger ale bottle at 172 feet? Really? That’s some set of eyes the eyes had.

One morning, my wife and I went out into the street, measured off 172 feet and stood at either end. My eyesight is 20-20 with glasses. Her eyesight is 20-20 without glasses. From that distance, I could not see a trace of the key I had hung around her neck. She could not begin to distinguish the Sprite bottle I carried from any other greenish bottle-shaped thing. From that distance, you couldn’t tell a v-neck from a crew neck or, for that matter, a T-shirt from a polo shirt.

I concluded that the eyes had lied about the specificity of his radioed description — and that he wasn’t the only one. Two other police officers who had been at the scene testified that they’d heard exactly that description, word for word, detail for detail, down to the ginger ale bottle. They said they were certain.

How could this be? Defense lawyer Norris offered a theory: The officers had colluded in a fabrication. To better justify the arrest, he said, they had improved upon what had probably been a much sketchier original description. Once they had all seen the defendant up close, in handcuffs, and examined photos of him taken at the scene, all the little details became clear: the v-neck, the key, the ginger ale bottle. Retroactively, Norris suggested, they produced a perfect description.

Hadn’t the initial description been tape-recorded? No. The D.C. police testified that they do not do that. Sending a radio message out over a recorded channel, they said, would risk that the message could be intercepted by the bad guys on a police scanner and alert them to the sting. I found myself wondering: If the police wanted to, couldn’t they just put a cheap recording device in the eyes’ car? Just for the record?

But they don’t. Possibly they don’t want the record.

As a juror, I was skeptical. As a citizen, I was angry. For one thing, I was mad about the whole case — the bewildering amount of police time and taxpayer money spent on prosecuting one guy for selling $10 worth of narcotics. But as a juror, I felt it was not my business to object to that. I would have been willing to convict a defendant despite those misgivings.

The police testimony was another matter. As witnesses, the officers had been supremely self-assured, even cocky; clearly, they’d been through this hundreds of times. As they passed the jury before and after testimony, they greeted us winningly. One of them winked at us, almost imperceptibly. Their testimony was clear, concise, professional and, in my view, dishonest.

I believe they feel themselves to be warriors fighting the good fight against bad people who have the system stacked in their favor. I believe they knew they had the right guy and were willing to cheat a little to assure a conviction.

I believe they had the right guy, too. But the willingness to cheat, I think, is a poisonous corruption of a system designed to protect the innocent at the risk of occasionally letting the guilty walk free. It’s a good system, fundamental to freedom. I think a police officer willing to cheat is more dangerous than a two-bit drug peddler.

In his charge to the jury, the judge made it clear that if we found the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt — which I had — it was our duty to convict. I was prepared to defy these instructions and acquit, in the interest of a greater good. There is actually a term for this:  “jury nullification.” I was going to nullify. But I was pretty sure that in my absence, the remaining 12 would convict.

The first sign that I was wrong came just minutes after I was dismissed. The other alternate told me that she, too, felt that the defendant was guilty but that the police had lied; in her mind, the lying created reasonable doubt. She, too, would have acquitted.

Back home, I waited for word of a verdict. It didn’t come. At the end of the day, after four hours of deliberations over a $10 drug bust, the deadlocked jury was sent home for the night. They came back the next day and tried again. More hours passed. In the end, they pronounced themselves hopelessly hung. A mistrial was declared.

I later spoke with one of the jurors, who told me they had been split, 10 for acquittal and two for a guilty verdict. Many of them had simply mistrusted the eyes. They didn’t believe he could have possibly seen the ginger ale bottle or the v-neck or the key, and they felt his apparent willingness to lie had tainted the prosecution’s whole case.

The prosecution seemed to get the message. On Friday, they said they would not refile the charges. The defendant is now free.

I’m proud of our jury system. I can’t say the same about our police.

Gene Weingarten is a staff writer for The Washington Post.

WWW.FIGHTCOLLECTIONS.COM

Prestigious just to be nominated, and even a greater rarity to be so honored just one time, Jason has bestowed with this honor for the past three years in a row

For an unbelievable third year in a row, Jason A. Shapiro has been named one of the BEST LAWYERS IN AMERICA.  Prestigious just to be nominated, and even a greater rarity to be so honored just one time, Jason has bestowed with this honor for the past three years in a row.  Furthermore, Jason is the only lawyer from Howard County to be recognized in the area of Criminal/DUI Defense.

Best Lawyers is the oldest and most respected peer-review publication in the legal profession. Best Lawyers compiles lists of outstanding attorneys by conducting exhaustive peer-review surveys in which thousands of leading lawyers confidentially evaluate their professional peers. The current, 16th edition of The Best Lawyers in America (2010), is based on more than 2.8 million detailed evaluations of lawyers by other lawyers.

Because lawyers are not required or allowed to pay a fee to be included, a listing in Best Lawyers is widely regarded within the legal profession as a signal honor, conferred on a lawyer by his or her peers. For more than 25 years, Best Lawyers lists have earned the respect of the profession, the media, and the public, as the most reliable, unbiased source of legal referrals anywhere.

Big congratulations to Jason A. Shapiro for this great honor.

CLICK HERE TO REVIEW JASON’S COMPLETE BIO

where else can you make $100 in 10 seconds?

Shapiro & Mack will be offering a $100.00 American Express Gift Card to the creator of the best 10-30 second video commercial for the firm.

Please look at our website (http://www.shapiroandmack.com)and make a short video commercial using any means that you like.  The video can be all text, all audio, or have live actors – the creator has complete creative control.

The video must be sent to smvideocontest@gmail.com, and then video will be uploaded to youtube and posted on our facebook fan page. All video makers will remain anonymous unless and until we have permission to use your name. The only requirement is that the video must be about Howard County’s Premier Criminal Defense Firm, Shapiro & Mack.

David Zwanetz will pick the winner, using comments on the site and private polls, on January 20, 2010.

The $100.00 American Express Gift Card will be sent to the winner on January 20, 2010.

$100.00 IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE HOLIDAYS! WHERE ELSE CAN YOU MAKE $100.00 FOR 10 SECONDS OF WORK??