The state’s attorney for Montgomery County said Monday he is seeking an appeal of a judge’s decision to dismiss a case against a 23-year-old who faced nine criminal charges of sexual abuse of a minor.
The case against Mahamu Kanneh was dismissed last week when Judge Katherine Savage ruled that the Liberian immigrant’s right to a speedy trial had been violated because of difficulty locating an interpreter. Kanneh, who according to court records lives in Rockville, speaks Vai, a rare West African language.
John McCarthy, state’s attorney for Montgomery County, said in a written statement that “the decision to dismiss these charges was legally improper.” McCarthy spokesman Seth Zucker said McCarthy had consulted with the Maryland Attorney General’s Office to request an appeal in the case.
“The Attorney General’s Office will appeal this to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals,” Zucker said.
Representatives from the office of Kanneh’s attorney, assistant public defender Theresa Chernosky, said in a written statement, “The Court determined that Mr. Kanneh could not understand these legal proceedings without an interpreter and one could not be provided.”
McCarthy said in a written statement that the obligation to find an interpreter rests with the court.
The clerk’s office had located three Vai speakers during the three years since Kanneh’s arrest, but one withdrew after becoming too emotional upon hearing the facts of the case, a second was ill and had to be replaced, and a third interpreter was available for trial, according to McCarthy’s office.
“We were reaching out nationally to find a speaker of the Vai dialect,” Darrell Pressley, spokesman for the Maryland Judiciary said. “We used a listserv that 40 states participate in to try to fill this interpreter spot.”
Pressley said there are roughly 400 interpreters in the Maryland court system’s database, but about 60 percent of them speak Spanish.
