An inmate accused of killing a corrections officer should not face the death penalty, because the police mishandled key evidence and the risk of executing an innocent person is too great, defense attorneys argued Tuesday.
“Well over 100 innocent people have been convicted and sentenced to death in this country,” defense attorney Michael Lawlor told Anne Arundel Circuit Judge Paul Hackner.
“It’s a human system, it’s fallible … the death penalty inherently carries the risk of executing an innocent person, and in this case, it’s exacerbated because the crime scene is so contaminated.”
Lawlor’s client, Lee Stephens, 29, is charged in the July 25, 2006, fatal stabbing of corrections officer David W. McGuinn, 42, at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup.
But Lawlor said execution should be off the table, because a homemade knife police found the day of the killing mysteriously disappeared within the prison, only to reappear on another inmate, Bradford Matthews, two days later.
Lawlor had planned Tuesday to call state police homicide Sgt. Michael Grant to testify about a report he wrote following his investigation of the killing.
Grant wrote in his 75-page report that he accidentally kicked a homemade knife off a catwalk at the crime scene, sending the shank falling down four floors into a utility closet, Lawlor said.
Grant found the knife below, photographed it and then left it to be retrieved by crime scene investigators several hours later.
The knife, however, disappeared.
Hackner said it was an “imaginative argument” but prohibited Grant from testifying prior to trial.
Hackner has not yet ruled on the defense’s second argument that insufficient funding by the Public Defender’s Office prevents it from adequately defending Stephens.
Prosecutor Eileen Reilly said the missing knife was never considered the murder weapon and had been picked up by a maintenance worker and turned over to a captain.
That captain admittedly put the shank in his pocket and mixed it up with the knife that was recovered from Matthews, she said.
Stephens sat stone-faced with his head down Tuesday. He and his co-defendant, Lamarr C. Harris, 37, were serving life sentences for murder at the time of the killing.
Lawlor and defense attorney Gary Proctor are expected to argue against the death penalty for Stephens through Thursday.
