Ex-Officer Appeals 1 Trial, Seeks Another

New Information Available, Lawyer Says

Former Prince George's County police officer Keith A. Washington, who is in prison for killing a furniture deliveryman and wounding the delivery helper, is fighting his convictions in not one but two courts.

A year after Washington was sentenced to 45 years in prison, a three-judge panel of the Maryland Court of Special Appeals in Annapolis heard arguments yesterday over whether Washington got a fair trial last year in Prince George's Circuit Court.

The arguments, already laid out in lengthy briefs, were expected. But Washington also took a less expected step by recently filing a motion back in Prince George's Circuit Court seeking a new trial.

After a lawyer for the state alerted the appeals court judges to the motion, Washington's attorney, Michael P. Lytle, said the civil suit filed against Washington by the wounded man, Robert White, and the estate of the dead man, Brandon Clark, had brought to light new questions about the credibility of White, who testified against Washington in the criminal case.

Clark and White, working for the furniture store Marlo, were delivering a replacement piece to Washington's Accokeek home when the fatal confrontation unfolded. Washington argued that he was being beaten by Clark and White and fired his gun in self-defense. He was acquitted of murder but convicted of involuntary manslaughter, first-degree assault and use of a handgun in commission of a felony.

In the motion for a new trial, Lytle said that after a mistrial was declared in the civil case in March, Washington's wife, Stacey, met in April with Prince George's State's Attorney Glenn F. Ivey, whose office prosecuted Washington.

Ivey said yesterday that he had agreed to have a retired judge review whatever information Washington's attorneys gather. "You always have to be open to make sure that you're doing justice in a case," he said. "If they feel like there's information that popped up in the civil case that might lead an objective party to conclude that a new trial should at least be considered, I wanted to make sure I got that information and to do that in a way that's as unbiased as possible."

No timetable is set for deciding the motion for a new trial. Yesterday in Annapolis, the appellate judges were focused on hearing about what happened in the original trial and what the defense argued were critical errors by the trial judge, Michael P. Whalen, including two key rulings on evidence.

Lytle said the judge should have allowed Washington's lawyers to introduce evidence of the dead man's prior violent conduct to bolster their claim that Clark was the initial aggressor and that Washington was acting in self-defense. Lytle also said the judge should not have barred the defense from cross-examining White about his failure to register as a sex offender.

Any of the rulings challenged on appeal, Lytle said, could have made the difference between conviction and acquittal. "This case was extraordinarily close," he told Judges Deborah S. Eyler, Christopher B. Kehoe and Lawrence Rodowsky.