McCorkle v. State of Maryland
Jan 29, 1993OUTCOME: All felony charges dismissed. No further prosecution.
Greg McCorkle was charged with staging a phony, after-hours robbery of the fast food Roy Rogers restaurant where he in fact had been the full time employee and manager for some months prior to the rob ... bery. Some weeks after the the restaurant robbery, charges were lodged against Mr. McCorkle leveling a number of felonies alleging that he himself had been the actual thief and that he had lied to the police at the scene of the crime, inventing a fictitious robbery and assault of himself by the unknown man McCorkle had unfailingly maintained was the guilty party who he had seen storm the restaurant just after closing locking away and injuring him in the process. On advice of counsel and never once wavering in his denial of the theft or of the charge that he himself had faked the robbery, Greg McCorkle plead not guilty to all charges and proceeded to trial. After several days of testimony by the State’s mostly irrelevant and unhelpful witnesses, the jury had heard very little if any actual evidence of McCorkle’s alleged guilt. After a week’s trial and much delay by the prosecution as it repeatedly sought to delay the trial while it tried in vain to locate and bring in as its only real witness, Greg McCorkle’s ex-room mate, a young man who had lived with McCorkle up until the date of the robbery. But as the the witness failed to ever appear at trial the prosecution could not continue. Instead it asked the judge to order a mistrial on grounds of Manifest Necessity thereby allowing for a subsequent and second prosecution and new trial. Over our strenuous objection, the trial judge adopted the prosecution's theory, ruling that because the missing ex-roommate and purported State’s witness had in fact been issued a subpoena to appear and testify for the State just minutes before the trial commenced, the mistrial was indeed one of Manifest Necessity. We immediately filed appeal of the judge’s ruling and argued before both courts within Maryland’s Appellate system that the trial judge had committed error by ordering the mistrial and more importantly, we argued that as such, the State was forever barred from retrying Mr. McCorkle under the Double Jeopardy Clause of the 5th Amendment to the US Constitution. The appel was a lengthy affair lasting almost two years. Finally, when the retrial once more failed to bring on the ex-room mate, the State’s case collapsed and all charges were dropped against Mr. McCorkle who escaped all further prosecution.
