Maryland Appellate Court: Charging document amendment

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Criminal; charging document amendment

BOTTOM LINE: Where the state amended the charging document to add a crime for which the defendant was not originally charged, at the request of or with the defendant’s approval as part of a plea agreement, the resulting sentence was not illegal.

CASE: Davis Jr. v. State, No. 2162, Sept. Term, 2023 (filed Sept. 3, 2025) (Judges LEAHY, Reed, Eyler, James).

FACTS: A grand jury indicted Vincent Davis Jr. on multiple charges. Pursuant to a plea agreement, Davis entered an Alford plea to first-degree assault—which was not originally charged in the grand jury indictment. Under the terms of this plea agreement, the state agreed to amend the first-degree sexual offense charge in the indictment to a first-degree assault charge and nolle pros the remaining charges.

A few years later, Davis filed a motion to correct illegal sentence under Maryland Rule 4-345(a). He argued that his sentence for first-degree assault was illegal because that crime was not included on the arrest warrant or in the grand jury’s indictment, and the state never obtained a charging document that charged him with first-degree assault. The circuit court denied Davis’s motion.

LAW: In Johnson v. State, 427 Md. 356 (2012), the Supreme Court of Maryland held that Maryland Rule 4-204 does not permit a new criminal charge to be added to an existing charging document by amendment. The purported “amendment” in Johnson was made in the middle of trial, when a verdict sheet presented to the jury included assault with intent to murder – a crime never before included in the indictment.  The issue on which this appeal turns, however, is whether a sentence imposed for a crime that is added to a charging document as a condition of a plea agreement with the state, at the request of or with the defendant’s approval, is likewise illegal under Rule 4-345(a).

According to the state, “the claim that Davis now raises is the same one” that Davis raised in his application to appeal the denial of his petition for post-conviction relief. In the state’s view, this argument was already rejected by this court when it denied that application.

Yet the order denying Davis’s application states only that this court “read[,]” “considered” and “denied” it. Because Davis’s application could have been denied on various grounds, this summary denial “tells no one what we thought of any particular allegation in the application.” In essence, the court expressly declined to “resolve” any of the contentions raised in the application. It further notes that other jurisdictions have held that summary denials of applications for leave to appeal do not implicate the law of the case doctrine.

The court thus holds that an argument raised in a Rule 4-345(a) motion to correct an illegal sentence is not precluded by the law of the case doctrine unless an appellate court, in a previous appeal within the same case, rejected or otherwise “resolved” that argument. Here, the argument raised in Davis’s Rule 4-345(a) motion to correct an illegal sentence is not barred by the law of the case doctrine.

Turning to the merits, a critical distinction between this case and Johnson is that, whereas Johnson’s conviction resulted from a trial, Davis’s resulted from a plea agreement. Maryland Rule 4-243, which governs plea agreements, provides that a “defendant may enter into an agreement with the State’s Attorney . . . on any proper condition, including . . . [t]hat the State’s attorney will amend the charging document to charge a specified offense or add a specified offense, or will file a new charging document[.]”

In the state’s view, Rule 4-243 permits the sort of amendment made here – charging Davis with first-degree assault, which was not charged in the original grand jury indictment – as a condition of the parties’ plea agreement, without obtaining a new charging document. Davis, on the other hand, essentially argues that Rule 4-243 only allows amendments of the kind already permitted by Rule 4-204 – amendments that add a lesser included offense of an existing offense in the charging document or make adjustments to existing charges.

Rules 4-243 and 4-242 ensure that critical due process protections are provided to defendants when they enter plea agreements. Those due process protections are central in this court’s conclusion that Rule 4-243 permits the state to add new charges to an existing charging document as a condition of a plea agreement with a defendant. Other jurisdictions have reached similar conclusions. And to the extent that Davis suggests that charges may only be added to an indictment by a grand jury, even in the context of a plea agreement, the court disagrees.

Judgment of the Circuit Court for Baltimore County affirmed.