Maryland’s Republican governor and Democratically-controlled legislature heralded the passage of a swath of new laws in a celebration early last month. Many of these laws are designed to increase education funding in the state and provide new opportunities to students. However, one stands to significantly impact the ability of prosecutors to obtain guilty verdicts against sexual offenders.
The law, which was championed by retired Sen. Jim Brochin, has been an important cause of his for the last 14 years. However, the #MeToo movement that developed over the last year provided the sort of broad support needed to ensure the law’s passage.
“This bill provides prosecutors with the ability to introduce into evidence a defendant’s pattern of behavior as it relates to sexual assault,” said Kush Arora, a Maryland sexual assault attorney with the law firm Price Benowitz, LLP. The introduction of previous convictions for the same crime with which a person is charged has long been disallowed in criminal trials. The concern is that showing a jury that an individual has, in the past, been convicted of the same crime with which they are now charged, will greatly prejudice the jury and make it easy to convince oneself that if the individual had done it before, they would do it again.
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