Lynae Chapman

War­ren Brown is highly exer­cised on Dec. 9, as he returns to the defense table from Bal­ti­more City Cir­cuit Court Judge David Young’s bench. “I’ll say for the record, your honor,” the criminal-defense attor­ney declares, “that the state can for­get about any help from this young lady.”

Brown is refer­ring to his client, 21-year-old for­mer prison guard Lynae Chap­man, who’s in court for her arraign­ment on mis­de­meanor charges that she helped pro­cure a cell phone for an inmate—22-year-old mur­der sus­pect Ray Don­ald Lee, an alleged Black Guer­rilla Fam­ily gang­mem­ber who is Chapman’s boyfriend and the father of her unborn child—at the Bal­ti­more City Deten­tion Cen­ter, where she worked until her Oct. 23 indict­ment (“A Big No-No,” Nov. 4). Chap­man, as Brown makes clear, wants to plead guilty, but, due to what­ever just tran­spired at a 10-minute bench con­fer­ence, the judge won’t accept the plea, so Chapman’s case is going for­ward to a trial sched­uled for Feb. 12.

“We’re pre­pared to plead guilty today,” Brown con­tin­ues, “but she’s gonna be con­tin­u­ally held [in deten­tion] until the next trial date, and the state’ll come up with some rea­son to post­pone. They’re com­ing up with a rea­son to post­pone a guilty plea! Which, I mean, when have we not allowed indi­vid­u­als to plead guilty unless we have some issue with regard to their com­pe­tency? The state acts as if they have a right to pro­hibit a per­son from plead­ing guilty! They have a fac­tual basis for the court accept­ing the plea.

“Quite frankly, as the state knows,” Brown says, “it’s not a ques­tion of guilt or inno­cence. They’ve got a very, very, very, very good case against her. Absolutely. And so we don’t intend to go to trial. We want only to resolve this as soon as pos­si­ble and take our lumps.” He adds that his client is not inter­ested in pur­su­ing a deal in exchange for plead­ing guilty: “I mean, no deals, all bets are off.”

The ratio­nale behind the judge’s refusal to allow Chapman’s attempt to plead guilty pre­sum­ably was dis­cussed dur­ing the bench con­fer­ence that imme­di­ately pre­ceded Brown’s open-court dia­tribe. City Paper on Dec. 10 attempted to learn what was dis­cussed by view­ing the video­tape of the pro­ceed­ing at the court reporter’s office, as has often been done in the past. But under new rules insti­tuted two months ago, the staff there explained, bench con­fer­ences are deleted from record­ings of court pro­ceed­ings prior to pub­lic view­ing, so the dis­cus­sion about Chapman’s case remains a secret between the state, the defense, and the judge.

The unusual twist is not the first odd turn in Chapman’s case. A strong indi­ca­tion that there’s more going on than meets the eye came from the spokesman for Chapman’s for­mer employer, the Mary­land Depart­ment of Pub­lic Safety and Cor­rec­tional Ser­vices. Mark Vernarelli declined to com­ment on the case after her indict­ment, say­ing that to do so “would jeop­ar­dize other law-enforcement agen­cies’ inves­ti­ga­tions.” In addi­tion, the court file of Chapman’s case is not avail­able for pub­lic review at the clerk’s office—indeed, the case is not even listed on the on-line Mary­land Judi­ciary Case Search, the main source of infor­ma­tion about court cases. City Paper’s report­ing has been pos­si­ble only via open-court pro­ceed­ings for Chapman’s bail review and arraignment.

Also strange was the prosecutor’s behav­ior after Chapman’s arraign­ment hear­ing, dur­ing which Brown did vir­tu­ally all of the on-the-record speak­ing. City Paper had been unable to hear her name when she stood to call the case, and, after the hear­ing was over, asked her to pro­vide it. She repeat­edly refused, sug­gest­ing that City Paper go look it up in the court file. When City Paper explained that the file in Chapman’s case is not pub­licly avail­able, she again refused to iden­tify her­self. In a Dec. 10 e-mail, Bal­ti­more City State’s Attor­ney spokesman Joseph Svi­atko dis­closed the prosecutor’s name: Nancy Olin.

At the end of the arraign­ment hear­ing, Brown does the only thing he can do: He pleads not guilty on behalf of his client and requests a jury trial. Chap­man, with her hair pulled back tight in a bun, sits beside him and signs the nec­es­sary paper­work, strug­gling with her hand­cuffs to do so. She’s in full restraints—her ankles, wrists, and mid-section are chained—and her preg­nant belly shows promi­nently through her gray Depart­ment of Cor­rec­tions sweat­suit. “You gotta hold on, baby-doll,” Brown tells her, before she is escorted out of the courtroom.

Tags: BGF, cell phone, lynae chapman, warren brown