B. Sifrit faces hurdles with post-conviction process in MD court

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), May 22, 2006 by Ben Mook

Four years after two Virginia tourists were gruesomely killed and dismembered in a luxury Ocean City condominium, the ex-Navy SEAL convicted in one of the murders is using the post-conviction process to seek a new trial.

And, while Benjamin B.J. Sifrit will get a hearing next month on his petition in Montgomery County Circuit Court in Rockville, sources familiar with the case say his ultimate goal lies about 25 miles south, at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Their chances are slim to none - and slim just left town, said one attorney familiar with the petition, on condition of anonymity.

Sifrit, 28, was sentenced in July 2003 to 35 years in jail for the second-degree murder of Martha Geney Crutchley over the Memorial Day weekend in 2002. Crutchley and her boyfriend, Joshua Ford, were shot and killed, and their bodies dismembered in the penthouse condo Sifrit and his wife, Erika, were vacationing in.

Sifrit's direct appeal was denied by the Court of Appeals, and he is challenging his conviction on grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel.

A source familiar with the ongoing appeal, though, said Sifrit hopes to convince the Supreme Court on a point the Court of Appeals rejected: that prosecutors unfairly presented conflicting theories of the murders at Benjamin and Erika Sifrit's separate trials.

The argument derives from a dissent to a 1995 Supreme Court case, Jacobs v. Scott, in which Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that it is fundamentally unfair for a sovereign state represented by the same lawyer to take flatly inconsistent positions in two different cases.

To get to Washington, though, Sifrit needs to exhaust all state remedies - starting with the petition filed by Michael Lawlor, an attorney with Greenbelt-based Lawlor & Englert LLC. (Lawlor did not return calls for comment last week.)

'Masterful' defense

At the hearing, scheduled for June 29, Lawlor is asking that Benjamin Sifrit's convictions be set aside and that he be granted a new trial, as well as the chance to file a motion for modification or reconsideration of sentence and a review of the sentence.

The petition centers on three allegations of counsel ineffectiveness: His attorneys failed to file an application for review of sentence by a three judge panel; they failed to file a motion for modification or reconsideration of sentence; and the attorneys did not put into evidence the statement Sifrit gave police - I do not know what happened, ask my wife.

The ineffective counsel argument will face a number of hurdles, including the fact that during sentencing, the trial judge praised Sifrit's lead attorney William Brennan Jr.'s defense as masterful. The jury found Sifrit guilty of Crutchley's death and not guilty of Ford's death, despite the fact the victims were murdered in the same small bathroom, at the same time.

It may also be hard to prove that Brennan and his co-counsel, Worcester County Public Defender W. Burton Anderson, should have filed for a review of the sentence - which could have resulted in a stiffer jail term.

At sentencing, Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Paul Weinstein, now retired, decried the verdict as one of the few times he disagreed with a jury's decision. Weinstein characterized Sifrit as a butcher, and went so far as to vow that if he were still alive at the time he would personally appear at Sifrit's parole hearing to testify against his release.

Complicating the task further is the sentence Erika Sifrit received on the same charges. Convicted in Frederick County Circuit Court of first-degree murder in Ford's death and second-degree murder for Crutchley's, Erika Sifrit was sentenced to life in prison on the first count and an additional 20 years for the second.

Conflicting theories

Attorneys contacted for this article agreed the ineffective counsel claim would be tough to prove. But, it does set the stage for a second trip through the state appellate courts, and from there to the federal system - and ultimately, to put the question of conflicting prosecutorial theories back before the Supreme Court.

At the Sifrits' separate trials, which were moved from Worcester County due to pretrial publicity, prosecutors presented identical lead-ups to the murders. Worcester County State's Attorney Joel Todd and Assistant State's Attorney E. Scott Collins told the respective juries that Crutchley and Ford were lured back to the condo after spending several hours at an Ocean City bar.

Piecing together recovered DNA, ammunition and physical evidence, prosecutors believe Crutchley and Ford wound up in the penthouse master bathroom, stripped to their underwear. Based on spent bullets recovered from the Sifrits and evidence the bathroom door was replaced, investigators theorized Ford was shot first as he braced the door closed with his arm raised.

With Ford - a martial arts expert - disabled, investigators believe Crutchley was then murdered on the bathroom floor. The Sifrits dismembered their victims and disposed of the body parts in dumpsters north of Ocean City, in coastal Delaware. Detectives and workers with the Delaware Solid Waste Authority recovered Ford's arm and bullet-damaged torso. Only Crutchley's leg was uncovered in the search.