Capital Gazette case judge rules on McCarthy records

Court also considering defense’s allegations against state’s attorney

Circuit Judge Laura Ripken ordered Annapolis attorney Brennan McCarthy to give her any non-privileged records he has related to the man charged with murdering five Capital Gazette employees after a Thursday hearing.

McCarthy’s records became an issue in the case against the man accused of fatally shooting Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters when the team of public defenders representing the man asked Ripken to issue a court order requiring the attorney to turn over records they believed to be in his possession that they argued would support the accused’s insanity plea.

Addressing Ripken, McCarthy described himself as both the attorney who for years fought Jarrod Ramos — who faces five counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted murder, six counts of first-degree assault, among a host of other charges — and as another victim of Ramos’ harassing behavior.

McCarthy represented a woman Ramos was found guilty of harassing in Anne Arundel County years ago. Ramos then sued the woman and McCarthy in Prince George’s County Circuit Court. As McCarthy detailed some of the comments Ramos hurled at him online during the course of the civil case, Ramos, 39, smirked from the chair where he sat shackled next to his attorneys.

“In order to get my client out of here alive, I had to put myself in his firing line,” McCarthy said.

The court proceedings that both McCarthy and Ramos were involved in spanned from 2012 to November 2015, said McCarthy, years before police say Ramos blasted his way through the front doors of the Capital Gazette newsroom and turned the pumpaction shotgun on employees trapped because he barricaded the back door, killing five.

Assistant State’s Attorney James Tuomey urged Ripken to nullify the subpoena, saying Ramos’ attorneys hadn’t shown how a years-old case was relevant to whether Ramos was insane on June 28, 2018. He recited the Maryland law, which says that to be found not criminally responsible it must be proven that the defendant could not understand what they did was wrong or couldn’t stop themselves because of a mental disease or disorder.

“Why do you need these records?” Ripken asked Ramos’ attorneys.

District Public Defender William Davis cited comments McCarthy made during the Prince George’s County proceedings, when he urged the presiding judge to mandate Ramos undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Why he asked the judge to do that, Davis explained, could be telling to the mental health expert evaluating Ramos.

Davis said McCarthy told police immediately following the shooting that Ramos was “crazy” and that he “kept tabs” on Ramos following the court proceedings. McCarthy’s statements, Davis said, paired with Ramos’ rhetoric on Twitter and his pleadings in court are “indicative of a person with mental illness.”

McCarthy said any statements he made about Ramos’ sanity are irrelevant because he’s not a mental health expert, that he used the word “crazy” in the colloquial sense and that by “kept tabs” he meant he occasionally checked Ramos’ Twitter feed.

“You don’t follow the devil,” McCarthy said, “you hide from him.”

McCarthy said he’d purged most of the file he once kept on the case involving Ramos. The only things McCarthy still has, he told Ripken, are documents covered by attorney-client privilege and excerpts of Ramos’ Twitter feed.

Ripken ordered that McCarthy review his records for any non-privileged records and to send those and the Twitter archive he’s created to her chambers under seal, where she’ll review them. She voided a subpoena filed against McCarthy’s sister, attorney Kathleen Kirchner, who aided McCarthy in the Prince George’s County lawsuit, after Davis explained Kirchner was forthcoming with what documents and information she had.

When the siblings vacated their post at the prosecutors’ table — where Ripken had asked them to sit — Ramos turned his chair and stared at them. McCarthy called it unsettling.

“What really went through my mind is what a malevolent person he is,” he said after court. “He just enjoys making people uncomfortable and scaring people and hurting people.”

The judge then turned her attention to a motion filed by Ramos’ attorneys asking her to penalize prosecutors for allegedly withholding evidence. State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess vehemently opposed the public defender’s claim as a “bald faced allegation without merit.”

The public defenders’ complaint about Leitess’ office involves a 2014 email exchange between Kirchner and Leitess — who was the top prosecutor then before losing her post to Republican Wes Adams at the ballot box the following year, only to oust him in 2018. In the email exchange, Kirchner raised concerns about Ramos’ behavior during the course of the lawsuit in Prince George’s County. Leitess said she responded by alerting courthouse security.

Public Defender Katy O’Donnell said Ripken should consider removing Leitess from the case, or making her testify as a witness about the email exchange, which she claimed showed Ramos was a danger and was relevant to his insanity defense.

Leitess told Ripken she’d turned over months ago all the information the defense was accusing her of withholding. She also rebutted its relevance, saying it had nothing to do with the slaying of five newspaper employees. The state’s attorney described it as a stunt.

“They want to recuse me from this case,” she said.

Ripken announced she would rule on the motion for sanctions in October, saying she was erring on the side of caution even though she’d heard enough to make a determination.