Prosecutors said yesterday they do not believe that a homemade knife found a few hours after the 2006 fatal stabbing of a corrections officer in a Jessup prison - and which disappeared and later resurfaced as a weapon confiscated from an inmate - was the weapon used in the murder.
The disclosure came at the start of the trial of five corrections officers accused of beating an inmate and planting the knife on him to justify the beating - a rare criminal prosecution of guards accused of assaulting an inmate.
The beating of Maryland House of Correction inmate Bradford Matthews occurred the day after Officer David W. McGuinn was killed, and it wound up drawing the attention of state police homicide investigators because the shank, or homemade knife, believed to have been planted on Matthews had disappeared after being accidentally kicked from a catwalk during a search near where McGuinn was killed July 25, 2006.
Prosecutors said yesterday that they later conducted extensive tests and found nothing to connect the shank to the killing of McGuinn. The knife and its circuitous route through the prison system had been the subject of a detailed, 75-page report in the spring of 2007 by homicide investigators, who suspected it could have been the one used to kill McGuinn.
"The knife that was in question ... was investigated as a possible weapon because it was found out in a corridor, in between the cells," prosecutor Anne Colt Leitess told Circuit Judge Pamela North. "When it turned up later ... they did DNA on it, they did testing, they did all these things, because they were concerned - because its proximity was so close to where it happened - that it was a suspect knife. Well, it turns out, none of that panned out."
Asked to elaborate after the hearing, Leitess declined to comment, saying only that there was "nothing to link it."
The officers, who continue to work for the Division of Correction, are facing charges of second-degree assault stemming from the beating, which defense attorneys plan to argue was justified. Prosecutors intend to show that the officers used excessive force, with the issue of the shank and McGuinn's killing a tangential footnote.
But the mishandling of the knife has also become an issue in the prosecution of two inmates accused of bypassing their cell-door locks, getting out of their cells and trapping and killing McGuinn in a narrow corridor. Lamarr Harris and Lee Edward Stephens could face the death penalty if convicted.
The shank drew the interest of investigators because it was first found a few hours after the attack near the site where McGuinn was killed. It disappeared within the prison after a state police investigator accidentally kicked it off a fourth-floor catwalk, and he and other searchers were unable to find it when they went to retrieve it hours later.
Matthews' beating occurred at 1 p.m. the next day during a strip search in the prison chapel. The officers said Matthews was not cooperative, took a swing at one of them and was injured when he landed face-down during the struggle to get him under control. Prosecutors said yesterday that Matthews now suffers from 80 percent hearing loss in one ear as a result of the incident.
The knife later turned up in an evidence locker in an envelope that identified it as a weapon taken from Matthews. One officer, Antoine Fordham, signed papers saying he recovered from Matthews a shank sheathed in a black-and-white cloth with the word DEADMAN, the name of a prison gang, written on it.
Matthews denied having a knife and passed a lie detector test. Fordham insisted the inmate had a weapon but refused to take a polygraph exam, records show. North ruled that his refusal to take the polygraph could not be mentioned during the trial.
Investigators would later conclude that officers making the claim about the inmate having a knife were not being truthful, according to hundreds of pages of investigative records obtained by The Sun.
Lawrence B. Rosenberg, an attorney for Fordham, said yesterday that homicide detectives at one point were sufficiently convinced that the shank was the murder weapon that they threatened to charge Fordham as an accessory to murder after the fact.
At issue in this week's trial is whether Fordham, 22, and the other officers - Naron Dyer, 28, Manuel Williams, 26, Berkeley Ghee, 32, and Keith Randolph, 35 - were justified in the amount of force they used to restrain Matthews.
"Some of the force was probably justified, but there comes a time when the justification ceases and excessive force takes over," Leitess told North.
The death of McGuinn, a by-the-book officer who had been the subject of death threats, came during a tumultuous time at the antiquated and now-closed prison that was known among corrections insiders as the "House of Corruption." Authorities were clamping down on prohibited items such as drugs and cell phones, and two officers were attacked by knife-wielding inmates that spring.
Opening statements in the assault case - in which all five corrections officers are being tried together - could begin today. At yesterday's hearing, each of the officers sat against a wall behind his respective private defense attorney.
The attorneys said that they intend to prove that Matthews did in fact possess a knife that was confiscated and possibly mixed up in the aftermath of McGuinn's death.
Prosecutors, however, successfully sought to limit testimony concerning Matthews' role as a "knife-maker" who had been caught several times with weapons and had been placed in segregation just 11 days before the beating, as well as evidence that he was using drugs.
justin.fenton@baltsun.com
Sun reporter Greg Garland contributed to this article.