Maryland's highest court has agreed to take up an appeal by the accused killer of Phylicia Barnes, whose charges were reinstated in June by the lower court.
Attorneys for Michael Maurice Johnson are asking the Court of Appeals to reinstate a judge's acquittal for the teen's 2010 death. In June, a three-judge panel of the Court of Special Appeals said the Baltimore trial judge made a procedural mistake, and reinstated second-degree murder charges against Johnson.
Arguments will be held in December.
Johnson has been free since January 2015, when Circuit Court Judge John Addison Howard granted a motion to acquit him of murder. Attorneys for the state argued that Howard lacked standing to make that decision.
The high court's decision to take up the case, through what is called a writ for certiorari, extends the legal drama in the high-profile case.
Barnes, a high school honors student from Monroe, N.C., disappeared from her sister's Baltimore apartment in December 2010, and a search attracted national attention. Her body was found four months later in the Susquehanna River.
Johnson, who had dated Phylicia's half-sister for 10 years, was charged a year later.
Prosecutors have said Johnson's involvement in the killing is the only "logical conclusion." He was the last known person to see her alive, and was seen struggling to move a plastic storage container out of the apartment where Phylicia was staying. Johnson's defense attorneys say prosecutors lack evidence to tie him to her death.
A jury convicted Johnson of second-degree murder in February 2013 and he faced up to 30 years in prison. But at his sentencing hearing Judge Alfred Nance ordered a mistrial after finding prosecutors had failed to turn over information.
At the second trial in late 2014, Howard ordered a mistrial after prosecutors played a recording jurors were not supposed to hear. As the case headed to a third trial, Howard reversed course at a motions hearing in January 2015, ruling that prosecutors had "insufficient evidence" to try Johnson again.
State's Attorney Marilyn J. Mosby vowed to keep pursuing the case and refiled charges against Johnson. Johnson's new case was again assigned to Howard, who dismissed the charges. Mosby's office then appealed.
Two Court of Special Appeals judges ruled in June that once Howard granted a mistrial, the case "became in the eyes of the law 'no trial at all,' and the trial court thereafter had no revisory power to revive the second prosecution and no fundamental jurisdiction to grant a judgment of acquittal."
A dissenting judge said Howard's moves were "procedurally defective" but that the acquittal was ultimately conclusive and precludes the state from retrying Johnson.