Parren v. State

I respectfully dissent from Parts III and IV of the Court’s opinion. The record is clear, in my view, that the petitioners knowingly and voluntarily chose to exercise their constitutional rights of self-representation and effectively waived, as a matter of constitutional law, their rights to counsel. Part III of the Court’s opinion should flatly state that conclusion. In Part IV the Court holds that reversal is required because of the violation of one aspect of the Rule 4-215 mandated procedure for taking a waiver of the right to counsel, namely, that the trial court should on the record…