COPELAND AND COVINGTON v. State

The facts arising in the trial that led to this appeal are best characterized as bizarre. The record reveals that Willie D. Covington and Edward A. Copeland were called to trial on September 9,1974, in the Criminal Court of Baltimore, to answer to charges of robbery with a deadly weapon and related offenses. As a result of the trial the appellants each received sentences of forty years.

When the case was called an Assistant Public Defender advised the court, on behalf of himself and another Assistant Public Defender, that the appellants had

“... expressed extreme displeasure with [both…