Watkins v. State

MOYLAN, Judge.

The appellant, Bruce Dwight Watkins, was convicted by a Montgomery County jury of second-degree murder. He raises the single contention that the trial judge erroneously failed to instruct the jury that even an initial aggressor at the nondeadly level may yet claim self-defense if the other party escalated the fight to the deadly level.

Without rehearsing the at-times confused and sometimes inconsistent testimony of numerous witnesses, it is enough to point out that on September 16, 1987, the appellant and the homicide victim, Kenneth Gardner, engaged in a fight at the home of a…