Background
On March 12, 2023, brothers Terance Johnson, Jr. and Teriquo Lamont Johnson were at Frank’s Den, a bar and liquor store in Glen Burnie, Maryland. Bar surveillance cameras captured what followed: Terance struck victim Jamie Marshall-Bates with a spray paint can outside the bar; Bates responded by knocking Terance to the ground and striking him for several seconds before being pulled away. Teriquo then grabbed Bates from behind, dragged him to the corner of the building out of camera view, and later returned to make kicking and stomping motions toward Bates. Terance, still unsteady, also made a stomping motion toward Bates. After both brothers drove away, witnesses found Bates unresponsive. Paramedics later confirmed Bates had sustained a traumatic brain injury, including a subdural hematoma requiring treatment at a shock trauma unit.
The State charged both brothers with attempted first- and second-degree murder, conspiracy, first- and second-degree assault, and reckless endangerment; Teriquo was additionally charged with rogue and vagabond for rummaging through what appeared to be Bates’s vehicle during the altercation. The trial court dismissed the attempted murder and conspiracy-to-murder charges at the close of the State’s case. After a joint jury trial in the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County, Terance was convicted of first- and second-degree assault and reckless endangerment, sentenced to 25 years with all but 10 suspended; Teriquo was convicted of second-degree assault, reckless endangerment, and rogue and vagabond, sentenced to 10 years. Both appealed.
On appeal, the brothers raised four issues: whether the trial court abused its discretion by refusing to instruct the jury on hot-blooded response to adequate provocation (as to Terance) and mutual combat (as to both); whether the flight instruction was improper; and whether the evidence was legally sufficient to support Terance’s first-degree assault conviction and Teriquo’s rogue-and-vagabond conviction.
The Court’s Holding
The Appellate Court of Maryland, in an opinion by Judge Berger, affirmed on all counts. On the central question of jury instructions, the court held that the defense of hot-blooded response to adequate provocation—and mutual combat as a species of that defense—is no longer available to defendants charged with first- or second-degree assault. The court traced the legal evolution: hot-blooded response is a mitigation defense that operates by negating malice, a concept uniquely tied to homicide. The defense had been extended to first-degree assault under Christian v. State, 405 Md. 306 (2008), because Roary v. State, 385 Md. 217 (2005), had held that first-degree assault could supply the malice element needed to establish felony murder. Once the Supreme Court of Maryland overruled Roary in State v. Jones, 451 Md. 680 (2017), that link was severed: first-degree assault no longer aligns with the “essence of murder,” and therefore no mitigation defense grounded in negating malice is available for assault charges. The trial court’s refusal to instruct on hot-blooded response and its withdrawal of the mutual combat instruction were not abuses of discretion—they were legally required.
The court also upheld the flight instruction, applying the established four-inference test and finding sufficient evidence that both defendants’ conduct—including driving back around the building toward Bates after initially leaving—could permit the jury to infer consciousness of guilt. On sufficiency, the court held that the surveillance video and reasonable inferences drawn from it provided legally adequate evidence to sustain both Terance’s first-degree assault conviction (assault on an incapacitated person creating risk of serious physical injury) and Teriquo’s rogue-and-vagabond conviction (circumstantial evidence connecting him to unauthorized entry into Bates’s vehicle).
Key Takeaways
- After State v. Jones (2017) overruled Roary, the defense of hot-blooded response to adequate provocation is categorically unavailable in Maryland for first- or second-degree assault charges—trial courts must not give this instruction in assault cases.
- Mutual combat, as a subset of adequate provocation, likewise cannot serve as a mitigation defense to assault for the same reason: neither defense can negate malice in a crime that no longer connects to the murder framework.
- A flight instruction is permissible whenever there is “some evidence” supporting all four required inferences—flight, consciousness of guilt, relation to the charged crime, and actual guilt—and the ultimate question of whether conduct constitutes flight is for the jury.
- Circumstantial evidence alone, including surveillance video and reasonable inferences drawn therefrom, can sustain a criminal conviction when it supports guilt beyond a reasonable doubt without resort to speculation.
Why It Matters
This reported decision definitively closes a question Maryland courts had left unsettled since State v. Jones: Christian v. State‘s extension of hot-blooded response to first-degree assault no longer survives as good law. Defense counsel who have historically raised heat-of-passion arguments in assault cases—particularly in bar-fight and street-altercation scenarios—must now understand that the theory is legally unavailable regardless of how compelling the provocation evidence may be. Trial courts, for their part, commit reversible error if they give such an instruction.
The decision also reinforces that Maryland’s flight-instruction jurisprudence is permissive: even conduct that a defendant characterizes as an ordinary departure from a scene can go to the jury as potential evidence of consciousness of guilt, provided the four required inferences are minimally supported. For practitioners on both sides, the lesson is that any post-incident movement by a defendant merits careful attention to whether a flight instruction is generated or contested.