Wolfe, whose initial guilty verdict was reversed amid concerns about prosecutorial misconduct, contends that a second set of prosecutors coerced him into the guilty plea by filing more drug and murder charges against him. The Supreme Court in 2019 instructed Virginia’s appeals courts to examine the merits of Wolfe’s claim, but the state courts declined to do so, finding defense attorneys raised the argument too late in the case. Wolfe again turned to the Supreme Court, which turned the case away without comment.
Wolfe was a 19-year-old marijuana dealer in the Bristow area of Prince William County when his supplier, Daniel Petrole Jr., 21, was shot dead near his townhouse in March 2001. Soon, tales emerged of high-dollar travel, spending and millions of dollars in marijuana and ecstasy trafficking in Northern Virginia, by participants not old enough to legally drink. A high school friend of Wolfe’s, Owen M. Barber IV, pleaded guilty and testified that Wolfe had ordered him to kill Petrole. A jury convicted Wolfe of capital murder in 2002, and he was sentenced to death.
But Barber repeatedly changed his story, and Prince William prosecutors and police were found to have withheld evidence from Wolfe’s defense team and to have pressured Barber to testify. In 2011, a federal judge ordered a new trial for Wolfe. New prosecutors from Fairfax County were brought in, and then-Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh added new charges to the original indictment against Wolfe.
Though he had proclaimed his innocence for 15 years, in 2016 Wolfe pleaded guilty to first-degree felony murder, use of a firearm and a drug charge, with an agreement that he would be sentenced to a maximum of 41 years. Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Carroll A. Weimer Jr. imposed the maximum term in July 2016, with Wolfe receiving credit for the 15 years he had already served. Barber received a 38-year term.
“I understand all the pain and suffering I caused,” Wolfe said at his sentencing. “I know an apology is not enough. But I’m sorry.”
But then Wolfe hired new lawyers and claimed that his plea was coerced by the new charges added by Morrogh, which increased the possible mandatory minimum sentences Wolfe faced, in addition to the death penalty. Though Wolfe wrote a four-page confession with the words, “I am responsible for Danny’s death even though I didn’t pull the trigger,” he now claimed that a vindictive prosecution by Morrogh caused him to enter the plea. Virginia’s appeals courts rejected his claim.
While his case was winding through the courts, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 ruled that a defendant who pleaded guilty could appeal his plea and conviction. Typically, a defendant who admits guilt also gives up their right to appeal. But Justice Stephen G. Breyer cited a North Carolina case in which a man was convicted of a misdemeanor, appealed and won, then was charged by prosecutors with a felony. He pleaded guilty but appealed again, claiming vindictive prosecution, and the Supreme Court ruled he could do so.
So in January 2019, the Supreme Court ordered Virginia’s courts to consider the merits of Wolfe’s claim that he too had suffered from vindictive prosecution. But Virginia’s courts didn’t do that. Instead, in September 2019, the Virginia Court of Appeals zeroed in on a key point of criminal procedural law: to appeal an issue after a trial, the issue must first be raised at the trial itself.
The appeals court said that Wolfe originally raised the specter that Morrogh’s new charges increased the maximum sentence he could face. But in his later appeals, Wolfe “presents a claim that the trial court never addressed,” the state court said, “that the presumption of vindictiveness arose because the new charges the special prosecutor brought increased the minimum punishment to which he could have been subjected upon conviction.”
Because the issue of minimum punishment had not been properly raised, only the maximum, the Virginia appeals court dismissed the case without a hearing on Wolfe’s claim of vindictive prosecution. The Virginia Supreme Court followed suit last year. And on Monday, despite desperate appeals from Wolfe’s lawyers contending that the minimum punishment was raised initially, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case again.
“This case has been a travesty of justice for decades,” said Wolfe’s lawyer, Marvin D. Miller. “These are just different arguments on the same subject. The minimum was argued the first time in the trial court. The implementation of justice here is, ‘We said the right words, we don’t have to give them any meaning. We’re not obligated to enforce our decisions.’ This is an abomination.”
Morrogh on Monday reiterated his stance that he did not charge Wolfe vindictively, that he studied the case after being appointed to it and that he concluded that the additional charges were appropriate. He said he was focused on the victim in the case, the son of a decorated Secret Service agent. “I’m thinking about Danny and his family today,” Morrogh said. “Finally, justice.”
The Virginia Attorney General’s Office, which handled all of the appeals in the case, declined to comment. Wolfe is scheduled to be released from prison in September 2037, when he will be 56.
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Justin Wolfe, whose murder case exposed massive drug ring in Va. suburbs, loses bid to overturn guilty plea - The Washington Post
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