Lawyer sues prosecutors over raid and seized files

St. Mary's state's attorney defends his assistant's work

Friday, Nov. 6, 2009

A lawyer running for St. Mary's state's attorney filed a lawsuit this week against the incumbent, an assistant and the county sheriff's office alleging that a recent police raid was an act of political retaliation.

The complaint on behalf of John A. Mattingly Jr. was filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court, the same day the assistant prosecutor attended a grand jury hearing with a sheriff's detective listed as an investigator in the search warrant application.

No charges were reported as of Thursday morning from an investigation that the search warrant application indicates concerns the handling of $20,000 provided by a defendant in an assault case and the lawyer's role in a series of real-estate matters. Mattingly and his real-estate partner have denied any criminal wrongdoing.

The application was included with the lawsuit that accuses its defendants of violating Mattingly's constitutional rights and seeks the return of the seized items. The complaint also requests a judgment barring the defendants from "using in any manner whatsoever any information derived" from Mattingly's client files seized through the search.

St. Mary's prosecutors sent a letter last month to a lawyer indicating that investigators had been attempting for "several weeks" to contact Mattingly and his real-estate partner to set a time for returning some of the materials. Clarke F. Ahlers, the lawyer contacting authorities about the seized items, wrote to a detective on Oct. 23 referencing the prosecutor's letter and requesting arrangements to pick up Mattingly's 12 boxes of files.

This week's lawsuit prepared by Rockville lawyer Kenneth Joel Haber states that Mattingly declared his candidacy for the state's attorney job last January, and entered the Democratic primary last September the day before the search warrant was obtained. Mattingly's mother owns the house in Leonardtown, the complaint states, where he stored client files in the basement and she rented another portion of the dwelling to her son's real-estate partner, Daniel Brown.

The search warrant did not authorize seizing the lawyer's files, the lawsuit states, accusing State's Attorney Richard Fritz and his assistant Daniel White of acting in an "arbitrary and capricious" manner in failing to return the seized files. The lawsuit notes Fritz's role in a mass purchase by sheriff's deputies of a tabloid newspaper on the eve of an election 11 years ago, which also led to a federal lawsuit.

The lawsuit filed this week alleges that the raid and seizure of the files "was undertaken in part due to defendants' retaliation against John Mattingly as a result of his seeking election as the state's attorney for St. Mary's County and preparing to run against defendant Fritz in his bid for re-election."

Fritz, a Republican elected to the prosecutor job in 1998, said this week that he did not seek a court-appointed prosecutor to handle the matter referenced in the search warrant application, in part because of the public expense.

"When I assign an attorney to a case, I usually don't interfere. I hire attorneys because they hopefully are experts in the criminal law," Fritz said this week outside the courthouse. "I have never farmed a case out to a special prosecutor that has resulted in anything other than a major bill to the people of St. Mary's County, and an outcome different than what I thought it should be."

jwharton@somdnews.com