Lawrence Greenberg

Lawrence Greenberg took over the defense in March 2022 and did what he has done for three decades — he rebuilt the record from the ground up, through interviews, witness accounts, disclosure logs, recordings, and the chronology behind the charging narrative. Then he found the hole in it. The prosecution possessed a recorded interview with Gregory Lamont Cottman, who said he did not think Ennals had been involved because Deaveon Johnson was bragging about the shooting. Johnson had already confessed to the killing. Cottman's interview sat undisclosed while Ennals sat in jail.

Greenberg pressed the failure under Brady v. Maryland, the rule that requires prosecutors to turn over evidence pointing toward innocence. He kept asking the questions the file could not answer: what had been recorded, who had been interviewed, and why evidence capable of changing the defense had not arrived with the rest of the discovery. The disclosure issue crystallized around a February 15, 2023 interview, whose full recording and notes the prosecution produced only after the defense followed up. On September 27, 2023, the circuit court disqualified the Dorchester County State's Attorney's Office from the case entirely, and Ennals walked out of jail that day — after 631 days inside.

The trial began on August 26, 2024, with a special prosecutor brought in from Prince George's County. It lasted four days. The jury deliberated for eighteen minutes and acquitted Ennals on every count. Twelve strangers needed less than the length of a lunch break to reach the conclusion Ennals had been stating for nearly three years.

"My body got loose," Ennals said afterward. "I barely could stand up."

The eighteen minutes were the visible end of more than two years of work separating the charging narrative from the state's own withheld evidence — a record finally made complete enough for jurors to judge.

Three Generations on Biddle Street

Greenberg Law Offices began in 1966, when Lawrence Greenberg's father, Henry I. Greenberg, opened a practice for Maryland residents confronting personal injury and medical malpractice. The firm has now served Marylanders for sixty years across three generations, from its office in Baltimore's Mid-Town Belvedere, a few blocks north of the city's circuit courthouse. Greenberg grew up inside the practice and decided at ten years old that he would be a lawyer.

He studied Sociology and Political Science at Boston University, earned his law degree from the University of Baltimore School of Law, and later served as a Captain and Legal Officer in the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the Maryland Defense Force, providing legal support to the Maryland Army and Air National Guard.

As managing partner, he handles criminal defense, civil-rights litigation, catastrophic injury, medical negligence, wrongful death, and insurance disputes. A single encounter can produce a criminal charge, a suppression issue, bodily injury, lost employment, and a constitutional claim, and Greenberg works the whole arc. Body-camera footage, dispatch traffic, warrants, laboratory reports, witness interviews, medical evidence, housing records, transfer paperwork, recorded communications: evidence developed defending a criminal case becomes the foundation for questions about official authority, civil liability, and what his client is owed.

The Transfer Form

Daquan Wallace was twenty years old, held before trial at the Baltimore City Detention Center — a century-old facility so decrepit the state would soon tear it down — when he refused to join the gang that effectively ran the jail. His mother, Nicole, called the jail repeatedly to warn that her son was being threatened and beaten. He was in that jail only because she could not afford his bail.

In December 2014, in violation of the detention center's own security and transfer policies, Wallace was moved to a less supervised area and left alone in a cell, where other detainees beat him into a coma. He spent two months unconscious. He emerged with a traumatic brain injury, unable to walk or speak.

Greenberg and Cary J. Hansel took the case to trial, and at trial one document did enormous work: the transfer form. It lacked the required shift-commander approval. It carried an illegible signature. And it stated, on its own face, that it was void without the missing authorization. The team then dismantled the asserted justification for the move — no disciplinary ticket, no identified victim, no recorded call, no officer claiming personal knowledge. The paperwork meant to protect a detainee instead revealed exactly how the protection was stripped away.

The jury awarded $10 million on the Maryland constitutional claim and $15 million on the negligence claim. The trial court applied Maryland's statutory cap and reduced the negligence award to $200,000 — a number the team refused to accept as the final word. With a constitutional challenge to the cap headed to the state's highest court, the parties resolved the state and federal claims for $7 million, which the Maryland Board of Public Works unanimously approved in March 2023. Greenberg was there that morning, pushing Wallace's wheelchair out of the meeting, Wallace's grandmother beside them. The funds — structured through a trust and annuity — secured Wallace's mobility equipment, medical treatment, rehabilitation, and care for the rest of his life.

The Trooper's Computer

Greenberg Law Offices represented Thomas Lawlor's wife and sons in litigation over a 2017 collision involving an unmarked Maryland State Police cruiser. The family's case came down to data: the cruiser's speed, and the use of its in-car computer, in the seconds immediately before impact. The machine had recorded what no witness could. The firm secured a settlement for Lawlor's wife and sons from the trooper, the state, and the Town of Ocean City.

Trained on the Officer's Own Curriculum

Greenberg completed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and International Association of Chiefs of Police training in DWI Detection and Standardized Field Sobriety Testing — the same curriculum used to train the officers who administer the tests. When he cross-examines an officer about a roadside stop, he knows the manual as well as the witness does: the instructions, the demonstrations, the timing, the surfaces, the stimulus positioning, the observations, the contemporaneous notes.

The same evidence-first approach governs his work on K-9 deployments, vehicle searches, and traffic stops extended beyond the time needed to address the reason for the stop. Consent, timing, reasonable suspicion, dispatch records, and camera footage determine whether the government can use what it found. Greenberg treats procedure as evidence, because an officer's authority depends on the steps the officer actually took.

Teaching, Leadership, and Public Service

Greenberg teaches Trial Advocacy as an adjunct professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, where his students face the same problem he faces in every case: turning a large file into an opening statement, a witness sequence, direct and cross-examinations, evidentiary decisions, and a closing argument — deciding which facts a jury must hear, and when.

He has taught practicing lawyers across Maryland on police-liability claims, personal-injury litigation, liens, damages, DUI law, parole hearings, administrative license suspensions, criminal defense, and law-office technology. He has testified before the Maryland House and Senate and served on state bodies addressing drunk and drugged driving, highway safety, and alcohol-safety policy. He served on the Maryland Association for Justice Board of Governors and became the association's president in 2013, helping create its first law-student chapter at the University of Baltimore and supporting outreach programs that distributed bicycle helmets and smoke detectors and connected hospitalized families with social-work assistance. His work has been recognized with Leadership in Law and Influential Marylander honors, among others.

Across Greenberg's criminal and civil docket, procedure becomes evidence. A withheld interview changes what a jury may hear. A transfer form reveals whether the people controlling a jail followed the rule meant to protect a detainee. A trooper's computer records the seconds before impact. Field-sobriety training supplies the standard against which an officer's roadside account can be tested. His practice follows those records until public authority must answer what they show.