Lawrence Greenberg

The Withheld Interview

Maryland charged Key’marion Ennals as an adult in January 2022, when he was sixteen, in the fatal shooting of sixteen-year-old Ja’Len Woolford in Cambridge. Daeveon Johnson, also sixteen, was charged in the same case. Johnson’s statements and later plea agreement became central to the prosecution. When Larry Greenberg took over Ennals’s defense in March 2022, he began with the record behind the charging narrative: interviews, witness accounts, disclosure logs, and the chronology connecting them.

On February 15, 2023, a state trooper and a Dorchester County prosecutor interviewed Gregory Cottman. Cottman said he did not believe Ennals was involved because Johnson had bragged about the shooting. The prosecution did not disclose that interview until eleven days before an August 2023 trial date, then produced the full recording and interview notes only after the defense followed up.

Greenberg pressed the disclosure failure under Brady v. Maryland. On September 27, 2023, the circuit court disqualified the Dorchester County State’s Attorney’s Office from the case. Ennals was released that day after 631 days in jail. A special prosecutor from Prince George’s County later took over.

The trial began on August 26, 2024, and lasted four days. The jury deliberated for eighteen minutes before acquitting Ennals on every count.

Criminal Defense and Civil Rights

Greenberg Law Offices began in 1966, when Larry’s father, Henry I. Greenberg, opened a practice for Maryland residents confronting personal injury and medical malpractice. Larry grew up close to the firm and decided at ten that he wanted to become a lawyer. He studied Sociology and Political Science at Boston University and earned his law degree from the University of Baltimore School of Law. He 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.

After joining the family firm, Larry expanded its work into criminal defense and civil-rights litigation while continuing its representation of people facing 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 later constitutional claim. A jail assault can require immediate preservation of medical evidence, housing records, recorded calls, transfer paperwork, and the names of every officer who controlled access to the unit.

That combined practice allows evidence developed in a criminal case—body-camera footage, dispatch traffic, warrants, laboratory reports, and witness interviews—to support later questions about official authority, civil liability, and compensation.

Daquan Wallace’s $7 Million Resolution

Daquan Wallace entered the Baltimore City Detention Center as a healthy twenty-year-old pretrial detainee. After he refused demands to join a gang, his mother repeatedly warned officials that he was in danger. Wallace was transferred into a more dangerous unit and attacked within hours, leaving him unable to walk or speak and dependent on lifelong care.

Lawrence Greenberg and Cary J. Hansel tried the civil-rights case, developing the warnings, transfer records, housing decisions, door controls, and officer conduct. In March 2023, the Maryland Board of Public Works unanimously approved a $7 million settlement that secured resources for Wallace’s medical treatment, rehabilitation, mobility, and continuing care.

The Trooper’s Computer

In October 2017, Thomas Lawlor was crossing Coastal Highway in Ocean City when an unmarked Maryland State Police cruiser struck him. Lawlor, fifty-seven, died from his injuries. His wife and sons later sued the trooper, the State of Maryland, and the Town of Ocean City.

The family’s evidence focused on the trooper’s speed and his use of the in-car computer immediately before impact. Greenberg Law Offices secured a settlement for Lawlor’s wife and sons.

The Case Other Lawyers Declined

On September 16, 2017, a tram knocked Mona Jones from her bicycle and ran over her leg. She was flown to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center and remained hospitalized for approximately six weeks. Other lawyers declined the case. Maryland’s contributory-negligence rule can bar an injured person from recovering anything when the defense proves that the person’s own negligence contributed to the injury.

Larry told Jones at the beginning that the case would be difficult. He then spent five years developing it through the delays of the pandemic. Jones recounted extensive depositions, repeated explanations of the process, and preparation thorough enough to change her confidence in the case. The matter ended in what she called a just and fair outcome.

Greenberg’s preparation addressed Maryland’s contributory-negligence defense witness by witness, while the medical record documented six weeks of hospitalization and lasting injury.

The Officer’s Own Training

DUI prosecutions compress a criminal case into minutes of roadside conduct. An officer gives instructions, positions a stimulus, watches a person walk or stand, records observations, and later presents those observations as evidence of impairment. Larry completed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and International Association of Chiefs of Police training in DWI Detection and Standardized Field Sobriety Testing—the curriculum used to train officers who administer the tests.

That certification changes the level of cross-examination available to the defense. The horizontal-gaze test can be compared with the required positioning and movement of the stimulus. The walk-and-turn and one-leg-stand tests can be examined for the instructions given, the surface used, the demonstration provided, the timing, and the officer’s contemporaneous notes. Departures do not disappear because the report labels the exercise “standardized.” They become concrete reasons to question the reliability of the conclusion.

The same discipline applies to 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. Larry’s criminal practice treats procedure as evidence because the officer’s authority depends on the steps the officer actually took.

The Trial Room, the Classroom, and Annapolis

Larry teaches Trial Advocacy as an adjunct professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. His students turn a large file into an opening statement, witness sequence, direct and cross-examinations, evidentiary decisions, and a closing argument—the same choices he makes when deciding which facts a jury must hear and when to introduce them.

He has also taught practicing lawyers across Maryland. His continuing-education subjects have included 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.

Within the Maryland Association for Justice, Larry served on the Board of Governors and worked across its criminal-law, auto-negligence, education, legislative, technology, and public-outreach functions. As the association’s president in 2013, he helped create its first law-student chapter at the University of Baltimore. His public-outreach work included programs with Safe Kids Maryland that distributed bicycle helmets and smoke detectors, and a partnership supporting social-work assistance for families whose loved ones were hospitalized at the University of Maryland Medical Center.