Patrick J. Collins

In February 2017 inmates had taken over a building at Vaughn, killed Lieutenant Steven Floyd, beaten two other officers before releasing them, and held a counselor for nearly twenty hours until tactical teams broke through a wall with a backhoe. Eighteen inmates were indicted, sixteen of them for murder. Shankaras had been one of four defendants in the first trial until the court removed him from it over the breakdown of his relationship with his court-appointed lawyer; Patrick J. Collins represented him when his case was tried alone in May 2019.

Deputy Attorney General Nichole Warner told the jury in her opening that no evidence directly connected Shankaras to Floyd’s death and that the State would proceed on accomplice liability: “Anyone who participated in that riot is on the hook for all those charges.” The State’s case rested on two letters Shankaras had written after the uprising to Royal Downs, a former Baltimore gang leader serving a life sentence for murder who had taken a walkie-talkie and joined the hostage negotiations, had been let out of the building during the siege, and had pleaded guilty to a single count of riot, which carries no mandatory prison time, in exchange for his testimony in every Vaughn trial. One letter began, “Warrior, as you know, this had to happen.” Prosecutors cast Shankaras as the uprising’s “puppet master.” Collins traced Downs’s dealings with investigators and the months he had kept the smuggled letters before his deal was made, and argued to the jury that Downs had urged Shankaras to write them and had held them as an insurance policy.

The jury acquitted on every count. “Roman Shankaras, everyone conceded, never laid a hand on anybody,” Collins said afterward. On June 12, 2019, the Delaware Department of Justice dropped every remaining Vaughn charge; three juries, it said, had shown that proving beyond a reasonable doubt who was responsible for Lieutenant Floyd’s death was no longer possible. Of the eighteen inmates indicted, eight had been tried, two convicted, and four acquitted of everything.

Five Words

Collins had opened the trial on May 6, 2019 by reminding the jurors of their oath to decide the case on the evidence and the law and by telling them what the State had to prove about Shankaras himself, beyond a reasonable doubt: that he was responsible for Floyd’s death and for the attacks on the other staff. Then he gave them the standard in five words. “Probably guilty equals not guilty.” Warner had told the same jurors they could draw rational inferences from the evidence. The verdict came seventeen days later.

The Driver’s Seat Pocket

On May 27, 2014, Corporal Ballinger of the Governor’s Task Force stopped a dark green Grand Prix on South State Street in Dover for a broken headlight. Kendall Evans was driving; Famous Rhoades sat in the front passenger seat and David Heath in the back. Background checks turned up two outstanding capiases for Heath, and officers found two crack pipes on him. Evans consented to a search of the car, and officers found a billy club in the pocket on the back of the driver’s seat; they did not photograph it or take it into evidence, and no weapons charge followed. They then had Rhoades step out and patted him down, recovering powder cocaine, crack cocaine, marijuana, money, and a cell phone. Corporal Ballinger testified that the frisk was routine protocol.

Collins moved to suppress in the Superior Court in Kent County, and on November 26, 2014, Judge Robert B. Young granted the motion. The stop and the search of the car were lawful, the court held, but a frisk requires specific, articulable facts giving the officer reason to believe the person frisked is armed and dangerous, facts that in the Delaware Supreme Court’s words must be “specific to the person frisked.” Heath’s capiases and pipes said nothing about Rhoades, the billy club lay far from him, and, the court wrote, “Officer safety in the broad sense, cannot be used as a catchall justification for the pat-down.” Everything taken from Rhoades was inadmissible.

October 1, 2013

On October 1, 2013, Wilmington Police Detective Randolph Pfaff heard from a confidential informant that a man called “Chin,” surname Nyala, kept two guns, had received a large quantity of heroin, and dealt it from a silver Nissan Altima; the informant picked Dilip Niyala out from his driver’s license photograph. Officers watched Niyala leave his apartment at the Manchester Arms complex, drive off, return, and leave again, and saw no drug activity. Pfaff drafted search warrants and never took them to a magistrate. A DEA special agent, Seamus Toolan, said he saw the Altima’s driver turn right without signaling, but Toolan made no stop; a marked K-9 unit under Sergeant Rodriguez pulled Niyala over, handcuffed him, and took him to the station, where no citation was written and no supplemental report filed. Questioned without Miranda warnings, he signed consent forms for his apartment, the Altima, and a West Fifth Street apartment to which he had a key. Police took $4,090 from a safe in his apartment; 856 bags of heroin, 48 grams of crack cocaine, 66 grams of marijuana, scales, a Pyrex dish, and a Ruger nine-millimeter from the second apartment; and $150 and 130 bags of heroin from behind the Altima’s center console.

Collins challenged the stop, the detention, the arrest, and the consent, and on July 17, 2014, Judge Diane Clarke Streett granted his motion to suppress all of it. The State had put on no officer who made the stop, and the agent who saw the turn had detached himself from it: “The stop was not a valid traffic stop.” Even a valid stop could not have justified the detention that followed; the informant’s tip said too little about the crime itself to supply reasonable suspicion or probable cause; and consent signed in handcuffs after an unlawful seizure, with nothing intervening, was tainted, so that the evidence from both apartments and the car was fruit of the poisonous tree. The State moved for reargument, contending that one officer may relay a violation to another, that Delaware’s arrest statute should be read more broadly, and that the officers had reasonable suspicion apart from the stop. On September 11, 2014, Judge Streett denied the motion: the State had repeated arguments already decided, it had offered no testimony from the stopping officer, nothing after the stop supported a longer detention, and the General Assembly’s August 12, 2014 amendment to the arrest statute did not change the result. “The Court’s decision granting Defendant’s Motion to Suppress stands.”

Collins Price Warner Woloshin

Collins graduated from Cornell University, earned a master’s degree in business administration, and took his law degree cum laude from Widener University School of Law. He is managing partner of Collins Price Warner Woloshin in Wilmington, where his practice runs from traffic and DUI cases through misdemeanors, felonies, homicide trials, and appeals in every Delaware court. Natalie Woloshin, Jacquez Robinson’s trial counsel in the case that follows, is his partner.

June 30, 2017

Jacquez Robinson was awaiting trial for first-degree murder in the Superior Court in New Castle County, with trial set for July 11, 2017, when, on June 30, 2017, Department of Correction officers entered his cell and took every document and note in it, including his correspondence with his lawyer and his notes on trial strategy. No warrant had been sought, no judge had approved the search, and defense counsel had not been told. Prosecutors John Downs and Mark Denney had suspected that Robinson’s lawyer violated a protective order entered August 24, 2016 in a separate gang case, which barred giving him documents containing witness summaries or identifying information; Chief Prosecutor Joseph Grubb assigned Chief Special Investigator John Ciritella to arrange the search, and Jamie Prater, a paralegal on the murder prosecution team, read the seized papers that day and learned the defense’s strategy. She stayed on the team until July 14. The State had set up no taint team, and it kept Robinson’s legal documents until four days before the scheduled trial.

Trial counsel moved to dismiss on July 7, 2017, and the Superior Court appointed Collins to present the motion. On September 19, 2017, Judge Andrea L. Rocanelli ordered the State to turn the seized documents over for review in camera, to answer Collins’s discovery request within five business days, and to produce its witnesses, Prater and the investigator among them, at a hearing: “Robinson’s Motion Counsel must have the opportunity for a meaningful review of the documents seized from Robinson’s cell.” After the hearings, on May 1, 2018, she found that the State had violated Robinson’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel, that its Fourth Amendment justification was misplaced and its invocation of the crime-fraud exception had been made without judicial approval, that it had used no taint team, and that Robinson had suffered actual prejudice.

The State appealed, and Collins represented Robinson in the Delaware Supreme Court. On April 16, 2019, in an opinion by Justice Karen L. Valihura for the court sitting en banc, the court affirmed the findings that the State had violated Robinson’s Sixth Amendment rights and that he had suffered actual prejudice. It disqualified Downs, Denney, Prater, Grubb, Ciritella, Marvel, and Dempsey, and anyone else who had been exposed to the privileged material, from any further part in Robinson’s prosecution, ordered the State to destroy all the trial work product it had developed in the case, and remanded.