Md. high court weighs impossibility defense in graduation eve slayings

Maryland’s top court grappled Monday over an impossibility defense as it heard the appeal of a man’s second-degree murder conviction for being an accessory before the killing of two Montgomery County teenagers on the eve of their high school graduations. Attorney John N. Sharifi, pressing Roger Garcia’s case, told the Court of Appeals a person cannot be guilty of assisting in the planning of a second-degree murder, which by definition is not premeditated and thus not planned.