Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown won't charge two Charles County sheriff's deputies who pursued a wanted fugitive into a fatal head-on crash in Brandywine—another case of government investigating government and finding nobody at fault.
When the state's top prosecutor declines to bring charges against law enforcement, the structural conflict is plain: prosecutors depend on police to make their cases, and police depend on prosecutors to shield them from liability. That revolving door—between state prosecutors' offices and the law enforcement unions that bankroll their campaigns—means the people with the power to hold officers accountable have every incentive not to.
Here are the facts, as WJLA reported them. On Aug. 25, Arlington County, Virginia, police asked Charles County deputies to stop a Toyota sedan on Maryland Route 5, believing a suspect wanted on more than 20 warrants was inside. The driver initially pulled over, but 34-year-old Miya Stringfield—wanted on those 20-plus warrants across Maryland and Virginia—climbed into the driver's seat and fled with a passenger, 33-year-old Alexis Cummings of Temple Hills, still trapped in the car.
Deputies pursued for about five miles over roughly four minutes. The vehicle eventually went the wrong way on U.S. 301 and collided head-on with another vehicle. Cummings died at a hospital. Stringfield and the other motorist were treated and released. No officers were injured.
The Attorney General's Office opened its investigation the same day as the crash, completed it Nov. 4, and announced Nov. 10 that the deputies "did not commit a crime under Maryland law."
Stringfield's rap sheet—more than 20 warrants across two states—raises its own questions about why a repeat offender with that kind of record was free to flee in the first place. But the accountability question for state power is different: when a pursuit ends with an innocent passenger dead, who answers for that outcome? The AG's answer: nobody.
Brown's office conducted its own investigation and reached its own conclusion. Whether that conclusion would survive independent scrutiny from a body that doesn't rely on police cooperation to do its job every day is a question Marylanders aren't allowed to answer.
The deputies followed a wanted fugitive. Stringfield made the choice to run. But Alexis Cummings is dead, and the only people with the authority to evaluate whether that pursuit was justified have every institutional reason to say it was. That's not accountability. That's a closed loop.
