Susan Iwunze
Nwoga.A pharmacist convicted on 287 counts by lawyers who were also working for the prosecution.

Poplar Grove Pharmacy sat on Franklintown Road in a stretch of Southwest Baltimore that the large retail chains had elected, as a matter of business, not to serve. Susan served it. She declined multiple offers from those same chains to acquire her business.

Approximately two years after she declined the last of those offers, a DEA investigation of her pharmacy was initiated. Before any charges were filed, Susan gave a sworn statement to investigators describing her standard verification practices and her refusal to fill prescriptions she had flagged as suspicious. The DEA took no adverse action against her license at the time.

Charges came later. By the time they did, the witness who would carry the prosecution's case had already been arranged.

The State's theory of knowing participation rested almost entirely on a single cooperating witness, Darnella Carter. Carter had presented forged prescriptions at Susan's counter and distributed the dispensed medications. She received substantial sentencing benefits in exchange for her testimony. No other witness — no DEA agent, no patient, no pharmacist — provided direct testimony that Susan knew the prescriptions were fraudulent.

What the bench was never shown was the agreement that governed Carter's cooperation: the Dayhoff-Branigan agreement. It established Carter's sentencing expectations, set the terms of her testimony, and gave her a direct, personal interest in Susan's conviction.

The agreement was in the prosecution's possession. It was communicated to Susan's defense counsel as part of the State's case management. It was not disclosed to Susan, and was never the subject of cross-examination at trial.

The firm Susan paid to defend her — Silverman, Thompson, Slutkin and White — was simultaneously representing Catherine Schuster Pascale, a Deputy Director at the Maryland Attorney General's office, and Maura Lating. Pascale and Lating were the same prosecutors whose methods the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland would later find, in United States v. Annappareddy, to "shock the conscience."

STSW did not disclose this to Susan. It admitted the conflict only in December 2022, on the record in a separate Montgomery County proceeding — years after the cell door had closed.

Susan paid for representation from one of Maryland's most prominent defense firms — and received representation whose loyalty was divided from the first day of trial.From Susan's Petition for Writ of Actual Innocence (Md. § 8-301)

The bench that evaluated Darnella Carter's testimony did so without knowing that Susan's own lawyers had an interest in Carter not being fully cross-examined. The defense never called the witnesses who could have impeached her. It never obtained the pharmacy's own records that would have corroborated Susan's verification practices. It limited cross-examination of Carter in ways that protected the integrity of the cooperation process her conflicted-out clients had engineered.

Susan's Petition for Writ of Actual Innocence identifies four categories of newly discovered evidence — none of which was available to her at trial, none of which could have been discovered through reasonable diligence, and which together leave the prosecution's theory without foundation.

The Maryland standard under § 8-301 is whether the newly discovered evidence creates a "substantial or significant possibility" that the result of the trial would have been different. Susan's petition argues — and the exhibits demonstrate — that without the conflict, Carter's testimony would not have survived cross-examination. The 287 counts cannot stand without it.