It took Dorothy some time to discover that the reputation of the “all-powerful” Wizard of Oz was not precisely as advertised. Perhaps, had she exercised some diligence in vetting him on the front-end of their encounter, she might have spared herself and her traveling companions the misadventures suffered at the hands of the Wicked Witch of the West (and her flying monkeys) at her castle. Nonetheless, no one dare fault her for relying initially on the accreted high opinion of the Wizard.

There seems to us some similarities between Dorothy’s and the Wizard’s relationship and this case. Unfortunately, the consequences of the late Joseph Kopera’s deception of Maryland’s courts, the Bar, and defendants for decades in a host of criminal cases in which he testified for the State as an “expert” in the field of firearms ballistics, based in part on later-discovered falsities in his academic curriculum vitae, have not proved to be resolved easily by legal wizards. In an effort to cut through at least a strand of the
larger Gordian Knot left in the wake of the 2007 discovery of Kopera’s misrepresentations, we shall adopt a somewhat outside-the-lines resolution of the present case in order to clear a path for Maryland courts to get more quickly to the more taxing question of whether Kopera’s deceit, once discovered, created, under Maryland’s actual innocence statute, “a substantial or significant possibility that the result [of the trial] may have been different.” Md. Code (2001, 2018 Repl. Vol.), Criminal Procedure Article (“CP”), § 8-301(a)(1)(i). We shall hold that, in this case and in all similarly situated “Kopera cases,” trial counsel were not expected reasonably to uncover Kopera’s deception before 2007, in the absence of specific information that should have put counsel on inquiry notice to investigate sooner Kopera’s background.