Last week attorney Thomas Maronick Jr., argued in Howard County Circuit Court that his client, a 26-year-old man charged in a sex offense case, should be placed on home detention instead of being held in jail before his trial.
It’s a proposition that’s become a harder sell in the wake of the murder of two teens outside the Mall in Columbia last year by another teen while he was being monitored by Towson-based Advantage Sentencing Alternative Solutions (ASAP), which surrendered its state license last year following years of repeated violations.
“There was a company called ASAP that wasn’t doing a very good job … they lost everything,” Maronick told the court. “The companies that are around now are a lot stricter.”
Home detention and electronic monitoring proliferated in recent years, initially as a way to stop the spread of COVID-19 and ease the burden on local detention centers. It has remained a staple of the pretrial landscape. However, some are now questioning the trustworthiness of ankle monitors and their ability to ensure the public’s safety.
While several jurisdictions, including Carroll County, have state-run pretrial home detention programs, Maryland also licenses several private home detention companies.
From 2016 to 2023, there was a 217% increase in the use of home detention in the state, according to a report from Justice Policy Institute. Meanwhile, private detention companies had an over 250% increase in clients since 2017.
However, nearly all private home monitoring providers showed a decrease in participants in the month after Emmetson Zeah violated his home detention without detection from ASAP and killed two teens in Columbia. After ASAP was forced to shut its doors, private providers in the state saw a 15% decrease in participants in the following month.
“There was some subtle hesitancy to go to private providers, as there should be,” said Seth Okin, a defense attorney who has worked in all 24 Maryland counties. “When someone breaks their promise, why believe the next person will do it better?”
The advantages of home detention
The home detention monitoring system is relatively new to the justice system. Harford County State’s Attorney Alison Healey said home detention “almost never got granted” until COVID-19 became an issue in detention centers.
Bradley Shepherd, a defense attorney with Charm City Defense, said that home detention has been a welcome addition to the pretrial process and offers many advantages for defendants, including making it easier to prepare for their case.
“I don’t know a single attorney who would say that it’s easier for them to handle a case when a client is held without bond versus when they’re … on home detention,” Shepherd said. “It’s 1,000 times easier.”
Attorneys typically have to travel to detention centers to talk to defendants held without bail, which often encumbers communication more than defendants on home detention, who can call, text or email at any time of day, Shepherd said.
“I need my clients out. I need them in treatment,” Okin said. “I can’t do anything if they’re sitting in jail.”
Access to health care for those with complicated medical situations is another advantage of home detention, Shepherd said. While detention centers offer health care, he said it falls short of health care available outside of confinement.
“If you have someone with a complicated medical situation, having them on home detention alleviates the state’s need to meet those high medical needs,” Shepherd said.
Electronic monitoring can also ease the burden on detention centers in the state, which has reported struggles with staffing.
Especially in the case of juvenile detention centers, home detention monitoring can keep these defendants out of the “very dangerous situation” of going to adult detention centers when beds fill up, Shepherd said.
Lost confidence in home detention
In late January, Danielle Winchester, program director of ASAP, sat at the witness stand in the Howard County Circuit Court with a packet of more than 100 papers resting in front of her. The papers detailed how one ASAP client — Zeah — violated his home detention several times before murdering two teenagers at a Columbia mall on Feb. 22, 2025.
ASAP, which failed its legal obligation to alert the court of any of Zeah’s violations within 24 hours, surrendered its license in Maryland last year. Zeah was found guilty of the murders in late January, and was one of the final dominoes to fall for ASAP after a long history of violations.
ASAP was “quite good” for a long time, Okin said. But around the pandemic, cracks began to show. In one Worcester County case Maronick worked, ASAP needed to show records of a client’s violation of pretrial release. However, the records were in “such disarray,” the judge said he couldn’t make a correct decision, Maronick recounted.
The judge then told Maronick he would never again accept testimony from ASAP because it was “simply unacceptable.”
Healey recalled several concerns with ASAP in Harford County. She said they would check defendants’ locations only during business hours, which “doesn’t really help to maintain victim safety.”
“In a hearing we had on a violation that was just egregious, absolutely egregious,” Healey said, “[The defendant was] running all over God’s creation while in home detention, and they never reported a violation at all.”
When ASAP’s lack of notification and appropriate supervision began coming to light, Healey said she noticed judges hesitating to order defendants for home detention with the company.
Last October, the parents of the two boys murdered by Zeah filed a negligence lawsuit against ASAP for what one parent called a “preventable” situation.
In a statement following Zeah’s conviction in January, the parents wrote their “grief remains immeasurable … but the outcome affirms that accountability matters, and that the lives of our sons mattered.”
Attorneys throughout the state reported a mistrust and hesitancy in home detention monitoring from the courts in the months following the “ASAP scandal,” as one attorney put it.
“Ultimately, someone got hurt,” Okin said. “Unfortunately, that hurts everyone, because there’s always going to be a hesitancy statewide at that point.”
Shepherd said prosecutors used the scandal to “beat the war drum” and point to it as an example of private home detention’s flaws.
“It’s an advocacy-related system, so they’re going to take their opportunity to press their advantage,” Shepherd said. “Their goal in arguing for bond is typically focused on public safety, and that’s a job that they take seriously, so I respect that.”
Healey said the Harford County State’s Attorney’s Office “doesn’t have the same trust in home detention as they did a year ago.”
In a recent Harford County case, a judge denied bail for a defendant who faced drug and gun-related charges and specifically pointed to people who have escaped while wearing an ankle monitor or broke it.
“When you lose trust in a system, it takes time to rebuild a system,” Maronick said.
Rebuilding the system
Private home detention initially proliferated because state-run programs couldn’t meet demands, Shepherd said. While private home detention is paid out-of-pocket by a defendant, the state-run programs are covered.
Defendants on private home detention will typically be released the same day their release is granted, while those in state-run programs will take more than a week to be released, Shepherd said.
Several prosecutors expressed concern in the for-profit model of private home detention. Since defendants pay the private company, if they violate home detention, prosecutors fear the companies won’t report the violation, because they would lose money.
Healey said she is not suggesting any of these companies aren’t reporting violations, but she has concerns about the model.
“What is the incentive for them to report someone to the court and take them off of home detention for violation? Because then they stop making money,” Healey said. “That of course is a concern, too.”
For that reason, prosecutors interviewed overwhelmingly prefer state-run programs.
Calvin Jones, who owns the home detention monitoring program Watch Tower, countered these concerns by pointing to the strict penalties in place if he fails to follow the Department of Corrections’ protocols.
“We do get paid to monitor people but if we don’t violate these people, we won’t make any money because the state will take our license,” Jones said. “I don’t want to lose my livelihood and I don’t want the public to be at risk.”
Jones, who began taking clients in April 2025 following a rigorous 16-month process for approval, said he sees the skepticism in home detention as the court doing its “due diligence,” as opposed to “mistrust.”
“I believe the courts and judges are fair. The judges want transparency and communication,” Jones said.
When asked the lessons he could take away from ASAP, Jones said to not cut corners and report violations fast.
“This is not a ‘set it and forget it.’ We are constantly monitoring people 24/7/365,” he said.
Watch Tower has quickly expanded in Maryland. Jones said he monitors around 300 people across the state. As of October 2025, Watch Tower was the state’s second-largest private company, according to data provided by the Maryland Judiciary.
As private home detention companies begin to build back trust and time heals the wounds caused by ASAP, attorneys say the skepticism is beginning to moderate.
While Maronick’s client was ultimately denied home detention, the attorney said, “there’s a lot more confidence now than there was a year ago.”
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