One involved a woman who sent a letter to the court, declining to testify against her husband. The testimony prompted O'Malley to ask how they verified whether the woman had actually sent the letter. They didn't have any verification system in place for that.
In another case, for which the delegation reviewed autopsy reports, she noted that a husband would only face a 15-year prison sentence for beating his wife to death because he was known to have been drunk when he killed her. Conditions in a jail the group toured were "scary," O'Malley said, and defendants in trials were required to sit in cages.
Bennett, a co-chair of the Maryland effort, said O'Malley was a "perfect fit and was a big hit over there."
He noted O'Malley's experience with domestic violence law and study of Russian in high school. "She was gracious and very inquisitive in terms of the domestic docket. ... They were charmed that the first lady of Maryland was a trial judge," he said.
O'Malley's status as first lady also opened up doors and made possible a meeting with the governor of the St. Petersburg-Leningrad oblast, or province. The oblast became a sister state for Maryland in 1993, and as a result of the visit, the O'Malleys will host its leader at Government House in the fall.
Between seminars and domestic violence discussions, O'Malley also took in the beauty of St. Petersburg, caught a ballet depicting the biblical story of the Prodigal Son, and practiced reading Russia's Cyrillic alphabet - so much so that she worried she was annoying the other members of the delegation. O'Malley took few pictures, she said, because the cold was so severe that it hurt her fingers when she removed her gloves.
"There were so many just lovely, lovely people that we met," she said. "It's such an old culture, and they're very, very proud of their country. They're very proud of the progress they've been making in the past 15 years."
bradley.olson@baltsun.com
