Each family can speak about the significance to them. Loney mingles with them after the ceremony, and when Spanish-speaking youngsters are part of new families, he talks to them in Spanish - a language he took up as an adult - to help them feel at ease, Greene said.
The Spanish helps in another way: He volunteers with dentists to provide free dental care in poor, rural areas of Latin America, translating and pitching in wherever needed.
He also was in charge for more than four years of management for family cases, a role that pushes to ensure that cases don't languish in limbo. Last year, Loney said, only one scheduled case was not reached.
"He did a hell of a good job," said Robert C. Wallace, the court administrator.
Loney said resolving a family matter benefits everyone involved.
"Most of us, no matter what the problem in life is, can deal with it once it is decided," Loney said.
But he's had his share of other types of cases.
He was the drug court judge from its inception in 2004 until June, helping to get the court treatment program off the ground.
"He is no-nonsense. That's what it takes for the people who are in drug court, it takes somebody the defendants are going to fear," said Anne Arundel County State's Attorney Frank R. Weathersbee. Defendants saw Loney mete out sanctions and praise, jail some among them and graduate others from the intensive program that aims to turn drug offenders into job-holding taxpayers who support families.
"It's like keeping 85 plates spinning. Every day there's a fire that has to be put out. People reoffend, there are problems," he said.
The drug court has graduated about 35 people and returned about the same number to prison, which Loney said has been both rewarding and painful.
He presided over one of the widely publicized criminal matters the county court saw in recent years: the sentencing in 2006 of Linda Lee Nichols, who, in a drunken haze, crashed her pickup into a stopped car, killing two of the three teenagers inside. More than 300 people, many of them teens, attended, so that Loney authorized a closed-circuit feed of the hearing for the overflow crowd. It was, he said, important for the community to see how the court handles such a heartbreaking case, and for friends of the dead youths to be included. The five-year prison term he handed down was seen as both too short and longer than most sentences for drunken-driving fatalities.
