Appeal Bond

Prominent Baltimore criminal defense lawyer William H. Murphy Jr. faces a 30-day jail sentence after his arrest yesterday for failing to show up for a trial in Prince George's County. Mr. Murphy, a former judge and one-time candidate for mayor of Baltimore, was arrested about 1 p.m. yesterday in Baltimore Circuit Court, where he had been arguing pretrial motions in a case before Judge Robert I. H. Hammerman. Shortly after Judge Hammerman broke for lunch, Mr. Murphy was arrested in a foyer outside the courtroom.

Just as he was scheduled to be released yesterday from the Carroll County Detention Center, former Carroll County schools Superintendent William H. Hyde was ordered held without bond on additional sexual abuse charges in a related Virginia case. Virginia authorities issued arrest warrants yesterday morning as Hyde was scheduled to be released after serving less than 12 months of an 18-month term for raping and sexually abusing an elementary school-age girl from Westminster. Virginia prosecutors said they will try the 63-year-old career educator on two felony counts of aggravated sexual battery.

Two siblings trying to collect a $2.6 million judgment against Baltimore's public housing agency for lead-paint poisoning argue in court papers that an auction of 20 agency vehicles must go forward because officials have refused to pay. The Housing Authority of Baltimore City "must be treated like every other judgment debtor that fails to pay its debts," their attorney, Evan M. Goldman, wrote in a motion filed Wednesday in Baltimore Circuit Court....

A Southwest Baltimore truck driver convicted in May of killing an Irvington handyman in Finksburg nearly 10 years ago was sentenced to life in prison yesterday in Carroll County Circuit Court.Judge Luke K. Burns Jr. denied Cordell Albert Patton's motion for a new trial before announcing the sentence and rejected the 41-year-old defendant's plea to remain free on bond pending an appeal.Hilda Mae Fefel, the mother of the victim, John C. Ruhs, said she would have preferred to see Patton "sitting in an electric chair with Diane Patton and Stephen Lucado holding each of his hands."

A 22-year-old man, who was arrested Sunday in Baltimore and accused of the attempted murder of a 17-year-old New Windsor girl, was returned to Carroll County yesterday and held without bond, authorities said.At the time of the alleged assault last week near Reese, Christopher Scott Frazier was awaiting a presentence investigation in unrelated cases, said Tracy A. Gilmore, a deputy state's attorney for Carroll County.Frazier, who has lived in New Windsor and Westminster, was convicted on burglary and theft charges Sept.

The former owner of an Annapolis pizza shop, facing deportation, wassentenced yesterday to 10 years in prison on a drug charge.Antonio Rosario Priola, 45, of the first block of Pinkney St. in Annapolis, was sentenced under a law requiring a mandatory 10-year sentence for a third conviction on drug charges.Court records show Priola's sister, Maria Priola, had put up her Severna Park house as bond for him, but requested release as his bondsman because he faces deportation. Priola, a resident alien, was convicted in November of possession of cocaine with intent to distribute.

An Elkridge man convicted of snatching an 8-year-old Brooklyn Park girl from a street corner and molesting her was sentenced yesterday to 15 years in prison.Jeffrey Meredith Chaney, 35, received 15 years for kidnapping and five years, to be served concurrently, for battery and a third-degree sexual offense despite his protests of innocence."I work hard, I'm a hunter and a fisherman and a golfer, and I ran my own business. I have no reason to do something like this," Chaney told Circuit Judge Bruce C. Williams.

A state appellate court has ruled that a Carroll circuit judge should have explained why he did not follow the recommendation of juvenile authorities last year when he waived a 16-year-old boy to adult court. The Westminster teen-ager was charged with selling a fatal overdose of heroin to a schoolmate.In its unpublished 27-page decision, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals remanded the case of Kristopher Olenginski, now 17, saying that the court "must carefully consider the recommendation of the [Department of Juvenile Justice]

Marijuana-rights activist Pamela Snowhite Davis was sentenced yesterday to two years in state prison with three more years suspended on a felony drug conviction involving less than an ounce of pot."You rationalize your criminal conduct. You blame an overzealous police force and prosecution, you blame the court system, you even blame your children," Carroll Circuit Judge Raymond E. Beck Sr. told Davis as he sentenced her for possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia and maintaining a common nuisance.

Returning to a place she has branded as "evil," marijuana rights activist Pamela Snowhite Davis came to Carroll County yesterday and settled a $40,000 civil lawsuit filed by the owners of the Westminster shopping center where she once ran her counterculture shop, Liberation.Davis, 49, will pay the Washington Real Estate Investment Trust, which owns the Westminster Shopping Center, $5,000 when she and her estranged husband, Daniel, sell their Silver Run farm.The money, which roughly corresponds to the rent Davis failed to pay for Liberation last year between May -- when she was sent to prison on felony drug charges involving less than an ounce of marijuana -- and August, when she closed the store.