Attorney General

A 48-year-old convicted sex offender pleaded guilty yesterday to two counts of second-degree sex offense for sexually abusing a 13-year-old boy he met while walking his dogs in his neighborhood. Robert Paul Layton of Dundalk admitted having sexual contact with the boy and buying food, candy and alcohol for him and several others, prosecutors said. Police said that Layton initiated conversations with teenagers while walking his dogs and then attempted to lure them to his home with the promise of drugs, food and the opportunity to play pool.

"Even my worst days as attorney general have been better than my father's best days." One doesn't want to begrudge Alberto R. Gonzales a brief, self-indulgent moment of mawkishness as he ignominiously departs the public stage. But one of his main problems was that mawkish self-indulgence was often his defining contribution to the public debate. To the bitter end, Mr. Gonzales remained the most self-involved attorney general in modern memory. (Full disclosure: My wife worked for him and his predecessor.

WASHINGTON -- Despite earlier denials, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales was deeply involved in discussions that led to the firing of eight U.S. attorneys, his former chief of staff testified yesterday. Kyle Sampson told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the attorney general had participated in "at least five" meetings on the subject over the course of more than two years and had other encounters in which the "strengths and weaknesses" of individual prosecutors were discussed. "I don't think the attorney general's statement that he was not involved in any discussions of U.S. attorney removals was accurate," Sampson said.

Appeals court takes consensual sex case Maryland's highest court agreed yesterday to hear a case that turns on whether consensual sex can become rape if one partner says "no" at any time. Women's advocacy groups, angered by a lower court's ruling, had backed the attorney general's office's request that the Court of Appeals take up the matter. The case stems from a report of a sexual assault in 2003 in Montgomery County. Judges in the state's intermediate appeals court said they had to follow a 1980 decision, which ruled that sex that continues after a woman withdraws her consent is not rape.

Amid allegations that a key witness is intentionally evading lawyers for Republican lawmakers, a Carroll County judge postponed yesterday until Jan. 4 a lawsuit that seeks to invalidate all of the tax, gambling and spending-reduction bills approved in last month's special session. Circuit Judge Thomas F. Stansfield granted a motion by the plaintiffs to postpone the hearings until Mary Monahan, chief clerk of the House of Delegates, can be found and deposed. The administrative officer is central to the case because the lawsuit hinges on an obscure technical provision in the Maryland Constitution that the plaintiffs - led by Del. Michael D. Smigiel Sr., a Cecil County Republican - claim the General Assembly violated.

WASHINGTON -- Former Justice Department official Monica Goodling acknowledged yesterday that she "crossed a line" and took political factors into consideration when screening applicants for entry-level civil service legal jobs, but she denied playing a role in singling out U.S. attorneys for dismissal. Testifying under a grant of immunity, Goodling told the House Judiciary Committee that she considered political leanings when interviewing would-be federal prosecutors, who are supposed to be hired without regard for political outlook.

The Maryland attorney general's office will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that said a Baltimore County police officer acted unreasonably by searching the buttocks cheeks of a suspected drug dealer in a public place. "There are differing opinions regarding what constitutes a strip search and under what circumstances a strip or a reach-in search is permissible as a search incident to arrest," Kathryn Grill Graeff, chief of criminal appeals for the attorney general, said yesterday.

WASHINGTON -- They rode into town in 2001, bent on changing the capital and stamping it with George W. Bush's compassionate conservative brand. The influential circle of Texans surrounding the president was close to him personally and shared many of his defining characteristics, including fierce loyalty, devotion to secrecy and a stubborn reluctance to admit error. Now, those Texans are all but gone. The impending departure of Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, two weeks after top White House aide Karl Rove resigned, reflects the waning of the Bush presidency, amid deep unpopularity at home and enormous problems overseas.

What is it about torture that the Bush administration finds so attractive? Consider the lengths to which the president's men have gone in order to preserve their right to inflict physical pain upon their enemies: In 2002, John Yoo, then a deputy assistant attorney general, wrote a Justice Department opinion validating the use of torture within broad limits, despite laws and treaties forbidding it. In 2004, his successor, a conservative who believes in...

WASHINGTON -- President Bush is preparing to nominate Michael B. Mukasey, a retired federal judge from New York, to succeed Alberto R. Gonzales as U.S. attorney general, people familiar with the president's intentions said yesterday. White House officials began yesterday to distribute background materials on Mukasey to Republican aides on the Senate Judiciary Committee in preparation for confirmation hearings in a month or so, the staff members said. The White House was preparing for an announcement as soon as today.

The infamous Baltimore ACORN video has become so widely viewed, and the behavior exhibited on it is so outrageous, that a criminal investigation should have been announced by someone somewhere before the first 100,000 or so YouTube hits. Too bad it took until Monday - a week and a half after the video taken at ACORN's Baltimore office was first released - for a prosecutor to step forward and do just that. Maryland Atty. Gen. Douglas F. Gansler's decision to look into the matter is welcome not only because the act of advising a pimp and prostitute, phony or not, on how to falsify income tax records merits such scrutiny, but because taping people without consent - as the filmmakers have obviously done - is a pretty clear violation of the law. Mr. Gansler has indicated that his office will investigate all of it. ACORN officials say the two employees involved were acting counter to the organization's policies (and both have since been fired)

The Maryland attorney general's office said Monday that it will investigate the local chapter of ACORN, a community organizing group that has come under fire with the release of secret recordings showing its employees advising a couple posing as a pimp and a prostitute. A spokeswoman for Attorney General Doug Gansler said the probe will "involve everything," although she declined to say whether it would include an examination of whether the recordings violated Maryland's law requiring consent from those being audiotaped.

Maryland's courts are open Friday, but more than 1,000 public defenders, assistant attorneys general and other state lawyers are off that day - making for what some court employees are saying could be a waste of a workday. The Friday leading into Labor Day weekend is the first of five planned state shutdowns that, together with additional days of unpaid leave, will save about $75 million. Gov. Martin O'Malley announced furloughs for nearly all of the state's 70,000 workers last week. The executive branch furloughs cover state agencies, such as the Office of the Public Defender and the Maryland attorney general's office.

Two state senators are requesting that Maryland's attorney general broaden his inquiry into the compensation of Constellation Energy Group's chief executive, Mayo A. Shattuck III. In a letter dated Aug. 10 to Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler, Democratic state Sens. Jamie Raskin of Montgomery County and James Brochin of Baltimore County said that about 30 percent of Constellation's executive compensation costs, not including salary, is allocated to Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. The senators said they are concerned that future compensation costs, including potentially tens of millions of dollars if Shattuck is terminated in connection with a change in control at the company, will be borne by BGE and its ratepayers.

WASHINGTON - -U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is poised to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA abuses committed during the interrogation of terrorism suspects, current and former U.S. government officials said. A senior Justice Department official said Holder envisions a probe that would be "narrow" in scope, focusing on "whether people went beyond the techniques that were authorized" in Bush administration memos that liberally interpreted anti-torture laws.

Wells Fargo must turn over electronic data on its Baltimore loans and make company officials available for depositions, a federal judge ruled Thursday at a hearing on the city's lawsuit accusing the bank of targeting minority communities with unfair lending practices that led to costly foreclosures. Attorneys for Baltimore City said they will analyze the data for patterns of racial discrimination. They argue that bad loans by the bank led to scores of foreclosure-induced vacancies that drain millions from city coffers in lost property taxes and extra police and sanitation services.

Joseph S. Kaufman, a trial attorney who helped establish the Maryland Transit Administration, died of a stroke Saturday at Sinai Hospital. The Mount Washington resident was 79. "He represented his clients aggressively and effectively," said Judge Joseph F. Murphy Jr. of the Court of Appeals. "Outside the courtroom, he was a friendly guy whose company I enjoyed." A Baltimore native raised in Forest Park, he was a 1947 City College graduate and earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland, College Park.

The young offenders sent to the Victor Cullen Center, the state's only locked facility for teenage boys convicted of crimes, might be too violent for the workers there to handle, Maryland's juvenile services watchdog said Monday in a report. The Maryland attorney general's Juvenile Justice Monitoring Unit questioned whether Victor Cullen is secure enough - citing three escapes in two years, including one on May 27 in which several workers were seriously injured - and raised concerns about employee levels and training, and whether the treatment program used there is effective.

In a rare criminal case against a Maryland homebuilder, a brother and sister who ran a Baltimore County company have pleaded guilty to misusing more than $225,000 in deposits from customers expecting new homes, the state attorney general said Wednesday. Walter Osborne Ely Jr. and Kimberly Zahrey started JAE Developers in 2002 and collected between $1,000 and $50,000 in upfront payments from prospective home buyers, according to Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler's statement of fact submitted to Baltimore County Circuit Court Judge Vicki Ballou-Watts.

Muslim women and others who wear face coverings for religious purposes can be required to remove the garb to enter courthouses, Maryland's attorney general has determined in a legal opinion, raising concerns among civil liberties advocates about how the practice will be carried out. The opinion addresses a sensitive issue that has sparked debate and outcry in recent years, including protests over the French government's ban several years ago on the...