Central Booking

The latest allegations of witness intimidation involve an unusual suspect: A correctional officer at Central Booking whose son is charged with murder. Rose Marie Peterson, 37, was recently charged with witness intimidation, assault, obstruction of justice and misconduct in office. She is accused of threatening a female detainee who is a witness in the first-degree murder case of Peterson's son, Anthony Dickson. "You better not show up for court," Peterson told the woman, according to court documents.

The family of a man who was killed at Baltimore's booking center last year filed a $130 million lawsuit yesterday, alleging that the state and correctional officers acted negligently in failing to correct what they knew were dangerous conditions. Attorney A. Dwight Pettit said he hopes the suit will force the state to examine the Central Booking and Intake Center and resolve problems of crowding, inadequate training and understaffing that he said contributed to the death of Raymond K. Smoot.

When Sidney Ponson hit a judge and went to jail last winter, I was dispatched to Aruba to check things out. Someone had to do it. The trail led me to a jail in a touristy neighborhood called Noord where Ponson spent most of his 11 days behind bars. It wasn't exactly a hard-time hellhole. The one-story building was small, quiet, clean. A beach was a half-mile away. Palm trees fluttered nearby. A watch commander at the front desk smiled and said "all the guys in the back" liked Ponson, as if they were frat brothers.

When inmates at the Central Booking and Intake Center in Baltimore were stacking up like planes at a busy airport, state corrections officials defended the agency. The state-run facility, overwhelmed by aggressive policing strategies in Baltimore, literally couldn't process inmates fast enough. But state Public Safety Secretary Mary Ann Saar argued persuasively that no one entity could be blamed because "the entire booking procedure is dependent upon a cooperative effort." Her agency isn't being very cooperative now. Ms. Saar refused last Tuesday to release the entirety of a consultant's report that her lawyers had offered up as evidence of the state's commitment to improve the central booking system.

State prison officials have given a judge and the city solicitor a heavily redacted consultant's report on problems at the state-run Central Booking and Intake Center in Baltimore, making it impossible to determine what, if any, remedies were recommended. The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, which runs the booking center, whited-out five of the 10 pages in the report. Officials said the blanked-out portions deal with their "internal decision-making" process for the center, which has been criticized for being crowded and inefficiently managed.

A 42-year-old armed robbery suspect who escaped from the Central Booking and Intake Center on Saturday returned to the jail yesterday afternoon to surrender, accompanied by his attorney, said a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Troy Aaron Gross of the Gwynn Oak section of Baltimore County was arrested Thursday on armed robbery charges and was taken to Central Booking on Friday, said spokesman Mark Vernarelli. Gross, who was being held without bail, was reported missing Saturday, Vernarelli said.

The teenager who has been at a pretrial detention center for almost a year in spite of a felony conviction and five-year sentence has been transferred to the state's prison system. Moshe Khaver was being held yesterday at the Maryland Reception, Diagnostic and Classification Center in Baltimore, where he will be assessed before moving to a prison to serve out the rest of his term. Khaver, 19, pleaded guilty last fall to first-degree assault. He admitted running over another teen, who spent five weeks in a coma and suffered permanent injuries, during a dispute about $20 in marijuana.

A Baltimore Circuit Court judge ruled yesterday that the city can share its "concerns and recommendations" in a lawsuit over delays at the Central Booking and Intake Center, even as he suggested that the Police Department's arrest policies may contribute to the problem. Judge John M. Glynn allowed the city to present its side in the case as a "friend of the court," but he delayed ruling on whether to include it as a plaintiff in the suit filed by the public defender's office against the state-run jail.

Responding to a 911 call reporting a person not breathing and lying in an alley, city police officers found a 27-year-old man dead of stab wounds yesterday morning in East Baltimore. The identity of the victim, whose body was found shortly after 7 a.m. in the 500 block of N. Decker Ave., was withheld pending notification of relatives, police said. Police also announced arrests of three men in connection with two separate homicides that occurred Tuesday - one of them the apparent result of a domestic dispute.

When a Baltimore judge sentenced Moshe Khaver to five years in prison for nearly killing a boy over a marijuana debt, she said the son of a Park Heights rabbi was no different from violent drug dealers from Cherry Hill. Yet the 19-year-old is being treated differently. Khaver has served the first 10 months of his prison sentence not in a state facility but in the city's Central Booking and Intake Center, an often crowded facility that typically houses detainees after they are arrested.