Closing Arguments

The attorney for a man accused of murdering a baby argued yesterday that any of several people -- parents included -- could have killed the Crofton boy, but prosecutors said only Zenon Cantu Jr. really had an opportunity.After five days of testimony, both sides gave closing arguments before an Anne Arundel County Circuit courtroom packed with misty-eyed relatives and friends of Cantu and the baby, Nicholas R. Alford.As the two camps left the courtroom, lawyers and deputies herded them to opposite sides of the hall to avoid a repetition of a hallway confrontation that occurred early in the week.

In a move that caught even her lawyers off guard, Ruthann Aron cut short her murder-for-hire retrial yesterday and pleaded no contest to charges that she had put out a contract to have her husband and another man killed.Aron's decision came at the last minute, just as jurors were preparing to hear closing arguments and begin deliberating.As opposed to pleading guilty, the "nolo contendere" plea leaves her record technically free of convictions or any admission of guilt.Montgomery County Circuit Judge Vincent Ferretti Jr. immediately revoked Aron's $25,000 bond, and returned the prominent Potomac developer and one-time U.S. Senate candidate to jail to await sentencing.

The jury in the murder-for-hire trial of Robert Dwayne Harris went home last night without reaching a verdict, after a defense attorney criticized police work in the case as shoddy and the prosecutor called Harris a con man with "an explanation for everything."Jurors began deliberations about 3: 45 p.m. yesterday, after hearing closing arguments that summed up a week's worth of testimony about the slaying of Harris' fiancee, Teresa Lynn McLeod of Pasadena.Harris, 24, is accused of hiring Russell Raymond Brill to kill McLeod so that he could benefit from her life insurance policies.

The two-month trial of nine men accused as henchmen in one of the most murderous drug organizations in Baltimore history entered its final leg yesterday, with jurors listening intently to Shakespearean passages and stories of horrific violence.In closing arguments, prosecutors said the Anthony Jones gang killed at least eight people, set fire to a man, threw out a body in a trash barrel, put a city police officer on its payroll and carted millions of dollars worth of cocaine in secret compartments of cars.

Wrapping up their case yesterday against suspected serial killer Joseph R. Metheny, on trial facing charges of attempted murder and attempted rape, prosecutors replayed an audio recording in which the suspect indicates he intended to kill the Baltimore woman."

A Glen Burnie High School teacher acquitted two years ago of charges that he had sex with one of his students in the 1970s is fighting accusations of sexual misconduct with her and three other students to save his job.Seven school board members heard closing arguments in a school board administrative hearing last night in the case of Thomas A. Newman, 47, accused of having sexual relations, kissing and sexually harassing four female students over an 11-year...

After 10 months of testimony about developer Kingdon Gould Jr.'s proposal for a quarry in Jessup, the Howard County Board of Appeals this week finally heard the first of the closing arguments -- with proponents insisting the mining operation would benefit the community, the county and the state."

A Baltimore County jury took less than two hours yesterday to find Rafel Bonner guilty of murder, rape and other charges in the January death of a 16-year-old runaway.Bonner, a 26-year-old unemployed Essex man, was convicted in the Jan. 20 strangulation of Courtney Danielle Letiro, an Edgewood girl who had run away from home with two friends.The trial began Tuesday and concluded yesterday with prosecutors saying Bonner beat and raped the teen-ager near the Back River sewage plant, and robbed her of jewelry.

Look for drama. Look for Deputy District Attorney Marcia Clark and chief defense attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. to gaze sincerely into the eyes of the jurors. Look for the prosecution to tell a gruesome tale of murder. Look for the defense to mock the evidence.Don't look at your watch.The ideal closing argument, law professors and lawyers say, is punchy and short."A good argument should be like a good joke," said Paul Bergman, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Closing arguments in Jason Aaron DeLong's first-degree murder trial are to begin this morning.Defense attorneys and prosecutors are expected to summarize what they believe they proved during the 14 days of testimony.The arguments -- each side will be given two opportunities to address the Carroll Circuit Court jury hearing the case -- are expected to last into the afternoon, attorneys said yesterday.Since Aug. 23, the jury of nine women and three men has heard testimony from almost a dozen mental health specialists, friends and relatives of Mr. DeLong, detectives and Mr. DeLong himself.

Jurors are expected to begin deliberations Tuesday in a federal death penalty case set deep within the "violent world of drug dealing, intimidation and murder" of a tiny section of Northeast Baltimore, prosecutors say, and the alleged drug ring that ran it, selling heroin and crack under one name: Special. The three defendants - Marvin Gilbert, 34; James "Miami" Dinkins, 37; and Darron "Moo Man" Goods, 24 - are accused, in various combinations, of drug conspiracy and multiple killings, including the shooting deaths of two witnesses, one of them on Thanksgiving Day in 2006.

A Baltimore jury acquitted a 19-year-old Baltimore man last week in his second trial in the death of Christopher Wayman, 23. The first trial ended in a hung jury. Prosecutor Richard Gibson contended that on April 19, 2007, Korey Harris, wearing a bandanna that covered the lower half of his face, knocked on the door of Wayman's home in the 2400 block of Seabury Road and shot him when he answered. In closing arguments, Gibson alleged that there was a break-in at Wayman's home two days earlier and that Harris believed Wayman's girlfriend was accusing him of it. Before Wayman could get to Harris, the then-17-year-old attacked, firing at a distance measured in inches, the prosecutor said.

A state delegate from Anne Arundel County, who is being sued for damages by a Pasadena woman who claims he tricked her into signing over her home, told a jury Wednesday that he was "doing the Lord's work." In his closing arguments, Del. Tony McConkey, a Severna Park Republican and real estate agent who is a law school graduate and represented himself in court, said that he was trying to help the woman save her home from foreclosure and that he never "knowingly and willfully broke the law."

A case against a Baltimore man accused of ordering a witness killing from jail using a contraband cell phone is expected to go to the jury Thursday after prosecutors have their final say in the morning. It is a last chance to address defense claims that the government's star witness - the "glue" holding the case together - is a lying "snake." Patrick Albert Byers Jr. is accused of ordering Carl Lackl's death to prevent the Rosedale man from testifying against him in a 2006 city murder case.

Jacksonville residents are justifiably distressed about a 26,000-gallon gasoline leak that seeped into the groundwater supplying area wells, but their fears about lingering contamination and possible health risks are unsubstantiated, a defense attorney representing Exxon Mobil Corp. said yesterday during his closing arguments in Baltimore County Circuit Court. The 300 or so plaintiffs suing the oil company contend that their physical and emotional health were damaged, along with property values, because of the spill three years ago at an Exxon service station in Jacksonville.

GREENBELT - Jurors who are to decide the fate of former Prince George's County schools chief Andre J. Hornsby were virtually bombarded yesterday with facts, figures and entreaties by attorneys for the prosecution and the defense during closing arguments in the four-week-long corruption trial. Describing each of the 22 counts against Hornsby in federal court, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stuart A. Berman said that Hornsby "defrauded the school system of his honest services" when he tried to enrich himself through surreptitious deals with a longtime business partner and with a saleswoman for an educational materials company who was his live-in girlfriend.

When a shooting victim testified that the Park Heights man charged with the crime was not his assailant, the prosecutor successfully argued to a jury that the victim was lying - that he was obeying "the law of the streets" in Baltimore, "the city that bleeds." Kevin R. Lee was convicted and sentenced to 30 years behind bars. Maryland's highest court said yesterday that the prosecutor went too far in invoking Baltimore's notorious "stop snitching" culture, and reversed Lee's 2005 conviction.

GREENBELT -- Former Prince George's County school Superintendent Andre J. Hornsby cut an off-the-books deal with his girlfriend, who worked at an educational-supplies company, to enrich them both, a federal prosecutor told jurors yesterday in closing arguments of Hornsby's corruption trial. In arguments after four weeks of testimony, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stuart A. Berman walked jurors through a 16-count indictment against Hornsby that alleges he orchestrated an elaborate scheme to award high-value school contracts to his lover and a business associate in exchange for kickbacks, and that he ordered school district employees to destroy the evidence.

WASHINGTON -- Testimony ended yesterday in the military trial of a Navy physician accused of secretly videotaping Naval Academy midshipmen having sex after prosecutors and defense attorneys argued over the doctor's whereabouts at the time gay pornography was downloaded to his computer. Closing arguments are scheduled for this morning in the general court-martial of Cmdr. Kevin Ronan at the Washington Navy Yard. The 41-year-old Annapolis resident is charged with conduct unbecoming an officer, illegal wiretapping and obstruction of justice.

A federal jury in Baltimore is expected to hear closing arguments this morning in the first-in-the-nation lawsuit against a Kansas church accused of invading the privacy of a family mourning the death of their son killed in Iraq. The civil trial, now a week old, has pitted a grieving father of a 20-year-old Marine against members of the Westboro Baptist Church, who Albert Snyder says exacerbated his pain and suffering by protesting at his son's March 2006 funeral with anti-gay slogans.