Confession

I did a double take one afternoon when I spotted a large ad plastered across an MTA transit bus. The elongated placard was from the Archdiocese of Baltimore and bore the words "The Light Is on for You." The ad caught me off my guard. It was saying to Baltimore's Roman Catholics during Lent: Get up and go to confession. Confess to a priest. 'Fess up - and seek spiritual advice from someone trained in giving it. Confession, Reconciliation, Sacrament of Penance - whatever its name - went into a sharp decline after the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.

How much money should a man get for being locked in a maximum-security prison for a crime he did not commit? A million dollars? Two million? Ten?For Anthony Gray Jr., the Calvert County man who was freed from prison this week after serving more than seven years, the financial compensation may be this: zero.Legal experts say that a successful malpractice case against his former attorneys may be a long shot and that Gray has almost no chance of winning a lawsuit for the government's wrongful prosecution.

Joseph R. Metheny dragged his hands across his face, listening as his voice was played yesterday in Baltimore Circuit Court in a tape-recorded confession he gave to police more than a year ago."I killed her. I'm a very sick person," Metheny is heard saying on the tape in response to questions by Baltimore homicide Detective Homer M. Pennington Jr.Metheny, 43, on trial for murder in the stabbing death of Kimberly Spicer, 23, confessed to police hours after her body was found near his Southwest Baltimore trailer on Dec. 15, 1996.

After failing to get his 15-page confession dismissed as evidence, a 29-year-old former Wells Fargo security guard pleaded guilty yesterday to smothering an East Baltimore woman at the senior citizens complex where he worked.Thomas Wyatt Campbell, who arranged stuffed animals around the body of 59-year-old Edith Akins after killing her in December, was given a life sentence. All but 50 years was suspended by Circuit Judge Gary I. Strausberg, who refused a defense request to throw out Campbell's confession.

Police can lie to suspects, mislead their relatives and keep juveniles from seeing their parents during an interrogation, legal experts say.The release of Allen Jacob Chesnet, a teen-ager from North East freed this week six months after he was charged in the killing of a neighbor, highlights the importance of the tools police use when they interrogate suspects.Prosecutors in Cecil County dropped murder charges against the 16-year-old suspect Tuesday after they disclosed what they had known for months: that blood in the home of the victim, Beulah G. Honaker, 52, matched neither the victim's nor Allen's.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court wiped out yesterday the conviction of a Baltimore youth for his role in the 1993 fatal beating of another young man in a dispute over money.The conviction of Kevin Domonic Gray was flawed, the court ruled by a 5-4 vote, because prosecutors used an edited confession to police by another youth who was involved -- a statement that unfairly pointed to Gray even though it was not supposed to be used against him.Gray's name had been deleted from the confession. But the court majority said yesterday that the deletion was so obvious that it might well have called "the jurors' attention specially to the removed name."

Jurors being asked to order the execution of confessed killer Joseph R. Metheny yesterday heard a tape of his emotionless confession to the 1994 strangulation of Cathy Ann Magaziner, a prostitute he buried near his trailer at a Southwest Baltimore pallet company.In August, Metheny, 43, pleaded guilty to murdering and robbing Magaziner. A jury in Baltimore County, where the case has been moved from the city, is being asked to sentence Metheny to death.Metheny is serving life without parole for the 1996 murder of Kimberly Spicer, and another 50 years for kidnapping and an attempted sex offense of Rita Kemper also in 1996.

WASHINGTON -- The current fad notion here that President Clinton can resolve the Monica Lewinsky episode with a speech from the Oval Office is a pipe dream. There is no magic bullet for this one.Politicians are by nature optimistic people, and they don't like to accept the idea that there are problems that are simply beyond an acceptable resolution. But there are just such situations, and this is one of them. It is far too late for a speech to make the difference.The president obviously couldn't get away with simply insisting there was no sexual relationship between him and the young White House intern, which is his latest word on the subject, offered six months ago. Even if Mr. Clinton were telling the truth, it wouldn't be convincing until the nation heard from the grand jury convened by independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr.

FORT WORTH, Texas - Sobbing and in a hoarse, quivering voice, Diane Zamora took jurors at her murder trial through a chilling account of what happened in the early hours of Dec. 4, 1995, when 16-year-old Adrianne Jones was shot to death in a cow pasture.Her daylong testimony on the witness stand yesterday differed wildly from the confession she gave police and from what friends remembered her telling them about the slaying.This time, she blamed her boyfriend, depicting David Graham as a rapacious, gun-toting crazy.

Opening a case in which a 29-year-old man is accused of killing two Baltimore boys -- hoping to send at least one "into a better land" -- a city prosecutor described to jurors yesterday how the youths were strangled with a cord and left to die."You will hear statements -- taped statements -- in which he confessed to strangling both of these victims," said Mark P. Cohen, the assistant state's attorney who is prosecuting the case against Shawn E. Brown.Brown is charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Marvin Wise, 8, and Obdul Richards, 16, last year.

WASHINGTON -The Supreme Court refused Monday to permit prolonged, secret questioning of crime suspects, ruling that even voluntary confessions may not be used in a federal court if the defendant was held more than six hours before he talked. Justice David H. Souter pointed to the number of people who have been shown to be innocent through DNA evidence but who nonetheless had confessed to the crime. Police questioning "isolates and pressures the individual," he said, "and there is mounting empirical evidence that these pressures can induce a frighteningly high percentage of people to confess to crimes they never committed."

I did a double take one afternoon when I spotted a large ad plastered across an MTA transit bus. The elongated placard was from the Archdiocese of Baltimore and bore the words "The Light Is on for You." The ad caught me off my guard. It was saying to Baltimore's Roman Catholics during Lent: Get up and go to confession. Confess to a priest. 'Fess up - and seek spiritual advice from someone trained in giving it. Confession, Reconciliation, Sacrament of Penance - whatever its name - went into a sharp decline after the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.

Mass didn't start until 12:10 p.m. yesterday, but Susan Topper made sure to get to the Baltimore Basilica before noon. The Pasadena woman, a retired state police officer, joined the line outside the confessional and waited for the light above the curtain to turn green. "It makes me feel closer to God," Topper said after Mass at the historic church. "When you do penance, if you really pray intently, you really do feel a sense of relief, that God forgives your sins and you can start anew."

MODESTO, Calif. - The Rev. Joseph Illo, pastor of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Modesto, Calif., has told parishioners in a homily and in a follow-up letter that if they voted for Barack Obama, they should consider going to confession because of the president-elect's position on abortion. "If you are one of the 54 percent of Catholics who voted for a pro-abortion candidate, you were clear on his position and you knew the gravity of the question, I urge you to go to confession before receiving communion.

The statements of a Dundalk teenager accused of fatally shooting a 16-year-old whom he and his friends picked at random to beat up can be used at trial, a Baltimore County judge ruled Friday. William R. "Billy" Ferandes, 17, is charged with first-degree murder in the January death of Joshua Gibson. Defense attorney Andrew I. Alperstein had argued that his client's statements to police were involuntary because, he said, homicide detectives used implied threats and promises to persuade Ferandes to admit to the shooting.

The Maryland attorney general's office said yesterday that it plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a state Court of Appeals ruling that a prisoner's child-molestation confession can't be used against him because he had asked for counsel years earlier during a separate interrogation. "We don't agree with the [state] court," said Chief Deputy Attorney General Katherine Winfree. The law doesn't "suggest that you can invoke your right to counsel for life," she said. The opinion, reached last week with two of the seven judges dissenting, means Michael Blaine Shatzer's confession that he sexually abused his young son can't be introduced in court.

A West Baltimore man has emerged from a coma and confessed to throwing his 3-year-old son off the Key Bridge into the Patapsco River, Maryland Transportation Authority Police said yesterday. After his confession Wednesday, police obtained an arrest warrant charging Stephen Todd Nelson, 37, with first-degree murder. Police have not recovered the body of the boy, Turner Jordan Nelson, but said the search will continue indefinitely. Turner's mother, Natisha Johnson, said yesterday afternoon that she was prepared for police to charge Nelson with murder but that she still hopes that the boy is alive.

His tape-recorded confession to killing a child gave police and prosecutors everything they thought they needed to send Melvin Lorenzo Jones to prison, probably for the rest of his life. What the confession didn't reveal was a reason for the brutal crime. "It started raining," he told his interrogators. "I just snapped, lost it, grabbed him around his neck" and stabbed 11-year-old Irvin Harris more than a dozen times last year as the boy fought for his life. Police and prosecutors got what they hoped for. Yesterday, Jones pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in Baltimore Circuit Court.

HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo. -- In the hush of a warm afternoon, the Rev. Larry Solan waits for sinners. The veteran priest sets aside a half-hour every Saturday to hear the failings of his flock at St. Mark Roman Catholic Church. On a typical week, he sees two penitents, perhaps three. Some weeks, no one comes. Today, Solan waits 10 minutes, 20. Two little boys take a bench in the lobby, bowing their heads over a bag of crackers as they wait for afternoon Mass. Their parents chat with friends.

Federal prosecutors portrayed Leeander Jerome Blake yesterday as a teenager who prowled downtown Annapolis with his friend looking for a victim and then took part in an armed carjacking, killing a man in front of his home. But the defense lawyer for Blake countered that his alleged confession to police in 2002 is the unreliable result of scare tactics and that he played no role in the 2002 carjacking and killing of Straughan Lee Griffin. Both sides presented closing arguments yesterday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.