Conviction

The state's highest court has refused to review the reversal of a cocaine-distribution conviction of a Westminster man believed to be serving the longest prison sentence for drug dealing ever handed down in a Carroll County court.Without comment, the Court of Appeals last week declined to review Noland Maurice Rheubottom's case. Earlier this year, the Court of Special Appeals reversed Rheubottom's cocaine distribution conviction of Jan. 20, 1993, his third in four years.That court said Carroll Circuit Judge Raymond E. Beck Sr. failed to instruct the jury about incorrect statements made by a county prosecutor in his closing arguments.

The state's highest court has upheld the murder and related convictions of a Dundalk man who police said was involved in a 2009 drug deal gone awry and fatally shot a bystander as she was speaking with relatives who had returned from church. In a decision issued Tuesday, a unanimous Court of Appeals rejected all of Warren Jerome Yates' claims, including that Baltimore County prosecutors lacked evidence to prove he committed a second-degree felony murder. Yates was convicted in 2009 of that, along with weapons, drug and assault charges, and sentenced to a total of 75 years in prison.

The Maryland Court of Appeals denied yesterday a request to have the murder conviction of a Waldorf man erased on the grounds that the man died while his appeal was pending. The request was made on behalf of Stefan Tyson Bell, who was convicted in August 2003 of first-degree murder in the fatal beating of a Gambrills teenager, Joseph A. Demarest, 17, who was killed in 1996. Bell, 27, died of a heroin overdose in prison in March 2005 before an appeal. Bell's lawyer, assistant public defender George E. Burns Jr., had argued that according to court precedent, Bell's conviction should be vacated because he died before a first-level appeal was completed.

STAMFORD, Conn. -- The Connecticut Supreme Court unanimously upheld Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel's murder conviction yesterday, more than 30 years after a killing that sparked decades of intrigue. Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, was convicted in 2002 of bludgeoning his neighbor, Martha Moxley, to death with a golf club in 1975 in wealthy Greenwich. Skakel, who along with the victim was 15 at the time, is serving 20 years to life in prison. He appealed his conviction to the Connecticut Supreme Court last year, arguing among other things that the statute of limitations had expired when he was charged in 2000.

An Annapolis handyman convicted of murdering an Arnold woman in 1992 has filed a $500,000 lawsuit claiming his lawyer's performance at trial was "negligent."Albert G. Givens was represented at the trial by Paul M. Kirby, an Annapolis lawyer who was at one time an Anne Arundel County assistant state's attorney and who served as a public defender for more than 10 years.In the suit filed Monday against Mr. Kirby in Anne Arundel Circuit Court, Givens -- who has served 15 months of a life sentence with no chance for parole -- claims he "would have been acquitted" of the first-degree murder charge if Mr. Kirby "was not so incompetent."

The murder conviction of William L. Snyder Sr., who was sentenced to life in prison for the 1986 Valentine's Day beating death of his wife, was overturned yesterday by the state Court of Special Appeals.The court ruled that police speculation had been entered improperly as evidence during the trial in Baltimore County Circuit Court in August 1993, when a jury convicted Mr. Snyder of first-degree murder.During the trial, police officers testified they had interviewed people who said the victim, Frances Kay Snyder, 43, was terrified of her husband and that they had "enough proof" of what happened.

The narcotics traffickers should be doing handstands today. They should chip in and send condolence cards to Preston Barnes' poor mother, who says she will visit her son's grave and tell him the wonderful news that his killing has been avenged. The drug traffickers should accompany her, in a gesture of group solidarity, and all should lay flowers in the cemetery.Barnes' death, and the subsequent conviction of the hapless police Sgt. Stephen R. Pagotto, is the drug dealer's triumph. Put aside, for a moment, that Pagotto made mistakes of procedure, and that, in the terror of a few frantic seconds, in a gesture of self-preservation, he failed to follow a rule book.

Telephone records and eyewitness testimony outweighed physical evidence in the murder conviction of an Owings Mills man late Tuesday by a Howard County jury. Lamont Johnson, 24, was found guilty of first-degree felony murder as well as first-degree attempted robbery and two related gun charges in the shooting death of Jason Batts in the parking lot of a Columbia apartment complex in May 2008. Though Johnson's fingerprints were not found on what was left of a sawed-off shotgun, cell phone records linked Johnson to a cell tower near the murder scene before and immediately after Batts was killed.

Joyce Danna remains in prison, although her 15-year-old murder conviction was overturned April 8 and a Baltimore County Circuit Court ordered her freed on $25,000 bond.Rachel Wohl, Mrs. Danna's lawyer, said her client's family and friends have not been able to post bail.Ms. Wohl said a fund set up by the House of Ruth, a shelter for battered women, has raised nearly $2,000, almost the 10 percent a bail bondsman requires.But the lawyer said she had expected Mrs. Danna to be freed immediately after Judge Thomas J. Bollinger set bail during a hearing five days after the conviction was overturned.