Court

An 11th-hour challenge to the eligibility of Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler to run for that office was dismissed because last-minute lawsuits are "too disruptive" to elections, the state's highest court said yesterday. The unanimous Court of Appeals opinion says the judges are not considering whether Gansler met the requirements -- a lower court ruled that he did -- because the matter should not have been heard. The opinion elaborates on the court's Nov. 2 order that threw out the case for being filed too late for the Nov. 7 election.

Maryland's highest court rejected same-sex marriage yesterday and upheld the state's 34-year-old statute defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. In a case watched closely around the nation, the Maryland Court of Appeals' 4-3 ruling dealt a blow to gay and lesbian advocates who launched their fight to overturn the state's marriage law three years ago. Yesterday, those advocates pledged to take the battle for marriage to the General Assembly, where two lawmakers have already said they will sponsor legislation to legalize same-sex marriage.

Maryland's top federal prosecutor is in the final stages of the process to fill a vacancy at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, according to sources close to the procedure. U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein's name has been linked to the judgeship for more than a year. The vetting process has accelerated in the past several weeks, with the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice asking former colleagues about Rosenstein as part of background checks. Supporters have called Rosenstein a sharp attorney, a successful and low-key leader of the highest integrity.

County police identify two Hillendale victims County police identified the two bodies found Wednesday in a home in the Hillendale area and continued to investigate the deaths as homicides. The victims were identified yesterday as Girard Scott Hall Jr., 22, and Frances Theresa Childress, 25, both of the first block of Astro Court, according to county police. Childress is described in court records as Hall's girlfriend. No arrests had been made by yesterday afternoon, and investigators were awaiting findings from the medical examiner's office to determine cause of the deaths, said Bill Toohey, a police spokesman.

Not long after taking the bench for the afternoon docket, Baltimore County District Judge Bruce S. Lamdin noticed a woman leaving the courtroom with a crying baby. "If she only knew how much I hate kids," the judge said, "she would not have brought that kid in here today." He later asked a Pennsylvania man caught speeding why every resident of that state "drives like a fool." "What is it up there? Is it in the water?" Lamdin asked. "You know, I get on [Interstate] 83 every day, going back and forth to work, and you all go flying by me. ... What's the big rush to get back to Pennsylvania?

With about a term and a half now under its belt, the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. has made a sharp turn to the right. As a new term begins today, the court will have at least three major opportunities to reassert fundamental constitutional rights of individuals in confronting government policies. Certainly, the court should be more protective of individual rights than it generally has been so far. As predicted, Justices Roberts and Alito have lined up with their more conservative colleagues, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, just as the more liberal John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have tended to band together.

For months last year, 50-year-old Larry Davis threatened and stalked and hurt his ex-girlfriend, according to court paperwork and testimony. He would sit in a chair across from the woman's Baltimore County home, a place where he had hidden knives and drill bits behind wall pictures and in furniture before she had kicked him out. He would disable her security system and sneak inside. He would ignore stay-away orders from the court. He once beat her with his Latex-gloved fists, and he once cut a hole in her roof and tried to crawl into her attic, according to court records.

A 62-year-old Baltimore man was sentenced yesterday in federal court to more than four years in prison for possessing more than 600 images of child pornography. In addition to a 51-month prison sentence, U.S. District Judge Andre M. Davis also ordered that Alfred O'Neill register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. According to the statement of facts presented to the court as part of the plea agreement, the Maryland State Police received a complaint in November 2004 from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about a suspicious person in Maryland using an Internet screen name.

For centuries, judges and barristers in the United Kingdom have come to court wearing white horsehair wigs and long black gowns. King Charles II started the wig trend in England in the 1660s, after admiring the powdered wigs worn in the French court of King Louis XIV. The solid black robe was introduced upon the king's death in 1685. But centuries of tradition may soon come to an end. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, is considering dropping the current formal garb for barristers and judges in civil proceedings to make the court more consistent with those around the world.

The right to a fair trial is such a fundamental freedom in this country that the charges leveled against the U.S. Coast Guard's administrative court system merit serious attention, at the very least. The single most damning piece of evidence is the sworn statement made by a retired Coast Guard judge who says she was told to always rule in the government's favor. Imagine a U.S. District Court adjudicating civil cases under the same guidelines. Impeachment proceedings couldn't be arranged fast enough.

Baltimore City Councilwoman Helen L. Holton appeared in Circuit Court on Wednesday to listen as her defense attorneys argued that the campaign finance charges against her should be dropped. Holton, a deacon, clutched what appeared to be a Bible and sat with family members during the 90-minute hearing. She declined to comment afterward. The West Baltimore councilwoman is charged with conspiracy to violate campaign limits by requesting that developers John Paterakis and Ronald H. Lipscomb fund a $12,500 poll for her re-election campaign.

Olympic News, one of the biggest retail operations at BWI Marshall Airport, must stop using its name after losing a trademark infringement lawsuit filed by the U.S. Olympic Committee, but the two parties are sparring over the timing of making changes to the name, signage and other promotional and advertising materials. U.S. District Judge Deborah Chasanow ruled in May that the use of Olympic News is unauthorized and violates federal law that grants the Olympic Committee exclusive right to the word Olympic and symbols associated with the games.

In the book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Toobin wrote that Justice David Souter wept after the Supreme Court's nakedly political, legally indefensible and bitterly divided decision in Bush v. Gore. And apparently it's been downhill from there. In his 18 years on the court, Mr. Souter has proved himself to be quite brilliant, and of course he became the stealth nominee who didn't turn out quite the way President George H.W. Bush's handlers expected. In fact, Mr. Souter emerged as one of the strongest and most principled moderate voices on the court (don't let anybody fool you - there are no real liberals on this court)

A legal challenge to proposed ballot language for November's slot-machine referendum has mostly failed, although yesterday the state's highest court upheld a lower court's order to add one word to the hotly contested question. Last week, a panel of Anne Arundel Circuit Court judges ruled that the proposed ballot language was misleading but could be fixed by adding a single word to clarify that state education programs would be the primary and not sole recipients of anticipated revenues.

In a decision expected to clear the way for states to resume executions by lethal injection, the Supreme Court upheld yesterday Kentucky's execution procedures, which are used by nearly every state with a death penalty law, including Maryland. Executions across the country have been on hold since the high court agreed in September to hear the case of two Kentucky death row inmates who challenged the three-drug procedure, which is used to anesthetize, paralyze and stop the heart. Within hours of yesterday's ruling, the governor of Virginia announced that he was lifting his state's moratorium on executions, while several prosecutors and governors around the country said they would seek execution dates as quickly as the courts can set them.

As Arizona Sen. John McCain zeroes in on the Republican nomination for president, he's trying to woo some of the doubting party faithful with the tried-and-true promise to appoint more conservative judges - in the mold of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. - to the U. S. Supreme Court. That may be reassuring to some, but it isn't to others, like us, who fear that the court's slow race to undercut existing rights could become a stampede. Granted, whether one thinks the court is upholding or undermining fundamental rights and liberties is a matter of perspective, just as judicial activism and restraint are in the eyes of the beholder.

When Ida Brown was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease three years ago, her daughter sought assistance from a state program to help elderly people of limited means receive care in their homes or communities. But even though Brown, now 85, was too sick to live on her own - she couldn't dress or feed herself, and she wandered off at night - she was too well to get help from the state. Her daughter, Diane Byus, sued the state, and with the help of the Maryland Legal Aid Bureau and AARP, she won. The Maryland Court of Special Appeals ruled last month that the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's standards for that portion of the Medicaid program were stricter than is allowed under federal law, and now the department has been ordered to re-evaluate Brown.

Do more to monitor judicial misconduct I found two surprises in the article regarding Baltimore County District Judge Bruce S. Lamdin's inappropriate behavior - the fact that only one judge was singled out for inappropriate behavior and the fact that the Maryland Commission on Judicial Disabilities receives an average of only 111 written complaints about judges a year ("Judge faces hearing over his conduct," Oct. 15). Anyone with regular business in Maryland courts is aware that there are several judges who act inappropriately on a regular, if not daily, basis.

Not long after taking the bench for the afternoon docket, Baltimore County District Judge Bruce S. Lamdin noticed a woman leaving the courtroom with a crying baby. "If she only knew how much I hate kids," the judge said, "she would not have brought that kid in here today." He later asked a Pennsylvania man caught speeding why every resident of that state "drives like a fool." "What is it up there? Is it in the water?" Lamdin asked. "You know, I get on [Interstate] 83 every day, going back and forth to work, and you all go flying by me. ... What's the big rush to get back to Pennsylvania?

State highway officials have agreed to limit construction on the disputed Intercounty Connector highway through the Washington suburbs while a federal court is hearing a lawsuit challenging the $2.4 billion project, according to a court document released yesterday. In papers filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, state and federal officials stipulated that contractors would do mainly preliminary work for the next month on the 18-mile east-west highway linking Interstate 95 in Prince George's County with Interstate 270 in Montgomery County.