Court Hearing

Ultimately, and with a little help from a certain former governor, Mike Grear got what he was after -- $773 in court-ordered restitution for car damage -- so it's probably difficult to see any degree of selflessness or civic-mindedness in his dogged pursuit of that money.But here's my point: Grear stayed on the case for two frustrating years, long after most crime victims would have given up, and he exacted a little piece of justice from a car thief who might otherwise have walked away laughing.

A Hampstead teen-ager was being held yesterday at the Carroll County Detention Center in lieu of $96,000 bail, charged as an adult in a string of burglaries and vandalism last winter.Douglas K. Baker, 16, was arrested last week on multiple charges stemming from 17 incidents alleged to have occurred between November 1996 and February, court records show.Baker was waived to the adult court at a Circuit Court hearing Friday, prosecutor David P. Daggett said yesterday.Daggett asked District Court Judge JoAnn M. Ellinghaus-Jones yesterday to forward all of the cases except three involving misdemeanor charges to the Circuit Court.

WASHINGTON -- Focusing on the law and leaving the politics to others, the Supreme Court will publicly weigh today President Clinton's plea to delay a sexual misconduct case against him for four more years.With a prominent private lawyer and the government's top Supreme Court advocate arguing for the president, and a self-styled "country lawyer" speaking for the plaintiff, the court will hold a one-hour hearing on a major constitutional question about presidential immunity to lawsuits.Significant political peril looms for the president if the justices ultimately decide to let the lawsuit by Paula Corbin Jones go forward in coming months, instead of postponing it until he is out of office, as he asks.

The Maryland Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that a Baltimore judge did not have the right to dictate what the media published from sources outside the courtroom as a condition of access to a juvenile court hearing.The case came before the state's highest court after a petition by The Sun, which in the past year has both won and been denied access to hearings in the case of a missing Baltimore boy and his mother, Jacqueline L. Bouknight.Ms. Bouknight was released Oct. 31 after 7 1/2 years in jail for failing to disclose the boy's whereabouts.

A man who briefly abandoned his child while attempting to flee security officers after reportedly stealing clothing from a department store at the White Marsh Mall was being held on bail, Baltimore County police said.Charged with theft, resisting arrest and assaulting the officers // and held in lieu of bail is David Tyler Bullock, 24, of the 5600 block of McClean Blvd. in Northeast Baltimore.Police said Mr. Bullock was shopping at Macy's last night when a security officer allegedly saw him place more than $100 worth of clothing inside a baby stroller that was occupied by his young daughter.

Flying solo as Baltimore's newest judge for the first time yesterday, the Honorable Jack I. Lesser dispensed traffic-court justice at a pace that only weeks earlier had seemed overwhelming to him.One man was excused for missing an earlier court hearing -- it clashed with his open-heart surgery, and he had the papers to prove it.Excuses did not work for a woman caught doing 43 mph in a 25 zone -- blaming her heavy foot on a big shoe did not clear her.And then...

A federal judge has granted the request of a death row inmate who sought to videotape John Thanos' execution as possible evidence that Maryland's gas chamber poses cruel and unusual punishment.But the issue will become moot if legislation authorizing lethal injection as a second form of execution is signed into law, as expected later this week.The written order, signed by U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis, affirms an earlier oral ruling that was contingent on his first-hand inspection of the gas chamber.

LEONARDTOWN -- With a baby-blue skull cap on his head and a smile on his face, killer John Frederick Thanos left the St. Mary's County courthouse here yesterday without saying if he will choose the gas chamber or lethal injection as the means of his impending execution.When asked which he preferred, Thanos replied, "Neither of them."However, in court, Thanos referred to a letter in which he said his preferred method of death would be by heart attack -- while in the arms of two beautiful women.

SANTA ANA, Calif. -- All they want is to go home.They have said so, over and over, for 10 months. They have told the psychiatrists, the lawyers, the judges and the caretakers who have come in and out of their lives like shadows.But Dr. Forrest Hayden Howard, 85, a retired obstetrician and gynecologist, is not going home. Not now, anyway. And neither is his wife, Catherine Marie Howard, 70, a retired nurse.Since August, their lives have been in the hands of a court-appointed conservator, who intervened after an Orange County social worker reported that the Howards' house was "dirty and disheveled" and their health neglected.

The county State's Attorney's Office has dropped charges against an Aberdeen man accused of making false statements to a police officer while dressed in women's clothing.Dwayne A. Norton, 22, had been charged on Jan. 30 with giving a Havre de Grace patrolman a false first and last name after the officer stopped him as he stood on a streetin the Concord Field area of the city at 4:18 a.m., court records say.Norton told the officer his first name was "Dwight" and spelled his last name as "Mortan," records say. The police officer, John W. Williams, later learned Norton's real name and arrested him, police said.

At court hearing after court hearing, Nicholas W. Browning has sat stoically as lawyers argued about his bail status, the doctors who would evaluate him and whether he would be tried in adult court or the juvenile system on charges that he killed his family. But yesterday, as Baltimore County prosecutor S. Ann Brobst read the gruesome details of the night that Browning methodically shot his parents and two younger brothers as they slept in their Cockeysville home, the 16-year-old removed his wire-rimmed glasses and wept.

The woman and her boyfriend boarded the No. 27 bus and tried to find a seat as it traveled through North Baltimore. But a fight quickly broke out between the pair and a group of nine students heading home from their Hampden middle school, police said. By the time Maryland Transit Administration police officers reached the bus along East 33rd in Waverly on Tuesday afternoon, the teens had punched and kicked the woman, dragging her out of the vehicle's rear door and leaving her with broken bones around her eye. The nine students from Robert Poole Middle School, who are all 14 or 15, are charged as juveniles with aggravated assault and destruction of property.

Kwaku Atta Poku, the Columbia cab owner who lost his family's townhouse to foreclosure after a refinancing, despite having made every mortgage payment, is to get another chance to present his case today in Maryland's highest court. In arguments that could change how lower courts handle foreclosure cases, attorneys for the immigrant from Ghana are fighting to overturn rulings in favor of Washington Mutual Inc., the national mortgage company that took and resold his Howard County house in 2005.

A Baltimore County judge denied bail yesterday for a 22-year-old man accused of fatally shooting the mother of his 3-year-old son in her rowhouse this week. Ryan Joseph Butler is being held on a first-degree murder charge in the death of Anna Marie Bergman, 20, who lived in the 300 block of Westshire Road in a neighborhood just west of Baltimore City. During a brief hearing in Towson District Court, a lawyer for Butler requested bail so the defendant could stay at his parents' Southwest Baltimore home.

The 26-year-old nurse was heading for a night shift Jan. 27, 1985, at a downtown Baltimore hospital when she was raped and stabbed - slashed so brutally that she was nearly decapitated. Now, almost 22 years later, city police believe they have identified her killer - a man who has been in prison all along. Orrell Youmans, 50, was arrested June 30, 1985, and charged in another city rape case, court records show. He is serving a 40-year sentence at Eastern Correctional Institute and, according to a court document, has a release date of 2015.

rockville -- Despite claims from his defense lawyers that he is mentally ill, convicted sniper John Allen Muhammad is competent to stand trial and will be allowed to act as his own lawyer at his Montgomery County murder trial that begins May 1, a county judge ruled yesterday. Muhammad, 45, who is on death row in Virginia for another sniper killing and is facing trial in Montgomery County in six slayings during the fall 2002 sniper rampage that terrorized the Washington area, sought yesterday to fire his lawyers.

WASHINGTON -- A last-minute decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the execution of a Florida inmate could temporarily halt lethal injections throughout the country until April. The high court decided yesterday to hear an argument by convicted killer Clarence Hill that his civil rights would be violated by Florida's lethal-injection method because it causes inmates to suffer pain during the procedure. "This is a stunning and very welcome development that puts on hold all Florida executions and may well put a timeout on all lethal-injection executions in the United States," said Abe Bonowitz, director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

Taking up the cause of public access to government information, Baltimore officials filed a lawsuit yesterday against the state prison system, demanding an uncensored version of a consultant's report about problems at the Central Booking and Intake Center. The city solicitor's office filed the unusual challenge in Circuit Court in Baltimore, citing the state's Public Information Act. The city argues that state prison officials, who operate the center, have "improperly and unlawfully withheld a public document by redacting so much of a report as to be tantamount to withholding it."

For years, William Nicholson supplied cocaine to three major drug dealers in Southeast Baltimore, and when he was arrested, the Highlandtown native had more than a pound of the drug hidden in his Yukon Denali. Last week, Nicholson entered a guilty plea that resulted in a prison term of no more than three years, a fraction of the 40 years he could have received if convicted of two charges of violating the drug kingpin statute. It appeared to be an unexpectedly generous plea deal. But Nicholson's short sentence brings to an end a case that, according to judges and court documents, involved either carelessness or wrongdoing on the part of prosecutors.

The city sought to join a lawsuit yesterday against Baltimore's booking center, accusing the state of mismanaging the crowded facility and hampering police efforts to reduce crime. In the past three months, more than 80 suspects have been released without charges from Central Booking and Intake Center because they failed to receive a hearing within 24 hours of arrest. In a court motion filed yesterday, city lawyers blame the state for the long-standing problems. "If the state can't figure out how to follow the law that dictates that they should operate the city centralized booking facility ... then we're all in danger," said Kristen Mahoney, chief of technical services for the city Police Department.