Court Of Appeals

In a boon to hospitals, patients can be held liable for bills for emergency care they received when they were minors if their parents refused to pay, a divided Maryland Court of Appeals ruled yesterday. "This ruling is critically important for hospitals," said Herbert A. Thaler Jr., lawyer for the hospitals. As a practical matter, he said, the 4-3 ruling largely affects people who turn 18, legal adulthood, within three years of receiving emergency medical care that their parents refused to pay for. The hospital has three years from treatment to file suit.

Maryland's top federal prosecutor and a Howard County Circuit Court judge are among six candidates seeking appointment to the Maryland Court of Appeals, the state's highest court. A seat on the court will open this month because Judge Lawrence F. Rodowsky, a member of the top court since 1980, will reach the mandatory retirement age of 70. He is scheduled to step down Nov. 9. The state Administrative Office of the Courts this week named the six individuals seeking appointment to Rodowsky's seat on the bench.

HAS the Maryland Court of Appeals decided to become the expert adjudicators of electric-power issues? That's possible, based on its precedent-setting decision to stop electric deregulation in the Baltimore area, pending a hearing tomorrow. Yet the state's highest court is ill-equipped to make the judgments sought by a New Jersey trade group that wants to overturn the 1999 deregulation order of the state Public Service Commission. The PSC spent an arduous 30 months hammering out a plan.

Maryland's top judge said yesterday that he wants the American Bar Association to examine the state's system of disciplining unscrupulous lawyers and to recommend ways to improve it.We're going to look at the system, quite frankly," said Robert M. Bell, chief judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals. The court's always interested in trying to improve the processes and procedures."Bell's comments came after a series in IThe Sun this week chronicled the problems Maryland lawyers have policing their own. But the judge said that members of the court had decided earlier this month to invite outside scrutiny of the system.

The Maryland Court of Appeals yesterday sided with the developer of Sojourner-Douglass College's satellite campus in Edgewater, ruling that the historically black college's facility will not have to be torn down and that its construction did not violate a neighborhood covenant. The opinion reverses a ruling made by the Court of Special Appeals. "This particular legal victory closes a chapter in a long struggle," said civil rights activist Carl Snowden, a supporter of the school. "The decision, of course, is a welcome decision."

The Maryland Court of Appeals has ended a nearly four-year legal battle between Black & Decker Corp. and its former advertising and public relations firm, declining to hear the case. The court's one-sentence rejection means that Black & Decker, originally sued for $1.5 million, must pay $195,000 plus $40,000 in interest to Phyllis B. Brotman, owner of Image Dynamics. Brotman sued the Towson toolmaker and one of her former employees, David P. Olsen, in 1998 after Black & Decker dropped her firm and started working with Olsen.

A Baltimore lawyer who is a former assistant federal prosecutor and former deputy director of the Legal Aid Bureau had his law license suspended yesterday by the Court of Appeals. Michael G. Middleton, in private practice since 1988, received a suspension of at least three years. In a 16-page opinion, the state's top judges said he was incompetent in representing several criminal defendants and had been found in criminal contempt in November for lying to a Baltimore County judge to win a delay in a trial.

Maryland's highest court is poised to create a family division in the state's five largest circuit courts to consolidate everything from child-support to life-support matters.Proponents, including Chief Judge Robert M. Bell of the Court of Appeals, say a family division is needed to efficiently manage the TC family cases, which have swelled to half the civil cases on any given circuit court docket, and to get appropriate services for the families.Because the emotionally explosive cases often sprawl across juvenile and adult courts, coordination is difficult.

A shareholder lawsuit against former executives and officers of Allfirst Financial Inc., where a rogue trader perpetrated one of the largest bank frauds in history, has been resurrected after the Maryland Court of Appeals agreed to hear the case later this year. The state's highest court agreed late Thursday without comment to review the case, more than two years after it was dismissed by a Baltimore Circuit Court judge. The $691 million currency trading scandal has been the subject of much litigation, though the only person who has been charged with a crime is the trader, John M. Rusnak, who is in federal prison in West Virginia serving a 7 1/2 -year sentence.

The state's highest court has reversed the decision of a Montgomery County judge who threw out DNA evidence against a rape suspect on the grounds that it was unconstitutional to collect his genetic profile for future use. In a one-page order issued Tuesday, the Court of Appeals did not explain the reasoning behind the decision or mention the constitutional questions surrounding the 1994 law that led to the creation of the state's DNA databank, saying a...