Courthouse

An Anne Arundel County deputy sheriff's leg was broken in a courtroom scuffle with a teen who deputies said refused to stop texting on his cell phone despite warnings that its use was banned in court. The incident is prompting officials to look again at the court's cell phone policy, which generally allows people to take cell phones into the Circuit Court building and use them everywhere except courtrooms. A poster-size notice in courtrooms tells people to turn off their phones. On Wednesday, deputies repeatedly told a person in the courtroom to put away his phone, but he refused and profanely started to tell off a deputy, Sheriff Ronald S. Bateman said.

People enter the Anne Arundel County Courthouse to get a marriage license, to get divorced, to settle disputes, to testify, and to take care of all sorts of things in their lives. Add one more reason: to visit the just-opened courthouse museum. Founders say the museum, some eight years in the making, weaves together the area's social fabric, history and the law. The goal is to show that the little courthouse in Annapolis not only aired the dirty laundry of the day but dealt with big issues of their eras because the brick building was, and still is, where all aspects of society intersect.

It's TMI - too much information, in the language of the Internet, cell phone texts and social media posts. Easy juror access to cyberspace is a growing problem for courts, whether it involves the criminal trial of Baltimore's mayor, an Anne Arundel County murder trial or a Florida drug case. Last week, a Maryland appeals court upended a first-degree murder conviction because a juror consulted Wikipedia for trial information. Earlier this year, the appeals judges erased a conviction for three counts of assault because a juror did cyberspace research and shared the findings with the rest of the jury.

For years, most of the wall space in the Anne Arundel County Courthouse library that wasn't behind bookcases was bare and white. But the walls have been spruced up recently with law prints and art of the state's capital city, giving patrons of the small public library something decorative to look at. Most recently, Judge Michael E. Loney donated a series of 19th-century French law prints from his chambers. They had been given to him by H. Chester Goudy, a retired Circuit Court judge and his former law partner.

Close up, Michael Jackson seemed fragile, his face a ghostly white, his eyes invariably shielded behind dark glasses, even indoors. When he spoke, the sound was an almost breathless whisper. Occasionally, some of us who were writing about his 2005 trial in Santa Maria, Calif., on charges of child molestation would relieve the tedium of endless testimony by ruminating on what color lipstick Jackson had chosen to wear that day - peach, perhaps, or was it orange? What struck me most was that regardless of how salacious or crude the testimony details, or how embarrassing they might appear to be, Jackson remained absolutely expressionless, his body immobile in his chair a few feet from us. For Jackson, once a pop star of sensational talent, the trial in Santa Barbara County Superior Court was undoubtedly the lowest point of a long career.

Parts of Charles County's Zekiah Swamp are every bit as inhospitable as the name suggests, choked with tick-infested woods and boot-sucking wetlands. But as archaeologists are discovering to their delight, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries Zekiah was a growth center for the young Maryland colony. The site of a 1674 courthouse was found last summer. Excavations this month have uncovered what might be traces of the "summer house" that Gov. Charles Calvert built to dodge his political enemies.

He's been a fixture around the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court House for 4 1/2 years, roaming its corridors, courtrooms, offices and parking garage, searching for explosives - though some would say he's really been looking for snacks. But this past week was the last one on the job for Levi, a black Labrador retriever and one of two bomb-sniffing dogs in the county Sheriff's Office. Levi, starting to gray around the muzzle, retired at the age of 9. "He's getting too old, a lot of aches and pains," said Deputy Sheriff Harry L. Neisser, a department spokesman.

Long-stalled efforts to renovate and expand Baltimore's outdated courthouses began again this month after city officials asked the Maryland Stadium Authority to do a formal study of the project. The city and courts have set aside $700,000 for the feasibility study, which must be approved by two General Assembly committees before it can begin, said George Nilson, the city's solicitor. It would be the second study in five years. The first elaborated on previous reports and identified eight sites where a third courthouse to handle criminal cases could be built.

He buzzed around like a fly behind a windowpane. He could see daylight but no obvious way to break through or go around. He was frantic, panicked. His house was in foreclosure, and in a few minutes it would go on the auction block. Pacing and smoking outside the hulking Baltimore County Courthouse in Towson, 47-year-old Andre Green pleaded his case with just about everyone he saw on the concrete steps. "I'm here to stop this sale!" he declared to auctioneer Ron Osher. Green waved a last-minute agreement with GMAC that would let him pay the lender $1,250 a month - and keep his late mother's brick rancher on a quiet street near Reisterstown Road Plaza.