Courtroom

After jurors filed into a room behind the third-floor courtroom Thursday to begin deliberations in an assault case, Judge William C. Mulford II took his books and headed down a back staircase to his chambers one flight down. As the 11th judge in a 10-courtroom courthouse, he is a nomad of sorts, navigating the rabbit warren of hidden corridors and stairwells in the Anne Arundel County Courthouse, hearing cases wherever a courtroom is available. Since his job was created 14 months ago, Mulford has joined the other sitting judges and a parade of retired judges in a game of musical courtrooms that has sometimes forced hearings to be delayed for lack of a place to hold them.

In his first court appearance, Charles Eugene Burns, the 35-year-old Harford County man charged with killing one of four women whose bodies were found in remote areas, lashed out yesterday at a judge and his attorneys, saying he has been "kept in the dark" about his trial. The outburst came at the end of a hearing during which his attorneys sought to unseal records that are said to detail abuse that Burns suffered as a child. His attorneys could use the records as a possible foundation for his defense, legal experts said.

Anne Arundel Man pleads guilty in unsolved slayings A man already serving a life sentence for a 1994 slaying pleaded guilty Thursday to three counts of first-degree murder and two counts of rape in a trio of brutal killings that went unsolved for more than a decade. Alexander Wayne Watson Jr., 36, made the formal plea three days after meeting with families of his victims, who were all strangled and fatally stabbed: Boon Tem Andersen at her Gambrills home on Oct. 6, 1986; Elaine Shereika as she was jogging on May 23, 1988; and Lisa Kathleen Haenel, 14, as she walked to Old Mill High School on Jan. 15, 1993.

Sometimes, the charges sound more weighty than they are.One man is charged with malicious destruction of government property -- he broke into a vending machine "to get some munchies," he told police.Another man is charged with theft of government property -- he was homeless and cold, and accused of stealing tablecloths to use as blankets.Welcome to one of the more obscure courtrooms in Maryland. Held in a U.S. Naval Academy sports arena, tourists and transients stand beside midshipmen and sailors to face Judge Jillyn K. Schulze, who sits at a makeshift bench above the baseline of Navy's basketball court.

Nowhere in the 1824 Anne Arundel Court House now being refurbished is the weight of history more apparent than in the cavernous upstairs courtroom and its gallery, where black residents say Jim Crow laws once segregated them.The upstairs courtroom was created in an early 1890s overhaul of the courthouse, which is the third oldest in Maryland. The building is being renovated as part of a $2.5 million project to turn it into a museum and gateway to the new Circuit Court building next door."I went up there as a lad to watch the trials," said George Phelps Jr., 72, who grew up on nearby South Street.

What with no defense lawyer to object or cross-examine -- and no defendant in the courtroom -- a robbery, theft and assault trial in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court was over in less than an hour yesterday.Manuel Aurturo Bautista helped pick jurors for his criminal trial Tuesday afternoon, because he had not hired a lawyer, but he missed the main event yesterday."I guess the defendant felt it was in his best interest not to show," juror William Siwak said later.The jury convicted Bautista of theft and assault, but it was undecided on a charge of robbery so a mistrial was declared.

A 44-year-old woman charged with assaulting a Baltimore District judge as he presided over a case was ordered held without bail yesterday until a psychiatric evaluation is performed.Angela P. Middleton, who lives in a YWCA building on West Franklin Street, was charged with second-degree assault, which carries a 10-year maximum sentence, and threatening a public official, which could bring a three-year sentence.Judges called the courtroom attack unprecedented.Judge Theodore B. Oshrine was not injured.

If you want to see her, you'll have to take a number.Monica Lewinsky -- the young woman whose taste in underwear helped launch a presidential scandal -- is coming to town today to testify against former confidante Linda R. Tripp.The arrival of a one-time presidential mistress might be a ho-hum affair for Washington, but it promises to be a bit more for the quiet, unassuming suburban courthouse in Ellicott City.Since Monday, when Judge Diane O. Leasure began hearing pretrial arguments in the case against Lewinsky's one-time telephone pal, more than 30 photographers, reporters and television cameramen have camped out on Courthouse Drive waiting to catch a glimpse of the woman whose every pound gained and lost has been monitored by a tabloid-hungry public.

A Baltimore County jury convicted Ardale D. Tickles yesterday of attempted murder and armed robbery in the shooting of a McDonald's restaurant manager, hours after deputy sheriffs and police subdued Tickles in the courtroom as he walked away from the trial table.The jury deliberated less than an hour before convicting Tickles, 19, who was arrested in the shooting in January after police found a pager rented by Tickles outside the Joppa Road restaurant.Tickles, a resident of the 1600 block of E. Northern Parkway, is awaiting trial in an unrelated murder-for-hire scheme in Howard County.

Celebrity watchers who snared seats inside the courthouse in Ellicott City yesterday left with bragging rights -- they'd seen Monica Lewinsky in person -- but not much else as her much awaited confrontation with Linda R. Tripp fizzled.Tripp was a no-show, though the Columbia resident's son unexpectedly appeared in the back of the courtroom, infusing some drama into an event that the lawyers seemed determined to make dull."I hope it goes to trial so my Mom can be completely vindicated," Ryan Tripp, 24, said outside the courtroom where a judge was weighing the validity of wiretapping evidence against his mother.

In two Baltimore courtrooms adjacent to the one occupied by Mayor Sheila Dixon - known here as defendant Sheila Ann Dixon - here's what happened on Thursday: In one courtroom, Gregory Carmichael pleaded with a judge to get into a program to treat his addiction to alcohol, just one in a parade of substance abusers that morning seeking help instead of jail. In the other courtroom, a judge started picking a jury to try Charles Owens on charges that he shot a man four times in drug-infested Park Heights.

An Anne Arundel County judge has turned down a defense request to let the younger of two teen-agers charged with killing another Crofton teen live with an aunt in Delaware while awaiting trial in September. Judge Nancy Davis-Loomis said Monday that while she understood his family's wish to have him home, she agreed with prosecutors who argued that there was no reason to move the 14-year-old out of a juvenile facility where he has been since his arrest on a charge of manslaughter in the May 30 death of Christopher David Jones.

A Baltimore circuit judge, who has three times been the subject of judicial disciplinary investigations, ordered a spectator to jail for 10 days for crying out "love you" to her handcuffed brother in the courtroom - and then reversed himself after a public defender spoke up on her behalf. As Tamika Clevenger left a Baltimore courtroom Friday, she shouted, "Love you, Nick," which set off Judge Alfred Nance. He ordered a sheriff to pull Clevenger from the hallway and found the 24-year-old in contempt.

By threatening a witness on the stand in the middle of his murder trial, Lance Walker rattled the very people now deciding his guilt or innocence. On the 10th day of the 17-day trial, as the lawyers huddled at the bench with their backs turned, the jury watched the 29-year-old defendant lock eyes with the witness, hold up a legal document with one hand, pump a thumbs-down gesture with the other and warn, "I know your name. You're going down. You're going down." Fear instantly gripped the face of the witness, who muttered in disbelief, and within earshot of jurors, "Did he just threaten me?"

Even in Baltimore, the judge noted, the murder of a child still shocks. So when Frankie L. Taylor stood before Baltimore Circuit Judge Gale E. Rasin last month and told her he had missed his very first meeting with his probation agent on March 24, 2008 - the day after she gave him a break from prison on a drug charge - because his 1-year-old son had been hit in the head by a stray bullet and killed, it "sucked all the oxygen from this courtroom."...

Presiding over a courtroom for the first time in six weeks, Baltimore County District Judge Bruce S. Lamdin talked yesterday about second chances. He emphasized the importance of learning from mistakes. And he warned some defendants that they'd face much worse consequences if they didn't maintain the life changes they vowed they had made. "I think the person you listen to most as a result of this case is the man standing next to you," Lamdin told one young man in front of the judge with his attorney for sentencing on a marijuana charge.

I went to the District Court of Maryland, Towson branch, because that's where I was told I'd find Judge Bruce Lamdin - in Courtroom 4. But Judge Lamdin wasn't in Courtroom 4, at least not during the morning docket. He wasn't in Courtroom 5 or Courtroom 6, either. He wasn't in Courtroom 1, Courtroom 2 or Courtroom 3. He wasn't in the men's room - and I went in there three times looking for him. I never found the judge with the potty mouth. I saw Judges Robert Steinberg, Nancy Purpura, Jan Alexander and Norman Stone, all doing their duty, all very professional and efficient, and polite.

Baltimore County prosecutors wrapped up the first part of their case yesterday in the capital murder trial of a twice-convicted killer who is charged with strangling to death another inmate aboard a prison bus in February 2005. They ended their guilt-innocence portion of the death penalty trial with the testimony of a convicted thief who was sitting directly behind Kevin G. Johns Jr. the morning that authorities say he killed Philip E. Parker Jr. as the prison bus rumbled through the predawn darkness from Hagerstown to Baltimore's maximum-security Supermax prison.

Here's an idea: Before you get a marriage license, you have to spend a day in family court. You have to take a day off from the goin'-to-the-chapel, band-or-deejay, you-n-me-4evah bliss of planning your walk down the aisle, and sit in the kind of courtroom where that aisle all too often can lead. You would have to sit and listen to the ugly charges and countercharges. Watch the faces of a once-happy couple now barely able to look at one another. Hear a judge decide who gets to live with the children and who only gets to visit with them, and under what circumstances.

The marble on the walls of Baltimore's spectacular, circular courtroom came from the Vatican quarry. The fancy-schmancy coffered dome, modeled on one in the Library of Congress. And the ghost? Nobody's quite sure where he came from. Circuit Judge Wanda Keyes Heard thinks her courtroom is haunted. How else to explain the chills that strike even when the heat is cranked up, the glass tabletop that shattered for no reason? "I'm an open-minded person," Heard said. "I don't presume to think as humans we know everything spiritually in life."