Courtroom

The General Assembly may soon lift the ban on cameras in Maryland's criminal courts, at last allowing television's all-seeing eye to scan the occasional scenes of high drama there as in the criminal courtrooms of all but three other states.Maybe this is progress. And maybe it isn't.Putting TV cameras in Maryland's criminal courts would push ever closer to extinction one of the few exemplars of refinement in such proceedings: the courtroom artist.Cameras were not always banned from courtrooms of Maryland or elsewhere.

Washington. -- An angry Judge Lance Ito has called a hearing for November 7 to determine whether he should throw television cameras out of the courtroom during the double-murder trial of O.J. Simpson.Despite the clamorous pile of mail inspired by a few grandstanding print journalists, Judge Ito ought to forget the idea of imposing a television blackout for these reasons:1) The cameras in the courtroom are in no way responsible for the outrageous and erroneous television and newspaper stories that have irritated Judge Ito, Mr. Simpson's defense lawyers and in some cases the prosecution.

CENTREVILLE -- Inside the 201-year-old Queen Anne's County courthouse, jury duty typically starts with a warm welcome and a hint of the fury that might lie ahead. Potential jurors are told to silence any cell phone or pager."If it goes off," sheriff's Deputy John Kerchner told a group last week, "so will the judge."For years, Queen Anne's Circuit Judge John W. Sause Jr. has been going off -- displaying a temper so quick that the county's public defender says he avoids Sause's courtroom and an assistant prosecutor worries about effects on the judge's health.

Baltimore Comptroller Jacqueline F. McLean emerged from months of seclusion yesterday for her first court appearance on fraud and misconduct charges, but the pretrial hearing was interrupted dramatically when she began shaking and gasping uncontrollably in her seat.While a court clerk continued to swear in her psychiatrist as a witness, Mrs. McLean's lawyer dashed toward Circuit Judge Elsbeth L. Bothe and pleaded for help."Let him attend to his patient," shouted lawyer William H. Murphy Jr., gesturing toward the psychiatrist.

It feels as if the world's going mad now: not just the shooting of city police, not just the routine violence, but the three of them sitting here now, the ones charged with the shooting of Officer Jimmy Young, all chained at the hands and feet in the front row of this big courtroom on North Avenue yesterday morning. And laughing.They're here for their bail review hearings, but it's as if they've got some funny little secret they're sharing, some little gag that only they understand. It's cracking them up. They're waiting for Judge Carol Smith to begin outlining the remainder of their lives, and they're as relaxed as tourists.

NEW YORK -- Louis Nizer, the shrewd and voluble trial lawyer who made a long career of representing famous people in famous cases and whose autobiography, "My Life in Court," was a best seller, died yesterday at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan. Mr. Nizer was 92 and lived in Manhattan.The cause of death was kidney failure, said Perry Galler, the managing partner in the New York-based law firm Phillips, Nizer, Benjamin, Krim & Ballon, of which Mr. Nizer was the senior partner.Mr. Nizer founded the firm with Louis Phillips, and colleagues said yesterday that he remained active, going in to his office almost every day, until 10 days before he died.

PHILADELPHIA -- In the virtual courtroom, judges, lawyers and witnesses may be in far-flung locations but linked electronically. The future has arrived in Wilmington, Del., where a bankruptcy judge and 30 lawyers and corporate officials were hooked up recently through special telephone lines and TV projectors to another judge and courtroom about 500 miles away in Toronto for a hearing. Just as computers are the norm in American homes and businesses, high-tech justice is emerging across the country.

Seconds after being sentenced to a year and a half in prison, Todd Raynard Neal lit out on a flight for freedom, a daring -- that coveredthree levels of the county courthouse before he was coralled by sheriff's deputies.The not-so-great attempted escape began Friday morning after Judge Raymond G. Thieme Jr.sentenced Neal to prison on three counts of burglary. The judge gave Neal a three-year sentence, butgave him credit for 18 months served while awaiting trial.In July, after he had pleaded guilty to the break-ins, Neal had been released on his own recognizance pending sentencing -- hence the absence of shackles on his feet when he appeared in court Friday.

Judges say the darnedest things.So do lawyers. And witnesses. And jurors -- and just about anyone in the courtroom.That is the message of three California lawyers who have been poring over reams of courtroom transcripts to cull some of the most ridiculous moments in American legal history.Pity the lawyer, for example, left to ponder this exchange with a potential juror in an Alabama death penalty case:COUNSEL: Can you participate in an endeavor in which the ultimate result might be death by lethal injection?

Only God knows what went through Jacqueline McLean's mind yesterday, but her body language spoke of a broken woman, and her attorney, Billy Murphy, did everything he could to put words around her suffering.Fighting for her life, said Murphy. Extremely suicidal, he declared. And with each pronouncement, McLean, the third-highest official in Baltimore, the woman accused of stealing big-time from the city, slowly crumbled in front of everyone gathered in the crowded criminal courtroom and finally collapsed, gasping for air.She did it at the very moment her psychiatrist, Dr. Dennis Kutzer, was being sworn in to testify about her mental condition; as her husband, James, sat in a front row courtroom seat a few feet from her; and with attorney, Murphy, in mid-harangue with Judge Elsbeth Bothe.