Courtroom

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."...

Leo A. Hughes Jr., a retired trial attorney and legal mentor recalled for a commanding courtroom presence, died of a heart attack Feb. 16 at his Catonsville home. He was 72. Born in Baltimore and raised on Woodhaven Avenue, he was a 1953 graduate of Forest Park High School, where he played basketball, football and baseball. Family members said he was a pitcher and once struck out a young Al Kaline, who then played for Southern High School and went on to play for the Detroit Tigers. Mr. Hughes attended the Johns Hopkins University and received a degree from the old Mount Vernon School of Law in 1959.

A throng of plaintiffs packed a Towson courtroom yesterday, overflowing into a hallway, to hear the lawyer they had hired make the case that their neighborhood was ruined and their health endangered by the leak from a gas station of thousands of gallons of gasoline. "This is a leak that should not have happened," Stephen L. Snyder, whose firm is representing 300 residents of Jacksonville, said in Baltimore County Circuit Court during opening statements in a trial in which the plaintiffs are collectively seeking $1 billion from Exxon Mobil Corp.

Some of the grand jurors investigating allegations of misconduct by Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon have grown tired of the probe and its near-daily media coverage, one grand juror told a Sun reporter last month. The exchange provoked a cringe: grand jurors - or any jurors - are not supposed to expose themselves to news accounts of the cases they are assigned. And it raises a question that goes to the heart of the integrity of the criminal justice system: are jurors routinely violating their oath not to research cases - at home on their computers, in the jury deliberation room on the iPhones, by glancing at news reports - on their own?

Weeping came from both sides of a Baltimore County courtroom yesterday where the drunken driver who fatally struck a Towson University freshman in an October hit-and-run was sentenced to 18 months in the county detention center. Matthew David Miller, 26, of Loch Raven Heights pleaded guilty in Baltimore County Circuit Court yesterday to one count of manslaughter by vehicle in the death of Kevin M. Ryan, 18, of Columbia, who was struck while walking on Hillen Road. Dozens of Ryan's family and friends filled benches on the right side of the courtroom, while almost as many of Miller's family and friends filled the left.

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.