NEWS
By Justin Fenton, The Baltimore Sun | April 29, 2013
Baltimore's lead detective in the high-profile disappearance of North Carolina teenager Phylicia Barnes was charged Monday with committing assault and burglary during a frantic search last year for his own daughter. Detective Daniel T. Nicholson IV, a veteran homicide investigator, is accused of forcing his way into a Northeast Baltimore apartment, knocking one woman down and pushing a second person to the ground in a search that began after his daughter ran away from home. The charges come more than a year after the allegations surfaced, and a month before the scheduled retrial of Michael Maurice Johnson in the death of Phylicia Barnes, a 16-year-old North Carolina teen who was visiting family in Baltimore when she went missing in 2010.
NEWS
By Jack Leonard and Hailey Branson Potts, Tribune Newspapers | April 10, 2013
A German native who consorted for years with New England's social elite by pretending to be a Rockefeller was convicted Wednesday in Los Angeles of first-degree murder, capping a nearly three-decade-old mystery involving a missing couple and a body buried in a Southern California backyard. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, 52, was accused of bludgeoning his landlady's adult son with a blunt object, then digging a 3-foot-deep grave in the backyard of the victim's home in San Marino. The body was buried behind a guest house where Gerhartsreiter had been living.
NEWS
By Justin Fenton, The Baltimore Sun | March 20, 2013
A Baltimore judge threw out the murder conviction of a man who was to be sentenced Wednesday in the killing of 16-year-old Phylicia Barnes, saying prosecutors withheld information about a key witness from defense attorneys. The second-degree murder conviction of Michael Maurice Johnson, 29, last month had appeared to close the case of the North Carolina girl who disappeared while visiting family in Baltimore in 2010. But Circuit Judge Alfred Nance's ruling will give Johnson another chance to plead his innocence.
NEWS
By Frederick N. Rasmussen, The Baltimore Sun | March 14, 2013
Roland Walker, a colorful and highly regarded defense attorney who was a fixture in Baltimore courtrooms for six decades, died Saturday of complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, at his Lutherville home. He was 82. "Roland was always a person's lawyer. He represented people, not organizations or institutions, and he did it brilliantly," said Joseph F. Murphy Jr., former chief judge of the Maryland Court of Appeals. "He did mainly criminal defense work and always had a wonderful way with people, judges and jurors.
NEWS
By Justin Fenton, The Baltimore Sun | March 12, 2013
When he became state's attorney two years ago, Gregg L. Bernstein created the Major Investigations Unit, pulling in elite prosecutors to go after violent repeat offenders using complex techniques. In February, the unit took on a new case: a downtown fistfight among a group of people who work in finance. After police had declined to charge anyone, two 29-year-olds with government clearances and no criminal records were indicted by a grand jury and taken to jail before dawn on a Friday to sit in Central Booking for four days before getting a hearing.
NEWS
By Justin Fenton, The Baltimore Sun | March 11, 2013
To rack up arrests and look good for his bosses, Officer Kendell Richburg decided to ensure that his confidential informant could continue dealing drugs and funneling him information. He paid the unnamed informant with city funds, a standard procedure, but also gave him seized drugs to resell, according to court records. Richburg told the informant about the whereabouts of law enforcement in the Pimlico area where he operated, and the informant would tell Richburg about drug activity.