Defense Attorneys

UPDATE: A Baltimore jury has found Michael Maurice Johnson guilty of second-degree murder in the killing Phylicia Barnes, a North Carolina teenager whose body was found in the Susquehanna River in 2011, months after a mysterious disappearance that drew national attention.   Lawyers on both sides   had acknowledged in closing arguments  that the evidence against Johnson was circumstantial. But while defense attorneys described flaws and inconsistencies, prosecutors said the facts pointed to Johnson as the only reasonable suspect.

Timothy R. Streett, a Bel Air lawyer and outdoorsman, died Saturday of complications from cardiac arrhythmia at Upper Chesapeake Medical Center. He was 53. Timothy Ryan Streett, whose father owns Boyd & Fulford Drugs in Bel Air, was born in Baltimore and raised in Bel Air. He was a 1977 graduate of Bel Air High School, where he played varsity football. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1981 from what is now McDaniel College. Mr. Streett earned a law degree from the Shepard Broad Law Center, which is the law school of Nova Southeastern University in Davie, Fla. A solo practitioner, Mr. Streett worked from a Main Street office in Bel Air as a criminal defense attorney for nearly 30 years.

Attorneys for three men accused of killing Kenneth N. Harris resumed their verbal sparring Tuesday with the state's witnesses and their questioning of virtually every iota of testimony. But a crucial identification of two of the defendants by a security guard was left unchallenged in the defense's cross-examination of the witness, even as the lawyers took apart his professional history and other matters only tangentially related to the murder of the former Baltimore councilman on Sept.

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.

LOS ANGELES -- Under relentless cross-examination by defense attorneys, Rodney King admitted he lied in the past about some aspects of his beating, and he testified he is not now sure if the police officers who beat and kicked him used racial epithets.Saying he initially denied that racial slurs were used at the request of his mother, Mr. King said yesterday that his testimony the previous day was the truth but he couldn't be sure whether the officers were saying "nigger" or "killer" as he was taunted during his violent arrest on March 3, 1991.

When Kiheem Taylor was charged with kidnapping two teenagers at a Timonium light-rail station and raping one of them, prosecutors struggled with an all-too common problem — they didn't have enough solid evidence. But Taylor gave prosecutors a break when he made phone calls from the Baltimore County Detention Center. Just months earlier, authorities had begun recording inmates' phone calls, and Taylor implicated himself while talking to an ex-girlfriend. Judge Robert N. Dugan said at the time that the call was "overwhelming, damning evidence of [Taylor's]

About a week before jury selection was set to begin, a federal judge substantially delayed the start of the public corruption trial against former state Sen. Thomas L. Bromwell Sr. and his wife, pointing to "irreconcilable conflicts of interest" among the couple's attorneys. The unexplained departure of the Bromwells' attorneys days before the long-scheduled trial was to start left the schedule of the case in flux. Prosecutors, defense attorneys and the judge all declined to provide details about why the defense lawyers left the case so abruptly.

The lawyers representing a man accused of killing a correctional officer at the Maryland House of Correction in 2006 argued yesterday that their client should not face the death penalty because they are not being adequately compensated for their work on the case. Gary E. Proctor and co-counsel Michael E. Lawlor entered a motion yesterday to preclude the death penalty as a sentencing option in the murder trial of Lee Edward Stephens, one of two inmates accused in the killing, because the fees they are being paid by the state to mount a defense are "manifestly unreasonable."

Alexander Kinyua, the 21-year-old accused of killing a man and eating his organs, has been formally indicted on charges of first-degree murder and assault and has been sent to a Maryland state mental hospital. Harford County State's Attorney Joseph I. Cassilly said in a statement Tuesday that the indictment follows a hearing Monday in District Court in which a judge ordered that Kinyua be transferred to Clifton T. Perkins Hospital for a competency evaluation, following a request from his attorneys.

For the second time this summer, a local family has been awarded a huge sum of money by a Baltimore jury after claiming that negligent care by a local hospital caused their child to be born with a disability. A jury Tuesday awarded $21 million to a Glen Burnie couple whose son was born prematurely with cerebral palsy at Harbor Hospital in 2002, and is now, at age 9, "literally trapped inside his body" with a fully functioning mind but a severely disabled body, according to a family attorney.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A judge delivered a major blow Monday to the state's case against two men accused of fatally slashing the throats of three children nine years ago, ruling that the testimony of a key witness is inadmissible. As prosecutors try for a third time next month to convict Policarpio Espinoza Perez, 31, and Adan Canela, 26, they'll have to do so without some important evidence and witnesses they used to secure a 2006 guilty verdict that was later thrown out by Maryland's top court. Circuit Judge M. Brooke Murdock told the prosecution that it may not use the statements of the woman who said in the earlier trials that she drove the men from work to the crime scene.

A Pasadena woman charged with killing her estranged husband on Christmas Day 2000 listened in a courtroom yesterday as prosecutors characterized her as someone determined to win a custody battle, while defense attorneys described her as a battered wife who fired her gun in self-defense. As the trial of Kelly Ann Clutter began in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court, attorneys and witnesses did not dispute that the 35-year-old woman shot and killed her husband, David Clutter Sr., 32, at her home on Solley Road on Dec. 25, 2000.

Attorneys for the man convicted of killing 16-year-old Phylicia Barnes have asked a judge for a new trial, arguing that prosecutors made improper statements to the jury and withheld information. Michael Maurice Johnson was convicted this month of second-degree murder in the death of Barnes, a North Carolina high school student, who was visiting relatives in Baltimore when she disappeared in December 2010. Most of the arguments made by Johnson's attorneys center on a crucial witness named James McCray, who testified that Johnson contacted him for help in disposing of Barnes' body.

Officer Gary Gephardt heard a loud pop from the Perry Hall High School cafeteria, which he thought could be firecrackers, an exploding milk carton or a gunshot. As teens spilled out of the cafeteria, he drew his service weapon with one hand and blocked fleeing students with the other as he headed into the room. There he found two staff members restraining the alleged shooter and a student lying wounded on the floor, the officer testified Friday in a Baltimore County court hearing.