Discretion

THERE'S SOMETHING very wrong in Baltimore County. Nearly 70 percent of the state's death row inmates were prosecuted by Baltimore County attorneys, but the jurisdiction records fewer than 10 percent of the state's murders each year. And at least four of the county's capital cases have wilted in the light of appeals that exposed insufficient proof of guilt or disclosure of evidence. Just last week, Clarence Conyers Jr. became the third Baltimore County death row inmate in the last year and a half to have his case or his sentence overturned.

TOO OFTEN I pick up the paper and find yet another story about the abusers of our immigration system. Just once I'd like to pick up the paper and read about the other side. Francisco, a Salvadoran national, came to my office last year. He told me how his wife had recently died of cervical cancer. Her last wish in life was to see her children. They were in El Salvador. The three kids, aged about 8, 10, and 15, had applied to the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador for visitors' visas to come and see their mother, if only for a week.

MAYBE you've heard of HBO's hit comedy "Sex and the City." Maybe you've seen it. But have you lived it? Filmed on location in Manhattan, the show puts a shrewd, ironic spotlight on the busy lives and even busier love lives of its four liberated leading ladies: sympathetic sex columnist Carrie, cynical red-headed lawyer Miranda, insatiable PR exec Samantha and optimistic WASP art dealer Charlotte. The heroines meet their men at some of the city's most sleek spots. They all look stylish and sultry, and so does their city.

A year-old Baltimore police program that made midlevel managers accountable for crime and community relations is being dismantled this week because poor resources made proper implementation impossible. Under the department's "sector management" plan, lieutenants were assigned geographic beats and held responsible for anything that happened there 24 hours a day. In return, they were supposed to have discretion over officer deployment and money. Twenty-eight lieutenants were given patrol cars to take home so they could quickly respond to incidents.

Direct Instruction, Baltimore's experiment in scripted, no-nonsense education, is beginning to show signs of success in reading instruction after three frustrating years of test results.Although not all of the program's 17 city schools showed progress in this spring's Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, five of the six schools in Direct Instruction from the beginning had something to brag about."We wanted five years ideally to show what we could do, but we wanted to show something after three," said Muriel Berkeley, board president of the Baltimore Curriculum Project, which coordinates the program.

CITIES STRUGGLING to get a grip on street crime while protecting individual rights now have some guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court on how to draft laws that will withstand constitutional challenges. The high court last week struck down a broadly worded Chicago anti-loitering ordinance that aimed to crack down on gangs by prohibiting groups of people from loitering "for no apparent reason." The law's intent was to protect residents in neighborhoods paralyzed by thugs and drugs.

If Crofton police were telling Charlie Wolfe that walking on private Crofton Country Club property was trespassing, they also should have been keeping the club's golf carts off public streets. Both are against the law and police should enforce all the laws, Wolfe argued.No, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals ruled yesterday, police have discretion in enforcing laws. They do not have to enforce state laws that bar unregistered motor vehicles from public roadways."It's good to hear," said Barbara K. Swann, Crofton town manager.

WASHINGTON -- Once again reaching the limit of its patience at the pace of death penalty cases, the Supreme Court brusquely ordered a federal appeals court yesterday to stop delaying the execution of a Californian for a rape and murder nearly 17 years ago.The court, splitting 5-4, displayed an intense frustration with lower courts that keep states from carrying out death sentences, and with the inability of "some 32 million persons" in California in particular...

Direct Instruction ties the hands of talented teachersThe suggestion from letter writer Tracy L. Smith Jr. that the much-touted Direct Instruction reading curriculum be adopted because it "takes the discretion out of the teacher's hands and replaces it with implemention, measurement and accountability" (April 12) is simplistic in the extreme.First, it would ignore the time-honored principle that teaching is as much an art as a science, thereby requiring a measure of discretion regardless of which curriculum is used.

PLENTY OF people can understand the frustration of Nathaniel Hurt, who in October 1994 had endured weeks of harassment by unruly young people in his East Baltimore neighborhood. But in this case the frustration led to tragedy when Mr. Hurt fired a handgun and fatally wounded a 13-year-old boy who lived in a foster home nearby.Nathaniel Hurt refused a plea bargain -- and ended up with a five-year prison sentence. Because the crime involved a handgun, a 1972 Maryland law allowed the judge no discretion in sentencing, despite circumstances that might have justified a more lenient term.