Early Release

Jeffrey A. Levitt, the savings and loan swindler serving a 30-year sentence for filching $14.6 million from his thrift, is seeking early release from prison.Levitt, 50, the former president of the now-defunct Old Court Savings and Loan, appeared before a Maryland Parole Commission hearing officer yesterday morning at the Baltimore City Correctional Center, the minimum-security prison where he is in the sixth year of his sentence.A decision on whether to grant him parole will not be made for "several weeks," said Paul J. Davis, chairman of the Maryland Parole Commission.

Parole was denied yesterday for Alpna Patel, the Canadian dentist who was convicted of manslaughter in September in Baltimore Circuit Court in the stabbing death of her physician husband. Patel, 29, was sentenced to three years in prison for killing Viresh Patel in his Pimlico apartment May 24, 1999. The Patels had wed in an arranged Hindu marriage 10 months before he was killed. Patel's attorneys, Lynn Williamson and Edward Smith Jr., declined to comment yesterday. At the parole hearing, which began at 9:45 a.m. and lasted about 90 minutes, Patel testified for about 45 minutes, saying she acted in self-defense on the night her husband was killed, said Leonard A. Sipes Jr., director of public information for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.

Two Carroll women who say they were driven to kill their mates because of physical or mental abuse have not been identified as candidatesfor early release or parole, a county domestic violence activist said.Representative Constance Morella, a Republican from Montgomery County, has asked Gov. William Donald Schaefer to consider pardons for 15 women in Maryland prisons who murdered or assaulted men they say abused them.But the names of Gloria Crutchfield and Amanda Perry, two Carroll women who say a cycle of abuse led them to murder, are not on the list prepared by the Baltimore-based Public Justice Center for Schaefer's review.

A suspended Carroll County priest who is serving 15 months in jail for molesting two boys has petitioned the court to be released or at least serve the last six months of his sentence in home detention. Brian M. Cox, who was sentenced in January for molesting the boys during the early 1980s while he was an associate pastor of a Westminster parish, has been a "model prisoner" and has led a prayer group at the Carroll County Detention Center, according to a written motion filed by his attorney.

Former NFL quarterback Michael Vick pleaded guilty yesterday to a state dogfighting charge in Sussex, Va., clearing the way for him to potentially leave a federal prison early and attempt a pro football comeback. Vick, 28, was sentenced to three years of suspended jail time, none of which will be added to his 23-month federal prison sentence as long as he stays out of trouble for four years. The three-year sentence was far less than the maximum of 10 years he could have faced. Vick arrived wearing wrist and ankle shackles with his gray suit, but the restraints were removed by the time he entered his plea.

Harry B. Johnson Jr., an AIDS patient and prison inmate whose plays and poems have streamed from his cell, will be released Monday from prison, according to Gov. William Donald Schaefer.Calling Johnson's situation "an unusual case," the governor yesterday announced he would commute Johnson's 35-year sentence for robbery with a deadly weapon. Under the state constitution, the governor has the authority to issue an executive order commuting -- or ending -- a prisoner's sentence. Johnson, whose pen name is H. B. Johnson, has been in prison since 1985.

WASHINGTON -- Even as many Democrats on Capitol Hill distance themselves from President Clinton in the wake of the independent counsel's report, members of the Congressional Black Caucus have emerged as Clinton's most ardent defenders.Nearly half of the 63 Democrats who voted against releasing the report by Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr were caucus members angry that Republicans rejected the White House's request to review the report before it was made public. Twenty-nine of the 35 caucus members who voted Friday opposed the measure.

The mother of an Overlea teen-ager killed during the 1990 Labor Day robbery of a Middle River gas station has sued the state and a former prison employee for $1 million, claiming that the alleged murderer, John Frederick Thanos, was wrongfully released 18 months early from prison."

PHILADELPHIA -- Tamoxifen, a drug widely used to treat breast cancer patients, shows that it can reduce the incidence of the disease by nearly half among healthy women at increased risk, according to a landmark study.Letters announcing the breakthrough have gone out to the 13,000 women in the United States and Canada who kept on with the Breast Cancer Prevention Trial despite controversy over its risks and benefits."Based on the most recent analysis of the data, this is now the first study in the world to show that a drug can reduce the incidence of breast cancer," the letter says.

JESSUP -- The hollering, the screaming, the insults of the drill instructors -- those are Alissia Miller's memories of her first days at Herman L. Toulson Boot Camp.By the end of her first 15-hour stint in the military-style program for first-time inmates serving time for non-violent offenses, she quit. Spending four years at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women for heroin possession, she reasoned, would be easier than enduring the drill instructors, the calisthenics, the marching and shouting and sweating for six months.