False Arrest

A Carroll Circuit judge yesterday dropped one of two defendants from a Woodlawn woman's $5 million lawsuit alleging racial and professional misbehavior by Springfield Hospital Center police officers.Judge Raymond E. Beck Sr. said Ida Hawkins, 54, had failed to show that Officer John Craven's role in a June 27, 1990, traffic stop led to false arrest, malicious prosecution and intentional infliction of emotional distress.Judge Beck also dismissed the allegations of malicious prosecution and false arrest against Officer Ricky Hinkle, but he decided to allow a jury to decide the emotional distress count beginning today.

A Delaware man was sentenced yesterday to three years in prison for violating his probation by having his former girlfriend arrested on false charges of attempted murder.Judge Raymond G. Thieme Jr. of the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court ordered the sentence for William Edward Kennedy, 35, of Harrington, Del.Kennedy was placed on five years' probation in November after he pleaded guilty to assault and battery for burning Cathy Rone, 27, of Linthicum with a cigarette and beating her two months earlier.

To Mark L. Corrallo, half of the fun of going to a Baltimore Orioles game is searching for premium tickets at bargain prices from fans looking to get rid of their extras.That's how he bought his tickets outside of Memorial Stadium and that's how he picked up four front-row seats for the sold-out game on Mother's Day at Oriole Park at Camden Yards."You can get really good seats that way," the 35-year-old attorney from Kensington said. "You can strike gold."But after being arrested May 22 for "doing business without a license" -- he says he was buying, not selling, and for below face value at that -- Mr. Corrallo doesn't find the ticket hunt to be so much fun.He's filed a $3 million suit charging the Orioles, the Maryland Stadium Authority, a city police officer and the city with malicious prosecution.

Roberta A. Sharper, a 60-year-old high school science teacher, says a shopping trip to a Value City store turned into a nightmare after she spent $253 but was accused of stealing an $8 belt.Mrs. Sharper said yesterday that security guards at the chain's Catonsville store falsely charged her with trying to steal her own belt, which they said belonged to the store and was worth $7.99.She said three guards trapped her in a room for three hours and refused to allow her to leave until she signed a document saying the belt wasn't hers.

It's the sweetest voice on the best-dressed suspect to turn up in a true-crime TV drama in a long time:"I have a home and a family," says Donna Mills innocently to police officers. ". . . How can you think that someone like me would be involved in a murder?"Ms. Mills' character, Joyce Lukezic, is missing the point. The police don't care whether she's involved in a murder or not: They need someone to convict, and she looks like an excellent prospect.The title takes some of the suspense out of ABC's "False Arrest," which airs in two-hour segments Sunday and Wednesday beginning at 9 each night (Channel 13)

If Yogi Berra were a TV critic, he would say ABC's "False Arrest" is deja vu all over again.It was just last Tuesday that we saw a blond-haired former series star tormented by a variety of darker-complexioned inmates while serving an unjust prison term. Sunday night you get to see it again.In the first one, it was Cheryl Ladd, framed on a drug rap in CBS' "Locked Up: A Mother's Rage" that eventually became a polemic on incarceration causing the sins of the mother to be visited upon her kids.

A Kent County Circuit Court jury yesterday awarded $42,000 to a Chestertown man who sued Maryland State Police after he was mistakenly arrested twice and held in jail for a month on drug charges.The charges against Allen P. Wickes, 46, were dropped when the undercover officer in the drug transaction Mr. Wickes was accused of saw Mr. Wickes in court as his 1988 trial began and realized that the wrong man had been charged.The trooper "took one look at the defendant, Mr. Wickes, and said, 'There's been a mistake, this is the wrong man,' that the man who sold him drugs was much taller and much heavier," said R. Stewart Barroll, one of Mr. Wickes' lawyers.

Brian Watson was getting out of the bathtub last July 5 when city police knocked on his front door and charged him with rape.Exactly nine months later -- having languished in the Baltimore City Jail without ever being brought to trial -- Watson was taken before Circuit Judge David B. Mitchell, where his case was thrown out of court.The state's attorney's office, having done a DNA genetic code test of Watson's blood, saliva, hair and sperm, decided it had the wrong man and told him he could go home.

A Baltimore jury awarded $1 million yesterday to a former University of Maryland scientist after concluding that two colleagues falsely accused him of stealing computer data from a Baltimore laboratory in 1988.The Circuit Court jury, after hearing three weeks of testimony, decided that the allegations by Anthony Sestokis and Philip J. Krause led to the false arrest of Robert W. Thatcher, the former head of the Applied Neuroscience Institute at the university's Eastern Shore campus. The three men worked together at a special clinical service that Mr. Thatcher helped to establish at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore.