Family Court

Eight people hung posters on the Anne Arundel County Circuit Courthouse fence yesterday and gathered signatures on a petition calling for passage of a law that would set up a Family Division within circuit courts to handle divorces and child custody disputes.Such issues are handled as part of Maryland's regular Circuit Court caseload.In three hours yesterday morning, the demonstrators gathered about 150 signatures on petitions asking the state House Judiciary and the Senate Judicial Proceedings committees to approve bills to set up a Family Division.

A $1.7 million court judgment against a man accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old Northwest Baltimore girl while on a church trip in 1991 has given the girl and her family a sense that justice may finally have been done."

The award for this month's most dazzling literary feat goes to Monique Truong, a Vietnamese-American whose first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 261 pages, $24) adds a brilliant twist to the old tales of the Lost Generation in Paris. Instead of rehashing stories of famous novelists behaving badly, Truong looks at Paris through the eyes of a young Vietnamese cook, Binh, who prepares exquisite meals for Gertrude Stein's stylish parties. Like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Binh is a lonely exile searching for a cultural home.

When Richard Joseph Moore's convictions for soliciting sex with a minor and attempted third-degree sex offense were overturned in the Maryland Court of Appeals last month, the matter seemed closed. He was off the hook on the grounds that there was no "victim" since he had solicited sex from an undercover state trooper rather than an actual minor. His former wife, Heather Moore, who divorced him during the proceedings, had been granted custody of their two young sons and moved from their Elkridge home to Virginia.

Shirley Harbin has worked as director of the victim witness assistance unit for the Howard County state's attorney's office for the past decade. The job of helping crime victims prepare for court proceedings may prove stressful at times. To stay inspired, Harbin says she relies on her history with the office, her supportive staff and her passion for helping others through what sometimes proves to be the most painful experience they've ever faced. Harbin oversees a staff of three - two victim advocates and a support staffer.

Some child support payments in Maryland could soon go up - a change that state Human Resources Secretary Brenda Donald called "long overdue." For the first time in two decades, lawmakers are poised to revise the guidelines that courts use to set child support when divorcing or unmarried parents cannot agree on an amount. Those guidelines are based on household expense data from the 1970s, and although they accommodate rising incomes, advocates say they don't account for the escalating costs of raising a child.

JANE BOLIN, 98 Pioneering N.Y. judge Jane Bolin, whose appointment as a family court judge by New York City Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia in 1939 made her the first black woman in the United States to become a judge, died Monday in Queens, N.Y. She was the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School, the first to join the New York City Bar Association and the first to work in the office of the New York City corporation counsel, the city's legal...

Area residents can receive a free half-hour consultation with a lawyer on the third Wednesday of every month through a volunteer lawyer program in the Anne Arundel County law library. The next consultations will be done on Wednesday between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Civil court issues, except for family court matters, can be addressed, including contracts, wills and real estate. The program is sponsored by the Anne Arundel Bar Association and the law library. The library is on the third floor of the Anne Arundel County Court House, 7 Church Circle, Annapolis.

In the past four years, Kathleen M. Murphy has become an outspoken advocate for the establishment of a statewide family court system. It was her drawn-out divorce and child support case that sparked her activism. And it is that same case that has brought her efforts to an end.In exchange for Murphy's silence on matters relating to their legal battles, her former husband, Lloyd N. Schaeffer, agreed Friday to release Murphy from her responsibility to make monthly child support payments for their son.The settlement, ordered by Carroll Circuit Judge Raymond E. Beck on Friday, ends the public legal battles between Murphy and Schaeffer that have continued since their October 1992 divorce.