Gunshot Residue

A 30-year-old Baltimore man convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced a decade ago to life in prison was granted a new trial Friday because potentially exculpatory evidence - a single-page police report - was not revealed during the original proceeding. Tyrone Jones was a college student home on summer break when he was charged with killing a 15-year-old boy in 1998. A jury acquitted him of the killing but found him guilty of conspiring to participate, based on a witness identification and the inexact science of analyzing gunshot residue, a particle of which was found on his hands.

Tyrone Jones walked out into the hazy sunshine Tuesday morning and let out a deep breath on the steps of the Baltimore City Circuit Courthouse, his shoulders light for the first time in a dozen years. He had come to court prepared for trial on charges of conspiring to commit murder, only to be told he wouldn't be prosecuted. The case was dropped. "It took all but 10 seconds to undo something that's been going on for 12 years," Jones said, still shocked. He threw an arm around public defender, Michele Nethercott, who began representing him several years ago as part of Maryland's Innocence Project, which works to identify wrongful convictions and get them overturned.

Isaac Truss, his body shaking so much that the clinking of his shackles could be heard in the back of the courtroom, seemed unsure during his sentencing on two murders Wednesday whether he wanted to show remorse or try the case.  Having already pleaded guilty to killing two men in downtown Baltimore over the course of less than two days, Truss was now appearing before Circuit Court Judge Althea Handy for sentencing. But he started off the hearing by seeking to revoke his plea.  "I wanted to go to trial," he told Handy.

Baltimore police had a woman in custody after a man was shot in a fourth-floor room of the Hilton Baltimore Convention Center Hotel, an incident police said appeared to be a domestic dispute. Police were called to the city-owned hotel near Oriole Park at Camden Yards about 7 p.m. Tuesday and found a man in his 30s who had been shot in the abdomen. A .40-caliber gun was recovered and a woman, who was in her 20s and was the registered owner of the handgun, was taken into custody pending charges.

Two soldiers involved in an altercation outside a Baltimore nightclub in which a gun was fired twice into the air could miss their deployments to Iraq this week after their attorney failed to get their trial postponed until the end of their 15-month tour. Pfc. Denario Wesson, 19, and Spc. Joshua Johnson, 24, will have to stay behind and face possible jail time, said their attorney, Arthur M. Frank, who sharply criticized prosecutors yesterday for pursuing the case and "carelessly disregarding" his client's duties to the American people at a time of war. At a hearing Monday, Judge Charles A. Chiapparelli left the final decision on a 15- to 18-month postponement to a city prosecutor, who rejected it. Earlier, according to a tape of the hearing, the judge had asked, "Do we need this kind of a bad guy to be in our Army?

Forensic tests confirmed that a Silver Spring man shot and killed a Highland woman and then shot himself in the back of the head, Howard County police said yesterday.Police said the weapon, a 9 mm pistol, was owned by Robert Warren Harris, 44, and gunshot residue was found on his hands. Police suspected a murder-suicide when they found the bodies of Harris and a former girlfriend, Ellie Kasten, 37, in her bedroom July 17.Investigators initially were cautious about drawing conclusions because Harris shot himself in the back of the head, which is unusual, police said.

Forensic evidence - DNA on a victim, gunshot residue on a hand, fingerprints on a weapon - holds a special place in courtrooms, often treated as irrefutable proof that police have nabbed the bad guy. But the labs processing that prized evidence can sometimes become the suspects. Last month, the Baltimore Police Department disclosed that its lab employees were leaving their own DNA on crime scene evidence. Lab director Edgar Koch lost his job because of the contamination, which had gone unidentified for years because the lab didn't take the basic step of cataloging employee DNA in a database.

The evidence used by the Baltimore Police Department to exonerate Officer Darlene Early when she shot an unarmed man in the back in 1993 came under attack in a Circuit Court civil trial this week by experts testifying for the dead man's family.Yesterday in the fourth and final day of testimony in a lawsuit brought by the wife and children of Raleigh D. Lemon Jr., the deceased man, a key forensics witness for the plaintiffs blasted the department's central finding in the case.Within a few days after the Jan. 13, 1993 slaying, police ruled that Ms. Early had fired in self-defense when Mr. Lemon -- an escaped prisoner who bolted away from the officer when she took him to Bon Secours Hospital for medical treatment -- turned and tried to grab her 9 mm Glock pistol.

Jurors in the trial of man accused of shooting a Baltimore police officer heard two widely different accounts yesterday -- one from a hostile teen-ager who repeatedly insisted that Donnell A. Ward didn't shoot him and the officer a year ago, and the other from a convicted felon who adamantly testified that Ward did. In a high-profile case that occurs two weeks after a jury convicted Howard "Wee" Whitworth of the shooting death of Baltimore police Officer...

A Howard County judge threw out yesterday several statements made to police by an 18-year-old accused of firing a bullet that hit a 4-year-old boy in the head as the toddler played in his bedroom in Columbia. During a two-day hearing, defense attorney Joe Murtha argued that two Howard County detectives improperly interrogated Tion Jamaar Bell of Flowerstock Row in Columbia and illegally seized DNA and his clothing after arresting him on an unrelated warrant. Circuit Judge Lenore R. Gelfman deemed some of Bell's statements to police on the night of the Jan. 20 shooting inadmissible because police did not read Bell his Miranda rights.