Home Detention

A Taneytown man was sentenced yesterday in federal court to one year in prison for trying to extort money from a bank and threatening the manager's family, according to the U.S. attorney's office. Chief U.S. District Judge Benson E. Legg also sentenced Gary Wayne Smith Jr. to six months of home detention with electronic monitoring and three years of supervised release. Smith, 36, had pleaded guilty to mailing a letter to the manager of Middletown Valley Bank and demanding $60,000 in cash, federal prosecutors said.

Man sentenced in friend's strangling A recovering alcoholic who strangled a friend he met in treatment, then stayed for two days at her Maryland City home alongside her body was sentenced yesterday to 18 months in prison in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court. Circuit Judge Paul Harris said that according to trial testimony, the killing was the result of a heated dispute that became "violent and out of control" on June 4 between Christopher Perkins O'Brien, 34, and archaeologist Katherine White, 32. White had befriended O'Brien while they were in rehabilitation for alcohol abuse and offered to let him stay with her upon his release.

An executive for a baking goods company who pleaded guilty to drunken driving and automobile manslaughter charges was sentenced yesterday in Baltimore County Circuit Court to six months in jail and a year of home detention.Robert L. Serio, executive vice president of Frank A. Serio & Sons, will serve the six months in the Baltimore County Detention Center for an accident Oct. 8 in which a Timonium woman was thrown from Serio's Porsche convertible in a crash on York Road near Sparks.Serio, who admitted walking from his burning car without telling emergency personnel that he had a passenger in the vehicle, was also sentenced to five years' supervised probation, the first year in home detention, prosecutors said.

After inviting the Carroll commissioners outdoors yesterday to see how his office had spent county funds on uniforms, patches and painting and striping marked patrol cars, Sheriff Kenneth L. Tregoning marched into their conference room and spelled out how he would save or earn them money, beginning today.Tregoning used the quarterly meeting yesterday to update the commissioners on 19 items, including the implementation today of new medical services at the county jail. The move will save $20,000 to $25,000 a year and provide better services, he said.

Georges Debeir was exactly the kind of cyber stalker the FBI wanted to catch: He had solicited more than 50 children from around the world on the Internet, went to malls to meet children he contacted by computer and regularly spoke online about his wish to molest minors.But instead of a victory for Innocent Images, the FBI's premier undercover Internet operation based in Baltimore, Debeir's case turned out to be a bust.He was sentenced to six months of home detention, despite a federal prosecutor's insistence that he was a predator intent on "trolling for young girls."

Private companies that run home-detention programs will be regulated by the state starting tomorrow.The rules approved by a legislative committee yesterday include a provision that requires companies to use equipment that will instantly send an alarm when someone sentenced to home detention strays.That provision, added by the Joint Committee on Administrative, Executive and Legislative Review, means some companies will have to upgrade their technology or leave the business.The rules proposed by corrections officials would have allowed companies to monitor detainees by making random phone calls, as some do now. Lawmakers said the proposal did not go far enough.

A Carroll Circuit Court judge allowed yesterday Matthew Keith Haines, 35, to remain on home detention through Jan. 10, and ordered him to pay nearly $2,000 in restitution to two women whose cars he stole last year.Haines, son of state Sen. Larry E. Haines, pleaded guilty in May to the thefts. On two occasions last fall, Matthew Haines took car keys from the purses of two women in restaurants."We will see where it goes from here," said Matthew Haines as he left the courthouse yesterday. "I am looking forward to a second chance."

Under the burning sun, three men are weeding plants outside Howard County's Bureau of Utilities. The heat doesn't seem to bother them, nor the work, nor the fact that they don't get paid.They are inmates at the county jail, and all that matters to them is that they are out of the jail, in a program where they can learn to use new tools and get what could be a good job reference in the future.The program, run with the Department of Public Works, is part of a new jail plan to better prepare inmates for returning to society.

Support for confining some inmates at home rather than in jail appears to be increasing among defense lawyers and prosecutors in Carroll County.Proponents say that home detention saves money and alleviates crowding in the county detention center, and that it should be reserved in nearly all cases for nonviolent offenders."

Under the burning sun, three men are weeding plants outside Howard County's Bureau of Utilities. The heat doesn't seem to bother them, nor the work, nor the fact that they don't get paid.They are inmates at the county jail, and all that matters to them is that they are out of the jail, in a program where they can learn to use new tools and get what could be a good job reference in the future.The program, run with the Department of Public Works, is part of a new jail plan to better prepare inmates for returning to society.

Teen switched to home detention in firebombing A teenager who was ordered last week to spend the rest of his summer in a juvenile detention facility for his role in the firebombing of a Piney Orchard town house, in retaliation for the homicide of a Crofton youth, was switched Tuesday to home detention. Anne Arundel County Juvenile Court Master Cynthia Ferris changed her earlier decision, putting the 16-year-old's punishment in line with the other two juveniles in the case, who have been released from a detention facility.

Police investigate deaths of two men in city City police are investigating the killing of two men who died last week in separate incidents. Wilbert Flowers, 31, who was shot three times in the head July 28, succumbed to his injuries Aug. 25, police said. He was found lying on the ground in the 800 block of East 43rd St. off York Road and was taken to Sinai Hospital with critical injuries. He died at a local hospice, and his death was ruled a homicide Aug. 26. Floyd Jones, 56, was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital at 3 p.m. that day suffering from head injuries and was later pronounced dead.

Jeremiah Harper pleaded guilty this month to selling cocaine. But despite previous convictions for drugs and manslaughter, a Baltimore judge agreed to sentence him to home detention, subjected to three years of round-the-clock monitoring by a Global Positioning System device. The 27-year-old is one of the first in Baltimore to be sentenced to this type of high-tech monitoring, the same type of system that powers navigational systems in cars. It is a punishment that could become more common in Maryland.

A man accused of filming a teenage girl in a sex act at a Carroll County hotel was sentenced yesterday to six months of home detention. George William Curran III, 54, of Germantown was also placed on probation for two years and ordered to perform 150 hours of community service over the next year after being found guilty of one count of contributing to the condition of a child yesterday in Carroll County Circuit Court. Curran was charged with three such counts, according to court documents.

A Taneytown man was sentenced yesterday in federal court to one year in prison for trying to extort money from a bank and threatening the manager's family, according to the U.S. attorney's office. Chief U.S. District Judge Benson E. Legg also sentenced Gary Wayne Smith Jr. to six months of home detention with electronic monitoring and three years of supervised release. Smith, 36, had pleaded guilty to mailing a letter to the manager of Middletown Valley Bank and demanding $60,000 in cash, federal prosecutors said.

A former Baltimore police officer has been sentenced in Baltimore County Circuit Court to six months of home detention in a scheme to cash fraudulent workers' compensation checks, the state attorney general's office said yesterday. Andre Alan Stover, 40, of Woodlawn received more than $150,000 in fraudulent disability and medical payment checks between May 2003 and April 2004, according to the attorney general's office. He accepted the checks from a claims adjuster on a street corner, cashed them and returned to split the proceeds, the office said.

Man sentenced in friend's strangling A recovering alcoholic who strangled a friend he met in treatment, then stayed for two days at her Maryland City home alongside her body was sentenced yesterday to 18 months in prison in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court. Circuit Judge Paul Harris said that according to trial testimony, the killing was the result of a heated dispute that became "violent and out of control" on June 4 between Christopher Perkins O'Brien, 34, and archaeologist Katherine White, 32. White had befriended O'Brien while they were in rehabilitation for alcohol abuse and offered to let him stay with her upon his release.

Ten months after a former Roman Catholic priest was sentenced to 18 months in jail for sexually abusing a student, a Baltimore County judge granted the priest's request yesterday to serve the rest of his sentence on home detention - a decision his two victims criticized. A lawyer for Jerome F. Toohey Jr., known as Father Jeff, had asked the judge to release his client either on probation or home detention because the conditions of his confinement at the county jail are "extremely tough."

School official quits city post for college job Jeffery N. Grotsky, an area academic officer and former chief of staff in the city school system, has resigned to work for the Center for Leadership in Education at Towson University. Grotsky said yesterday that he will leave the school system July 31 or when a replacement is found, whichever is sooner. He has worked for the city schools since 1998, after his dismissal as superintendent of Harford County schools. He served as chief of staff to city schools Chief Executive Officer Bonnie S. Copeland from 2003 to 2005.

The state prosecutor is investigating how Gilbert Sapperstein, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for his role in a scheme to steal $3.3 million from the city schools, managed to have nine months shaved off his sentence while serving the remainder on home detention in the suburban comforts of his Green Spring Valley home. "We're concerned about this," said State Prosecutor Robert A. Rohrbaugh, "but until we have all of the facts we don't have any further comment." Rohrbaugh's staff spent months building a case against Sapperstein and those who helped him. Officials with the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services said Sapperstein qualified for home detention because of his low risk for flight and relatively short sentence.