Inmate

An inmate serving a 10-year prison sentence for second-degree murder walked out of a Baltimore detention facility on Friday morning, never reported to his scheduled work-release job and was considered escaped by Friday afternoon, according to Maryland State Police. Jermaine Jeter, 30, left the Baltimore Pre-Release Unit at about 10:30 a.m., and was supposed to arrive for work at an area Checkers restaurant at 12:30 p.m., according to police. He never did, nor did he arrive back at the unit at 3 p.m., as he was scheduled to do, police said.

An inmate serving a 10-year prison sentence for second-degree murder walked out of a Baltimore detention facility on Friday morning, never reported to his scheduled work-release job and was considered escaped by Friday afternoon, according to Maryland State Police. Jermaine Jeter, 30, left the Baltimore Pre-Release Unit at about 10:30 a.m., and was supposed to arrive for work at an area Checkers restaurant at 12:30 p.m., according to police. He never did, nor did he arrive back at the unit at 3 p.m., as he was scheduled to do, police said.

Fifteen years ago, when Parris Glendening was in his first year as governor of Maryland and his voter approval rating was under 20 percent, he gave his famous "life means life" speech. He announced that he would never approve parole for any inmate serving a life term -- unless they were very old or very sick -- and he told the Maryland Parole Commission not to even bother sending recommendations to his desk. The mild-mannered former professor, a Democrat elected in 1994 by one of the narrowest margins in state history, showed that even liberal-leaning, good-government nerds could show some brass and exploit public fears for political gain.

The prospect of spending years behind bars in a tiny cell is sufficiently chilling to deter most people from ever committing a crime. Those who willfully break the law anyway and get caught have no one to blame but themselves when a judge sentences them to prison. But even convicted felons shouldn't have to suffer the extralegal indignity and physical trauma of being raped by fellow inmates and prison staff while they're serving their time. Sexual assaults in the nation's prisons are alarmingly common.

A Cecil County man who was being held at the Harford County Detention Center in connection with a recent string of armed robberies died Friday, the Harford County sheriff's office said Saturday. According to the sheriff's office, inmate Michael Ray Malpass, 26, was found unresponsive in his cell about 10:55 p.m. Thursday. He was taken by Bel Air Volunteer Fire Company to Upper Chesapeake Medical Center in Bel Air, where he was pronounced dead at 12:08 a.m. Friday. A spokeswoman for the sheriff's office said Malpass was detoxing from heroin use and was on medical watch at the time of his death.

A Maryland inmate serving a 40-year sentence for a string of robberies on the Eastern Shore pleaded guilty Monday to mailing a threatening letter to a federal judge, the Maryland U.S. Attorney's Office announced. Willie Ray Bryant, 41, smuggled a hostile letter out of his Cumberland prison a year ago and sent it to U.S. District Court Judge William D. Quarles Jr., who received it Sept. 14, according to court records. Quarles had previously presided over one of Bryant's state cases.

Responding to last week's mistaken release of a violent inmate serving a life sentence, corrections officials said Tuesday that they will revamp inmate release procedures, including implementation of portable fingerprinting machines at a handful of prisons across the state. Rick Binetti, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said the agency plans to begin using portable fingerprint scanning machines called "Fast ID" as an extra safeguard during the release process.

One inmate was fatally stabbed and another was injured Sunday night at Eastern Correctional Institution in Somerset County, according to authorities. The incident occurred shortly after 9 p.m. in a recreation yard inside a housing unit at the Westover facility, a state correctional department spokesman said. Both victims were taken to Peninsula Regional Hospital in Salisbury, where Tozzi Carter, 37, was pronounced dead. The injured inmate, identified as 32-year-old Dawntay Tobin, was also stabbed and was injured on his hand, shoulder and back.

A 26-year-old man who was serving three consecutive life sentences for shooting his ex-girlfriend and her two daughters in 2004 was erroneously released from a downtown Baltimore prison Thursday, setting off a regional manhunt as officials scrambled to explain how he got out. Raymond Thomas Taylor, who was sentenced in 2005 to three life terms on three charges of attempted first-degree murder, escaped from the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center...

A 64-year-old inmate at the Anne Arundel County Detention Center died late last month of an apparent heart attack while serving jail time for drunken driving, jail officials said Monday. Joseph Powell, of Severn, entered the Ordnance Road facility in Glen Burnie on March 25 to serve the third of five two-day sentences for a drunken-driving conviction. On March 27, Powell was set to be released, "when it appeared he had an upper respiratory episode," said Brenda Shell Eleazer, the correctional facility administrator of the Jennifer Road Detention Center in Annapolis.

Keith Russell Judd, better known as the federal inmate who scored 41 percent of the vote against President Barack Obama in the West Virginia primary, wanted to be on the ballot in Maryland, too. Without Judd in his path, Obama cruised to an 88 percent victory. Blame U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett, who last year dismissed Judd's complaint against the Maryland State Board of Elections in which he alleged he was being wrongly kept on the ballot. Bennett referred to Judd, who is serving a 210-month sentence in a Texas federal prison for extortion, as a "prolific and vexatious litigant who has filed more than 748 cases in federal courts since 1997.

For the first time since taking office five years ago, Gov. Martin O'Malleycommuted the sentence of a Maryland inmate serving life for murder - that of Mark Farley Grant, a Baltimore native who has been incarcerated for 29 years. In commuting Mr. Grant's sentence last month, the governor made no comment about the 44-year-old inmate's credible claim of innocence. A report that made the case for Mr. Grant's wrongful conviction in a 1983 street shooting went from the University of Maryland School of Law to the governor's office four years ago. It was either ignored or discounted.

When Renee Hutchins, the University of Maryland law professor, got her client on the phone Thursday afternoon and told him the news — that the governor was going to commute his life sentence — Mark Farley Grant was "largely speechless and completely stunned. " Hutchins said she will visit her client at the state prison in Hagerstown on Monday. By then, Grant should have a complete understanding of what's happening: freedom after nearly 30 years in prison, but no exoneration and no pardon.

Gov. Martin O'Malley is expected to commute the sentence of a Baltimore man serving a life sentence for murder, using that power for the first time during his tenure. Mark Farley Grant's attorney Renee M. Hutchins confirmed Thursday that she had been notified of O'Malley's decision. The O'Malley administration declined to comment, but an announcement was expected this afternoon. "[The governor] had not to this point granted any clemency requests, so I am extremely grateful to him for exercising his ability to do so in Mark's case," Hutchins said.

It appears that the governor of Maryland, a former prosecutor and Baltimore mayor who built his political career on zero-tolerance crime policies, might finally give birth to a conscience in the matter of Mark Farley Grant - an inmate who went to prison 28 years ago for a crime he most likely didn't commit. It's one thing to be tough on crime, another to be just and fair. In the matter of Farley Grant, the otherwise ambitious governor of Maryland has come late to the latter ... maybe.

Anne Arundel County jurors began weighing the possibility of a death sentence Wednesday for the inmate they convicted of murdering a correctional officer at a now-closed state prison in Jessup. "He brutally murdered, stabbing and ending the life of David McGuinn," prosecutor Sandra F. Howell told the jury, as convicted killer Lee Edward "Shy" Stephens, 32, looked on. "For that, ladies and gentlemen, the law provides the ultimate penalty. " If the jury, scheduled to resume deliberations Thursday morning, agrees with her, Stephens would become the first person to receive a death sentence under Maryland's new and more restrictive capital punishment law. The jury's sentencing choices are death, life without parole and life with the possibility of parole.

The way Omar Broadway sees it, Maryland prisons are overrun with gangs, disciplinary rules are ignored and inmates pass the time playing video games and making wine in their cells. You don't have to take his word for it: He says he's getting it on film. Broadway, a New Jersey native serving a 12-year sentence for carjacking, has gained notoriety as an amateur documentarian of life behind bars. The choppy footage he captured in a Newark prison was turned into a full-length feature ("An Omar Broadway Film")

Jury deliberations began Wednesday in the death-penalty trial of a convicted murderer charged with killing a correctional officer at the now-closed House of Correction. If the Anne Arundel County jury convicts Lee Edward "Shy" Stephens in the July 2006 stabbing of Cpl. David McGuinn, he could become the first person sentenced to death under Maryland's new capital punishment law. The three-week trial featured 10 prisoners testifying as eyewitnesses for both the prosecution and defense, giving jurors a peek into life at a troubled maximum-security prison where investigators found hundreds of homemade weapons in the aftermath of the slaying — but no murder weapon.

A Maryland corrections division that provides inmate labor has backed out of a data entry contract with the health department after state auditors found that prisoners had access to some patients' personal information, which was supposed to have been redacted from documents, but occasionally wasn't. The findings were included in a Legislative Services report made public Tuesday, three months after Maryland Correctional Enterprises, an industry arm of the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, ceased providing the services to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.