Innocence

THE NINE nerveless Nellies currently ensconced on our Supreme Court have just committed the wimp-out act of the year. Two weeks ago, the pusillanimous justices refused to review a case out of Indiana, where overzealous school officials imposed mandatory drug testing as a condition for participating in extracurricular activities.Picture it now. Chess club members puffing on a joint while they decide to use a King's Gambit or a Sicilian Defense opening. Math club members smoking crack between discussions on the finer points of number theory.

THE WOMAN who allegedly had sex with the president in the White House was, according to various newspaper descriptions, "a 21-year-old intern fresh out of a small college in Oregon," "only a few years older than Chelsea [Clinton]," "not only innocent, but also not fully formed," and may have had a relationship with a man "old enough to be her father."Monica Lewinsky, now 24, may have been exactly as described when she worked in the White House. Then again, maybe she wasn't naive. Either way, her story reflects America's continued grappling with the indistinct line that divides childhood innocence from adult accountability.

WALTER MCMILLIAN was released from Death Row to the welcoming arms of his family after the state of Alabama admitted that prosecutors had willfully withheld evidence of his innocence.He had been convicted of murder in a two-day trial seven years earlier. Although no physical evidence linked him to the crime, three witnesses, who had all received favors from the state for testifying, connected him to the murder. All three later said they lied on the stand. One said he was pressured by the prosecutors to implicate Mr. McMillian.

WELL, I'M A grandfather. What of it?Grandbebe Marcus is three months old and when I hold him I feel ancient, like a tree. I hold his light, light person, weighing about the same as a grocery bag, and feel this awesome shoot of energy. His eyes alight and widen when he sees me and he smiles, and I am filled with his innocence.Almost everything he sees is for the first time; his gaze finds the things of this world one by one and bathes them in a wide surprised wonder. A bird. A fence. The word ''Waffle'' on the side of the Waffle House.

The jury in Ruthann Aron's murder solicitation trial will deal separately with the questions of her innocence and sanity, a Montgomery County circuit judge ruled yesterday.Aron, a Potomac developer and unsuccessful candidate for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination, has pleaded not criminally responsible to charges she tried to hire a hit man to kill her husband and a Baltimore lawyer who testified against her in a civil trial.Judge Paul A. McGuckian approved a request from prosecutors for a two-phase trial that will begin Dec. 15 despite the objections of Aron's lawyers, who said her mental state goes to the heart of her defense.

I CRIED OVER Princess Diana, which for a while caused me some little embarrassment.''She's your Elvis, isn't she?'' my husband asked, watching me blink and sniffle over the sad headlines the day she was killed.This wasn't easy to admit, because I had always been baffled by and a bit contemptuous of tears shed on behalf of famous strangers. At 16, I thought it silly when a friend of my mother's fell apart over Elvis' death. At 19, I watched, incredulously, footage of the heartbroken banging their heads against walls after John Lennon's murder.

EVERY REVOLUTION around the sun seems to peel away another layer of innocence. Ideals shatter, expectations vanish into a black hole. Trust and credibility took a beating last year.Not until 1996 could Columbia residents have imagined that a 15-year-old girl could be raped outside a local library branch while waiting with her younger sister for their parents to pick them up. If there was one place viewed as a safe haven, it was the library. What parent in this suburban town can have the same sense of security in 1997?

Linda Fiorentino as a good girl!She's just one of the surprises in "Unforgettable," a violent, creepy thriller in which Fiorentino, the ultimate femme fatale in "The Last Seduction," co-stars with Ray Liotta.John Dahl, who also directed "Seduction," keeps the twists coming in a pretty twisted story, contrived but entertaining. Liotta stars as a medical examiner who is obsessed with solving his wife's murder -- especially since he was arrested for the crime and, although the charges were dismissed, is still assumed to be the killer.

You can't hype the Beatles, though God knows it's been tried often enough.In this latest incarnation of (enforced) Beatles hysteria, they've gone over the top, introducing a gimmicky "new" Beatles song (I won't listen; I can't listen; OK, I'll listen, but I won't like it), made, literally, over John's dead body.And it doesn't end there. Throw in six hours of network TV and three new double albums from the Abbey Road archives, and you're suddenly mustache-to-mustache with Beatlemania redux, only with far less screaming.

It's interesting how popular culture gives us a window into ourselves. About a year ago, ''Quiz Show,'' a fine film directed by Robert Redford recounted how TV network executives and producers deceived viewers by fixing the results of the quiz shows of the 1950s. It was said to limn the many magnitudes of innocence we've lost since the era of Eisenhower, gray flannel suits, Miltown and cars with fins that grew and grew and college students whose apathy grew and grew and grew. Now comes ''Apollo 13,'' a summer blockbuster directed by Ron Howard, which also is reputed to show what's wrong with us:Namely, we've lost our common goal and destiny, our collective purpose and rallying cry. For a few lucky decades, it seems, we had the Commies to set us straight: It was the Evil Empire, the feared Bolsheviks vs. the Yanks, God's Own Good Guys.

Even in the pile of desperation that is Suzanne Drouet's mail - the inmates saying they were wrongfully convicted, the family members begging the Maryland Innocence Project for help - the letter from Jesse Barnes stood out. At 17, he had been accused of killing his 15-year-old girlfriend. He had no prior record. There were no witnesses or physical or scientific evidence connecting him to the crime. There was only a confession. Barnes - who had been classified as "mentally defective" on a school evaluation - signed the confession after 32 hours in police custody and seven hours of interrogation.

In public, City Councilwoman Helen L. Holton casts a formidable figure. She sparred with the city's popular police commissioner over her concern that his detectives weren't solving enough murders, and she has debated with colleagues on development bills, pushing tax breaks she believes are good for the city. "She's not shy," said Councilman William H. Cole IV, who has known Holton for the past decade. "She educates herself on the issues, and then she expresses her opinion." Like many City Hall observers, Holton's friends and supporters were surprised Wednesday at the news that she had been indicted on charges of accepting a bribe, perjury and misuse of her office.

Federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for a 23-year-old man accused of orchestrating from prison the murder-for-hire of a Baltimore County man who had witnessed a killing in the city, according to a notice filed in U.S. District Court yesterday. A superseding indictment alleges that Albert Byers Jr., of Baltimore, paid at least $2,500 to co-defendants to fatally shoot Carl Stanley Lackl in July 2007 outside his Rosedale home. Authorities have said Lackl had witnessed Byers shoot a man in an East Baltimore alley a year earlier.

Coast Guard shows LNG plan is unsafe Last week, the U.S. Coast Guard erased any doubt that a proposal to locate a liquefied natural gas terminal in Eastern Baltimore County poses serious security threats to the region ("LNG security questioned," Feb. 28). The Coast Guard's report, which focuses on whether AES Corp. could safely transport LNG up the Chesapeake Bay, confirms the fears that Baltimore County Executive James T. Smith Jr. and other county officials have harbored about this project since its inception.

Does it make it worse that Zachariah Hallback, 18, who was recently robbed and murdered at a bus stop, was a "good kid" who fought for justice with Baltimore's Algebra Project and sang with the choir in Israel Baptist Church? Does it make it worse that he was an innocent victim and not a drug dealer? He was no angel. Like all of us, Zack was human. Sometimes he did well, sometimes not; he helped and harmed. None of us is different. Why do some victims merit an outpouring of civic sympathy and others not?

Public defenders are calling on Baltimore police to overhaul the way victims and witnesses pick suspects from photo lineups to ensure detectives can't influence the results. Police made some revisions last month, but Baltimore Innocence Project director Michele Nethercott and city Public Defender Elizabeth L. Julian want investigators to incorporate more aggressive reforms made in other states into their policies. City public defenders want the photos of possible suspects shown one at a time, rather than in a group of six. When viewing photos one by one, witnesses would have to repeatedly recall the event, rather than compare the pictures and choose someone that most resembles the person they saw, said Gary L. Wells, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University and expert on witness identification.

Death row inmate Troy Anthony Davis won a temporary reprieve from the Georgia parole board this month as a succession of witnesses who fingered him as a cop killer admitted that they had the wrong man. Their recantations weren't new; they'd been telling courts and others that they were mistaken in their identification of Mr. Davis for some time now and yet it didn't seem to make a difference until Mr. Davis was within 24 hours of execution. How is that possible in American jurisprudence?

David Evans and James Curtis Giles don't know each other. But their personal nightmares hinged on the very same thing - an accusation of gang rape. Their nightmares ended last week in two different cities, each man affirmed in his innocence and wronged by a miscarriage of justice. Race, class and money were at play in their individual cases, powerful forces that can free or imprison the truth. Last year, Mr. Evans and two other Duke University lacrosse players, all white, were charged with sexually assaulting a black dancer at a team party.

James Owens Jr. believed he would die in prison. Sentenced to life without parole for a rape-murder, he saw no other future - until last week, when a DNA test cast serious doubt on his conviction in the 1987 slaying of a young Southeast Baltimore woman. The testing, opposed by prosecutors and delayed by a judge, supports claims of innocence by Mr. Owens and his co-defendant, James Thompson Jr., who is serving a life sentence. It reaffirms the potential of this technology to identify innocence - and guilt - and underscores why requests for post-conviction DNA testing should be handled swiftly and judiciously.

Convicted murderer Roger K. Coleman went to his execution in 1992 protesting his innocence in a Virginia case that became a cause for death penalty opponents. But DNA technology unavailable at the time has proved otherwise: Mr. Coleman's guilt in the murder-rape of his sister-in-law was confirmed last week by a DNA test, the first ever held post-execution. Virginia Gov. Mark Warner was right to order the test: The technology offers a certainty as to guilt or innocence in crimes of murder and rape that other kinds of evidence can't match.