Innocence

This bet stinksNow, for the obligatory story about the obligatory bebetween politicians in cities whose teams are involved in postseason play:Pittsburgh councilmen Bernard "Baldy" Regan and Duane Darkins have wagered a day on a garbage truck that the Pirates will beat the Atlanta Braves in the National League playoffs.If the Braves win, Regan and Darkins will spend a day picking up Atlanta garbage. If the Pirates win, Atlanta Councilman Bill Campbell will do the dirty work in Pittsburgh.Politicians and garbage . . . nah, it's too obvious.

Joseph Jett, the dismissed Kidder, Peabody & Co. managing director, asserted his innocence in court filings yesterday and demanded that the firm release nearly $5 million frozen in his accounts.Kidder has refused to release the money since accusing Mr. Jett last month of creating $350 million in phantom trades to conceal trading losses and to inflate his 1993 bonus of $9 million."Mr. Jett vehemently denies any wrongdoing," his lawyers said in papers filed with the New York Supreme Court and the National Association of Securities Dealers.

A former Baltimore County police chemist, whose work is being questioned by a nationally renowned legal clinic, left the department four months after acknowledging she did not understand the science of her forensic tests and that her blood work in a death-penalty case was "worthless," court papers show. Some local defense attorneys and officials with the Innocence Project, the New York-based clinic, say that this 1987 testimony, during a pretrial hearing in Robert Bedford's murder case, raises more warning flags about Concepcion Bacasnot's forensic work, and about how the former chemist may have affected Baltimore County defendants throughout the 1980s.

Using the same DNA evidence that exonerated a man falsely convicted of rape, Baltimore County police arrested a new suspect yesterday in the 20-year-old crime. Darren Lyndell Powell, 36, of the 1000 block of Harlem Ave. was arrested yesterday morning and faces charges of first- and second-degree rape, first-degree assault, first-degree sex offense and first-degree burglary in the 1982 home invasion and rape of a Towson schoolteacher. It is the same crime for which Bernard Webster served 20 years in jail.

My father was shooting pool when the war started. My mother was sitting in an apartment in the Bronx with her mother and her 12-year-old brother, and everybody asked, ''What's Pearl Harbor?''''Sure,'' I say to my mother, making a little joke 50 years after the fact, ''a Pearl Schwartz, you might have known. But who knew a Pearl Harbor?''My mother's memory is jarred. Actually, she says, there was a Pearl Schwartz in her apartment building. But, a Pearl Harbor? No, half a century ago they didn't know such a place existed until the moment that dreadful news came over the radio.

Syria needs to do more than declare its innocence in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. That's a dead end. The findings so far of a special United Nations investigation implicate top Syrian officials in the murders of Mr. Hariri and 22 others in disturbing ways that cannot be dismissed by Syrian President Bashar Assad's repeated protests. The investigation's log of cell phone traffic tracking Mr. Hariri on the day of his death revealed a trail of complicity that led to Syria's Lebanese surrogates.

In a self-proclaimed fight for his innocence, Abras S. Q. "Sandy" Morrison asked a three-judge panel in Carroll County to remove the term "without parole" from his life sentence for first-degree murder."

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.

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.

We have now moved into the second decade of the AIDS epidemic.It was 10 years ago this month that the Centers for Disease Control published a short item on an outbreak of a rare form of pneumonia among five homosexual men in Los Angeles, a disease doctors had seen before only in patients with suppressed immune systems.Since then, 175,000 Americans have been diagnosed with AIDS and more than 110,000 have died. AIDS experts say that another 1 million in this country may be infected with the AIDS virus.