Judge

Jerrod Rowlett is counted among Baltimore's worst criminals. He's racked up dozens of arrests in his 25 years, including at least four murder charges (one of which is still pending). He has a handful of gun, drug and assault convictions, and he's classified as a "violent repeat offender" by the state. He's also never served any significant time. But he's about to. After cutting Rowlett a generous break in 2007, setting him free under probation via a plea deal on assault and drug charges, Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Lynn Stewart ruled Thursday that he would have to serve the rest of his previously suspended 15-year sentence because he violated probation.

An Anne Arundel County judge agreed yesterday to hear arguments on whether to release records concerning a homemade knife to lawyers for two inmates accused in last year's killing of a correctional officer at the Maryland House of Correction. Investigators have said in written reports that they consider the knife to be potential evidence in the July 25, 2006, killing of David W. McGuinn, noting that the knife was initially found near where he was killed. The shank turned up missing for two days and reappeared tagged into evidence as having been taken from an inmate during a strip search, according to documents obtained by The Sun. Investigators said it would have been impossible for the inmate to have the 8 1/2 -inch knife.

Nearly three years after he was sentenced to die for killing his girlfriend's young daughter, a Baltimore man's life was spared yesterday. A jury sentenced Jamaal K. Abeokuto, 27, to life in prison with no chance for parole in the kidnapping and stabbing death of his girlfriend's 8-year-old daughter. He had been sentenced to death in 2004 after being convicted of the crime, but Maryland's highest court reversed the sentence last year when four Court of Appeals judges voted, for two different reasons, to grant him a new sentencing hearing.

Not in the running for Father of the Year: 25-year-old Willie Pickett Jr., an adventurous driver from Evansville, was charged with drunken driving, criminal recklessness and neglect of a dependent after police noticed him changing seats with a passenger in the front seat of his car while it was going 60 miles an hour. Mr. Pickett is the father of a child, who happened to be sitting in the back seat at the time. The passenger, Daryl Wilson, 20, was charged with criminal recklessness. The toddler's mother, 24-year-old Krista Hirsch, who was also in the back seat, was charged with neglect.

After jurors filed into a room behind the third-floor courtroom Thursday to begin deliberations in an assault case, Judge William C. Mulford II took his books and headed down a back staircase to his chambers one flight down. As the 11th judge in a 10-courtroom courthouse, he is a nomad of sorts, navigating the rabbit warren of hidden corridors and stairwells in the Anne Arundel County Courthouse, hearing cases wherever a courtroom is available. Since his job was created 14 months ago, Mulford has joined the other sitting judges and a parade of retired judges in a game of musical courtrooms that has sometimes forced hearings to be delayed for lack of a place to hold them.

Westboro Baptist Church, the Kansas-based anti-gay group, and three of its members have a tiny fraction of the nearly $11 million they were ordered by a Baltimore jury last month to pay for their protest at a Marine's funeral in Westminster, according to detailed financial papers unveiled by a federal judge yesterday. Eight pages of documents submitted in U.S. District Court in Baltimore by the church and three of its members - and made public at The Sun's request - reveal they have a net worth of almost $1 million but do not fully explain how the church is able to fund its picketing near military burials across the country.

Sentencing system defrauds the public Does anyone understand why Arthur Bremer, who was convicted of attempting to assassinate a presidential candidate, is being released from prison this year after being sentenced to 53 years in prison in 1972 ("Wallace shooter to be freed," Aug. 24)? He is not being released because he has been a model prisoner. He is not being released because a parole board determined that he has earned the right to live outside the prison walls. He is not being released because of his work tutoring other prisoners.

The frustrated landlord put it plainly when she appeared before a Baltimore District Court judge a month ago: "I want her out of my property." Margaret Carlest, who with her husband owns the Cecil Avenue rowhouse where six people died in a fire this week, complained that renter Deneen Thomas had "a lot of people there," and was destroying the house. Though the Carlests had been to court twice in two months trying to have Thomas and her family evicted - and though Thomas had failed to pay rent for months - getting the group out was not a simple process.

He sat there, at the defense table, a broken man. Despite an education capped with an MBA, a wife and young child and a close extended family, Patrick McDevitt, now dressed in a prison jumpsuit, admitted he could not stop using other people's money. A federal judge ended that spending spree yesterday with a 2 1/2 -year prison sentence for the Timonium man. McDevitt, who tearfully apologized to his friends and family in U.S. District Court in Baltimore yesterday, filed $399,537 in false claims to his employer for reimbursement of fake business expenses, court records show.

NEW YORK -- A federal judge in Wisconsin ordered Chevy Chase Bank to rescind loans made to some borrowers who took out so-called option adjustable-rate mortgages, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. The ruling was in a case against the Maryland-based bank brought by Susan and Bryan Andrews, who took out an option ARM in the belief that a 1.95 percent introductory rate was fixed for five years. Two months later, they received a statement showing the rate had risen to 4.375 percent, the newspaper said.

Thomas Meighan Jr. was well-acquainted with accusations of recklessness and dangerous driving, long before Baltimore police charged him with a string of traffic offenses related to the hit-and-run death of a Johns Hopkins University student two weeks ago. He got his first traffic ticket before he even had a driver's license, for speeding and driving without supervision on a learner's permit when he was 17. Within a year, his license was revoked, the...

WILLIAM WAYNE JUSTICE, 89 Influential Texas judge U.S. District Judge William Wayne Justice, whose rulings shattered old Texas by changing the way the state educated children, treated prisoners and housed its poorest and most vulnerable citizens, has died. He was 89. His law clerk, Kelly Davis, said the judge died Tuesday in Austin. The soft-spoken jurist spent three often tumultuous decades on the bench following his appointment by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. To some, Justice was a judicial renegade who disregarded the public's will by imposing his own concepts on a conservative state.

The odd and tragic case of Mark Castillo took another erratic turn Wednesday, when the 43-year-old father abruptly pleaded guilty to drowning his three young children in a city hotel bathtub, carefully timing their submersion with a stopwatch. Castillo's unexpected guilty plea to the murders, which he calculated to punish his estranged wife, came after lawyers and court officials spent a week choosing a jury for his trial. Baltimore Circuit Judge Wanda K. Heard found Castillo, who arrived in court in sweats and a T-shirt instead of his customary suit, mentally capable of entering the plea and sentenced him to three consecutive life terms without possibility of parole.

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon should stand trial on charges that she perjured herself by not disclosing gifts from a developer boyfriend, a judge ruled Monday as he rebuffed objections from the mayor's defense team that the accusations rest on faulty evidence. The decision sets up the prospect that Dixon will face a pair of trials in the months ahead - one scheduled for November on charges that she stole gift cards intended for the needy, and another later on two perjury counts. "It is not good news from the standpoint of her being able to govern," said Donald F. Norris, chairman of the Department of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

A federal judge sentenced Trenell D. Murphy to 20 years in prison Friday for possession with intent to distribute about 90 pounds of cocaine that Baltimore police said they found in the back of his Chevy truck in February - the department's largest coke bust. Murphy's sentence, though significant, was "substantially lower" than the guideline range of 24.3 to 30.4 years, despite his having been found a "career criminal," with four major felony convictions since the age of 17, noted U.S. District Judge Benson E. Legg.

Fingerprint evidence from a 2006 murder case will be admissible in federal court, a U.S. district judge in Baltimore ruled Tuesday, rejecting a decision by a Baltimore County judge that shocked prosecutors and set the defendant free. Brian Keith Rose, 25, is accused of killing Warren Fleming, a Cingular store owner at Security Square Mall, while trying to steal his car. He was linked to the crime by partial prints left on the Mercedes and a stolen Dodge Intrepid that police say was used by Rose and his accomplices in the January 2006 incident.

James Augustine Judge Jr., a career Air Force officer and bomber pilot who flew in the Pacific and China-Burma-India theaters and later participated in the historic Berlin Airlift, died of cardiovascular disease Aug. 15 at Summit Park Health and Rehabilitation Center in Catonsville. He was 86. Colonel Judge was born and raised in Lawrence, Mass. He was a 1940 graduate of Central Catholic High School in Lawrence and attended seminary before enlisting in the Army Air Forces in 1942. Trained as a bomber pilot, he was sent to the Pacific, where he flew B-17 Flying Fortress, B-25 Mitchell and B-29 Superfortress bombers.

Standing before a judge and facing 60 days in jail, Baltimore County Councilman Stephen G. Samuel Moxley admitted publicly for the first time Wednesday that he is an alcoholic and needs help. Moxley was accused of being drunk shortly before midnight July 23 when he caused a four-car pileup in West Baltimore that injured 44-year-old Justine Matthews. A police officer described him as "stumbling," "swaying" and smelling of alcohol when he emerged from his badly damaged Toyota Highlander.

Pasadena man arrested for threatening judge A Pasadena man has been arrested for threatening an Anne Arundel Circuit Court judge this month, according to the county sheriff's office. Harvey Branston Burroughs Jr., 57, of the 8500 block of Main Ave. left a threatening message on the voice mail of Judge Paul F. Harris Jr., the sheriff's office said. Burroughs had left several messages for Harris expressing displeasure after the judge in May gave his brother, Dennis Ray Burroughs, an 18-year sentence on burglary and theft charges.

A Baltimore judge refused to accept a plea agreement Thursday that would have allowed the 17-year-old defendant, charged with murdering her grandmother, to transfer into the juvenile justice system. After taking a day to consider it, Circuit Judge Timothy J. Doory denied the state-proffered plea deal, apparently unable to countenance what he called the "judge shopping" aspect of the carefully crafted plan. It essentially would have overturned another judge's ruling in March that Jabreria Handy must be tried as an adult, in part because of a history of "behavioral problems" that include nine high school suspensions, throwing a textbook and threatening a teacher's cats.