Judge Bell

Chief Judge Bell honored for efforts on conflict resolution Maryland's chief judge, Robert M. Bell, will receive an award this month from the American Bar Association for "advancing the appropriate use of mediation and other non-adversarial forms of conflict resolution in the court system and in the wider community," the ABA said yesterday. The award will be presented March 21 in San Antonio. Bell created a commission in 1998 and then a state office to take nonconfrontational methods of conflict resolution to courts, schools and communities.

Four judges and one lawyer have applied for the Court of Appeals seat that will become vacant July 6 when Chief Judge Robert M. Bell reaches the mandatory retirement age of 70. The applicants for the judgeship on the state's highest court are Judges Stuart Ross Berger, Albert Joseph Matricciani Jr. and Shirley Marie Watts, all sitting on the Court of Special Appeals; Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge W. Michel Pierson; and Baltimore attorney Mary...

GOV. PARRIS N. GLENDENING faced a formidable task in naming a replacement for Chief Judge Robert C. Murphy of the Court of Appeals, who retired earlier this month. For a quarter-century, Chief Judge Murphy provided strong, able and honorable leadership for Maryland's judicial system. The challenge facing his successor, Robert M. Bell, is not simply to maintain this high level of justice, but to enhance the quality of Maryland's courts and their service to the public.Chief Judge Bell brings one qualification not shared by any other candidate for the job, having served on all four levels of Maryland's courts, beginning with his appointment to the District Court in Baltimore City in 1975.

July 6, 1943 Robert Mack Bell born in Rocky Mount, N.C.; family moves to Baltimore about 11/2 years later. June 17, 1960 Bell and 11 students try to get seated at Hooper's Restaurant at Charles and Fayette streets in Baltimore. A hostess says the restaurant policy is not to "serve Negroes," and they sit down nonetheless, prompting a call to police that leads to their arrest and conviction for trespassing. Case becomes known as Bell v. Maryland because Bell's name came first alphabetically.

What several hundred Baltimore students saw yesterday in the Dunbar High School auditorium was Robert M. Bell take the oath of office as a judge on Maryland's highest court, the Court of Appeals. What schoolmates and best friends Octavia Brice and Elissa James saw was a vision of their own futures.Judge Bell is what the two 15-year-old juniors at Lake Clifton High School intend to be: a graduate of Baltimore schools, an alumnus of Harvard Law School, a lawyer, a judge. Seeing him yesterday and listening to his encouragement merely reinforced the ambitions both girls say they have harbored and imagined for years.

Even in a year when voters seemed inclined to "throw the bums out," all nine incumbent appellate court judges on the ballot yesterday were expected to win election to 10-year terms.With no major controversies surrounding the judicial races, five Court of Appeals judges and four Court of Special Appeals judges were expected to win their retention elections.The judges faced no challengers, and all were endorsed by the Maryland State Bar Association.Voters were asked whether the incumbents should be retained for 10-year terms.

BROAD DISSEMINATION of information is a primary objective in our Internet Age. Yet Maryland's judiciary wants to cut off easy public access to court records. Court officials propose delegating to clerks and PR aides vast powers to stop people from viewing records in person or over the Internet. Reporters -- especially those writing critically about judges and court controversies -- could find themselves cut off from court files. It's a dangerous limitation of First Amendment rights. It also sharply contradicts what Robert M. Bell has preached since he became Maryland's chief judge in 1996 about making courts more accessible to citizens.

Meyer M. Cardin, a former judge of the old Supreme Bench of Baltimore City and patriarch of a family of lawyers including Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, died of cancer yesterday at his Park Heights Avenue home. He would have celebrated his 98th birthday tomorrow. "They don't make judges like that anymore. He loved people and the law, and he had lots of wisdom, which he loved to share," Maryland Court of Appeals Chief Judge Robert M. Bell said yesterday. "He came from a different era, when the law was a lot less complex.

IT LOOKS LIKE Parris Glendening's greatest triumph. But the appointment last week of Robert M. Bell as Maryland's top judge could ultimately hold the seeds of Mr. Glendening's defeat.Maryland's judiciary is the forgotten bureaucracy. Little is written about the state court system. Each twitch of the U.S. Supreme Court is dissected endlessly, but not the Maryland Court of Appeals or any of the lower courts.Few people can name a single member of this state's highest court. Is it a conservative group?

POLITICS IN THE selection of the state's chief judge? Of course. Give a governor or any other elected official appointment power over another branch of government, and politics will be part of the equation.And why not? Politics is a way of weighing competing interests, and winning an election gives a governor the right to weigh it his way -- or hers. So any carping that Gov. Parris N. Glendening may have factored his political interests into the appointment of the state's first African-American chief judge is beside the point.

Clayton Cann Carter, a retired Queen Anne's County Circuit Court judge who was a Maryland history buff and a collector of Maryland-related objets d'art, died July 30 of an apparent heart attack at Chesterfield, his Centreville home. He was 92. The son of a miller and a storekeeper, Judge Carter was born and raised in Centreville. He was a 1935 graduate of Centreville High School and earned a bachelor's degree in 1939 from Duke University. "There were only 11 grades in those days at Centreville High School and he was 16 when he entered Duke, where he earned his degree at 20," said a daughter, Rachel MacDonough Carter Gross of Chestertown.

Meyer M. Cardin, a former judge of the old Supreme Bench of Baltimore City and patriarch of a family of lawyers including Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, died of cancer yesterday at his Park Heights Avenue home. He would have celebrated his 98th birthday tomorrow. "They don't make judges like that anymore. He loved people and the law, and he had lots of wisdom, which he loved to share," Maryland Court of Appeals Chief Judge Robert M. Bell said yesterday. "He came from a different era, when the law was a lot less complex.

Chief Judge Bell honored for efforts on conflict resolution Maryland's chief judge, Robert M. Bell, will receive an award this month from the American Bar Association for "advancing the appropriate use of mediation and other non-adversarial forms of conflict resolution in the court system and in the wider community," the ABA said yesterday. The award will be presented March 21 in San Antonio. Bell created a commission in 1998 and then a state office to take nonconfrontational methods of conflict resolution to courts, schools and communities.

Rosa Lee Bell, the mother of Maryland's chief judge, died Tuesday of a circulatory ailment at her home in Brooklyn, N.Y. She was 84 and formerly resided in East Baltimore. She was born Rosa Lee Jordan in Enfield, N.C., the oldest girl in a family of 11 children. Her parents were sharecroppers. "When the crop had to be gotten out, she was not in school. At best, she completed the third grade. Later in life, she taught herself to read and got an eighth-grade equivalency certificate," said her son, Chief Judge Robert M. Bell of the Maryland Court of Appeals.

Exactly 37 years ago, the Supreme Court ordered Maryland's highest court to review the case of some civil rights demonstrators arrested in Baltimore for refusing to leave a whites-only restaurant. Next week, one of those demonstrators will receive an award for his efforts to promote a lesson learned in that case. Robert M. Bell, chief judge of the state's highest court, will be honored Tuesday by the Pro Bono Resource Center of Baltimore for his efforts to improve access to the legal system.

BROAD DISSEMINATION of information is a primary objective in our Internet Age. Yet Maryland's judiciary wants to cut off easy public access to court records. Court officials propose delegating to clerks and PR aides vast powers to stop people from viewing records in person or over the Internet. Reporters -- especially those writing critically about judges and court controversies -- could find themselves cut off from court files. It's a dangerous limitation of First Amendment rights. It also sharply contradicts what Robert M. Bell has preached since he became Maryland's chief judge in 1996 about making courts more accessible to citizens.

NOT CONTENT with stop-gap measures, the Maryland General Assembly wants to revamp Baltimore's malfunctioning criminal-justice system. Legislators have frozen $17.8 million until they are satisfied that comprehensive reform is under way. To free that money, Court of Appeals Chief Judge Robert M. Bell must submit by Oct. 1 a blueprint to overhaul the city's problematic prosecution and court practices."

Bell's RecordWhile reading John P. Greenspan's letter (Oct. 30) concerning Judge Robert Bell, I was struck by what seemed to be an obvious misstatement of Judge Bell's record.Although Mr. Greenspan did not identify the four-month period to which he had reference, I reviewed Court of Appeals cases for the period May, 1991, when Judge Bell joined the court, through August, 1992, and I could find no four-month period during which Judge Bell did not vote to affirm a conviction in an appropriate case.

NOT CONTENT with stop-gap measures, the Maryland General Assembly wants to revamp Baltimore's malfunctioning criminal-justice system. Legislators have frozen $17.8 million until they are satisfied that comprehensive reform is under way. To free that money, Court of Appeals Chief Judge Robert M. Bell must submit by Oct. 1 a blueprint to overhaul the city's problematic prosecution and court practices."