Justices

Annapolis Alderman Mathew Silverman resigned Friday, citing time conflicts with his job as a special agent at the U.S. Department of Justice, according to city officials. Silverman, a Democrat, was elected to the City Council in 2009 while he was an Anne Arundel County police officer. He subsequently took what he has called "a dream job" with the justice department. In a Friday letter to his council colleagues and Mayor Joshua Cohen, Silverman, 33, wrote that new job responsibilities require him to be on call 24 hours a day and may conflict with his city work.

Forty-three years of letters, photographs, campaign buttons, itineraries and the occasional miniature flag are crammed into 2,000 fat binders lining three walls - floor to ceiling - of a storage room in the University of Maryland School of Law. They amount to a meticulous chronicle of Larry S. Gibson's professional life from 1965, when he was still a law student, to 2008, when he was active in a presidential election in Ghana. And that doesn't include 160 binders worth of material that's still in boxes, plus 200 more at Gibson's home and his law school office.

Exelon Corp. will pay $692,000 - including $151,000 to Maryland regulators - to settle alleged violations of a Justice Department agreement that had allowed the company to acquire Baltimore's Constellation Energy Group. The Justice Department said Thursday that Exelon - to not raise market prices for electricity - was required to make electricity-sale bids at or below cost from 22 of its generating plants while waiting to sell three plants in Maryland after the merger. Instead, some of its bids were above cost, the agency said.

Now that the 112th Senate is returning for its lame duck session after President Barack Obama captured a second term and Democrats retained a Senate majority, this is an ideal moment to analyze the federal judicial vacancy crisis. The bench currently has 68 vacancies in the 679 District Court judgeships - a 10 percent vacancy rate - including one in Maryland. Thus, starting with Tuesday's lame duck session, President Obama must promptly nominate, and the Senate expeditiously confirm, nominees, so that judges can deliver justice.

Criminals paid to restore a stream that runs through a Bel Air park. They also are covering the cost of upgrades to septic systems in the Sassafras River watershed and an effort to find new ways to detect illegal pollution discharge in Montgomery County and Cumberland. In January, the Gunpowder Valley Conservancy will begin a two-year project to improve the Middle River and tidal Gunpowder watersheds, courtesy of lawbreakers. All of the work is possible because local Coast Guard inspectors caught shipping companies dumping pollutants in the ocean and a federal judge ordered them to pay $1.3 million in restitution.

In the midst of one of many tributes to former state Sen. Clarence M. Mitchell III at his memorial service in an Upton church Sunday night, hundreds of family members, friends and fellow politicians broke out into an impromptu singing of the hymn "Lift Every Voice and Sing. " The message of the hymn, popularized during the civil rights movement, is one of steadfast devotion to liberty. Many who spoke during the hours-long service honoring the late legislative pioneer used their own voices to laud what they said was his same devotion.

It may be time to say farewell to affirmative action in higher education admissions and to the aspirations that went with it. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a case challenging the sliver of consideration the university gives to race and ethnicity when deciding whom to admit. It is already being billed as "the case that killed affirmative action. " That may prove true, as the make-up of the Supreme Court has changed considerably since the last time it looked at this heated issue, in 2003.

When he was in prison, Harold Bailey said, he would often think about the homicide that resulted in his 20-year incarceration and about how his criminal record might cost him opportunities for employment or education. To continue the undergraduate education he had worked at for two years, Bailey would sit in his cell and voraciously read novels, autobiographies, academic texts — any work he could get his hands on. Since his release in 2005, Bailey has earned two degrees, a bachelor's and a master's, from Coppin State University.

Rick Bowlus comes by his love of football honestly. But becoming a big-time Ravens fan — that wasn't so easy. Bowlus, who goes by the name "Poetic Justice" on Ravens game days, grew up in Ohio a devoted Browns fan. And he maintained that allegiance even after moving to Maryland in 1970 and becoming a science teacher and assistant basketball coach at Bel Air High School. Unlike the vast majority of his fellow Browns fans, whose allegiance didn't follow when the team headed to Baltimore, Bowlus became a proud Ravens fanatic.

Baltimore City officials owe an explanation to the family of Monae Turnage, the 13-year-old girl whose body was found covered under trash bags in an alley near her home this spring. Two boys who were friends of the victim, ages 13 and 12, later confessed to involvement in the accidental shooting of the girl while playing with a rifle, then dragging her into the alley to hide the crime. But police have never explained how the weapon came to be found in the personal vehicle of a Baltimore City police officer, John A. Ward.