Juvenile

In office barely a month, Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler has ousted the state's independent monitor of juvenile detention programs and replaced her with a politically connected lawyer from his home county of Montgomery. The new monitor is Marlana R. Valdez of Takoma Park, a former family law professor who was campaign manager for freshman Sen. Jamin B. Raskin, a Montgomery County Democrat who is a close ally of Gansler's. Created in 2002, the independent monitor's office is the state's watchdog over programs for juvenile offenders, and in recent years it has released scathing reports about poor conditions in youth detention facilities.

The state is finally moving ahead with plans for a $41 million Juvenile Justice Center that is designed to alleviate overcrowded, antiquated conditions in Baltimore's system for dealing with youthful offenders.The Board of Public Works is expected to award the construction contract for the 240,700-square-foot building today. The long-delayed project -- occupying 5.1 acres on the site of the former Hillen Tire outlet on Hillen Street near Old Town Mall -- is scheduled to be finished in summer 2001.

A Westminster teen-ager accused of selling a fatal dose of heroin to a schoolmate in January is expected to offer a plea, rather than proceed with a weeklong trial scheduled to begin Monday in Carroll Circuit Court.Kristopher Olenginski, 16, plans to plead not guilty but accept the prosecutor's statement of the facts presented to Elsbeth L. Bothe, former Baltimore circuit judge, said Anton J. S. Keating, Olenginski's Baltimore attorney.Bothe was assigned the case in the absence of Judge Luke K. Burns Jr., who is on medical leave.

WASHINGTON -- WHEN THE Rev. Eugene Rivers, who left the mean streets of his poor Philadelphia neighborhood to go to Harvard, decided to go to the streets of Boston's rough Dorchester neighborhood as a minister, he received an important lesson from a tough local drug dealer.As Mr. Rivers tells the story, the drug dealer, named Selvin Brown, took the reverend on a tour of the poor black neighborhood's crack houses and drug hustlers.Mr. Rivers, himself a former gangbanger in the poor Philadelphia neighborhood where he grew up, was impressed by the sophistication of this lucrative industry, asked how the church ever lost such bright young minds as Mr. Brown's and why it continues to lose so many bright, promising children to the streets.

A third juvenile wanted in connection with a drug overdose death of a 15-year-old Westminster High student last month, was found hiding in the basement of his home Friday.Westminster police believe the boy, also 15, was involved in selling heroin to Liam A. O'Hara, who was found dead in bed by his father on Jan. 9.A state medical examiner determined that Liam O'Hara died of drug intoxication.Two Westminster High School students -- a 16-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl -- were arrested Jan. 26 on drug possession and distribution charges.

Two young men and a juvenile were arrested early yesterday on theft charges stemming from a scavenger hunt in which hundreds of items, including a large fiberglass cow, were found on the lawn at Liberty High School in Eldersburg."

Instead of sending 13- to 15-year-old drinkers, smokers, drug users and dealers to juvenile court, county police want to take them under their wing, scare them straight and teach them manners.The Teen Opportunity Program is not the first program in the area to take aim at a rising juvenile delinquency rate, but it is the first to hook up offenders with police."We're going to try and instill respect and manners and show them that they're worth something," said Lt. Ronald Bateman, who helped create TOP. "We want to change their behavior, their outlook on drugs, alcohol and tobacco."

An ambitious new program in Anne Arundel County aims to turn around troubled juveniles before they become entrenched in their ways and in the court system, while at the same time making it easier for their often-single mothers to get off the county's welfare rolls.The county's Juvenile Intervention and Family Independence (JIFI) Project is modeled after a 5-year-old Boston program that is considered the national model for juvenile justice intervention and prevention.A collaboration between the county's public defenders and social workers, JIFI will debut in two weeks when a lawyer, who will represent the youths in court, and a case manager, who will delve into their school and home lives, start to work.

William Thomas Fitzgerald, a former master for what is now Juvenile Court in Carroll County and a craftsman who carved an exquisite and detailed collection of birds, died Saturday of heart failure at his Westminster home.Mr. Fitzgerald, 77, was the juvenile master in the Carroll County courts from 1981 to 1989, a position he used to help and work with county youths. After he retired, he worked part time in the juvenile system."He was just everything you could want in a judge," said Peter M. Tabatsko, who succeeded Mr. Fitzgerald in the position, which was then called master of juvenile causes.

THERE WAS A hell of a fight two years ago in Baltimore over the imposition of an updated juvenile curfew law. New data released this month by the U.S. Conference of Mayors indicates curfews are growing in popularity and are being given partial credit for drops in juvenile crime. The information suggests Baltimore was right to continue its curfew law, but public officials must keep in mind the tool has only limited value.Baltimore first imposed a curfew in 1983 that prohibited unsupervised minors from being on the street after 11 p.m. The shooting of a 10-year-old boy led to passage of an even tougher law in 1994, but it couldn't stand up to constitutional scrutiny.

On November 4, 2009, Leonore Smart Wetherill A memorial service will be held at the Church of the Good Shepherd, 1404 Carrollton Avenue, Ruxton, MD 21204 on Tuesday, November 10th at 4 P.M. In lieu of flowers contributions may be made to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International, 120 Wall Street, 19th Floor, New York, NY 10005.

When Judge Richard S. Bernhardt ran for election to a 15-year term as a nonpartisan Circuit Court judge in Howard County a year after then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. appointed him to the bench in 2005, he talked about his experience as a judge and attorney, not individual cases. But it's tough decisions like the one Bernhardt made recently to send 16-year-old Darnell Rasheen Furby back to juvenile court that gives voters a chance to consider the quality of their selection. Furby was one of three youths charged as adults with attacking and robbing a private security guard near the Long Reach Village Center May 13, though Furby is not suspected of firing a gun or of physically hitting the victim.

Even in a city where so many of us have become inured to violent crime, the vicious beating of 76-year-old James A. Privott, allegedly by a self-described white supremacist, last week at Fort Armistead Park was particularly unsettling and repugnant. Not just because the victim, a state government retiree who was doing nothing more provocative than fishing - and who had no water or cigarettes to share with his assailants - was hospitalized with a fractured eye socket and two missing teeth, but because of the questions it raises.

A 16-year-old Columbia youth and alleged gang affiliate accused as an adult in a May attack on a security guard near the Long Reach Village Center was ordered detained Wednesday as a public safety risk, but also had his case returned to juvenile court. Darnell Rasheen Furby had been free on $35,000 bail until Howard County Circuit Judge Richard S. Bernhardt decided the teen should be treated as a juvenile instead of facing adult charges of assault, theft, and use of a handgun in commission of a felony in the May 13 attack in the 8800 block Flowerstock Row. Furby lives in that same block.

An Anne Arundel County judge has turned down a defense request to let the younger of two teen-agers charged with killing another Crofton teen live with an aunt in Delaware while awaiting trial in September. Judge Nancy Davis-Loomis said Monday that while she understood his family's wish to have him home, she agreed with prosecutors who argued that there was no reason to move the 14-year-old out of a juvenile facility where he has been since his arrest on a charge of manslaughter in the May 30 death of Christopher David Jones.

Citing concerns for safety and the accused youth, an Anne Arundel County judge barred the public from the trial of the younger of two teenagers charged in the May 30 death of 14-year-old Christopher David Jones of Crofton. Judge Philip T. Caroom's ruling, issued Monday, allows the news media at the trial, but with a request that they voluntarily agree not to publish the names of the 14-year-old boy who is charged and names of witnesses who are juveniles. Caroom issued the order after learning of death threats against the 14-year-old while the boy was at one detention center.

A Glen Burnie teen was found responsible yesterday in the death of a 49-year-old man who died after being struck on the head with an aluminum baseball bat. Christian J. Schellenschlager Jr., 16, was found the juvenile court's equivalent of guilty of voluntary manslaughter. He avoided a similar finding on more serious charges, including second-degree murder, in the death of Brian Michael Myers in April. Prosecutors had attempted to have him tried as an adult. The teenager did not admit responsibility, but he agreed to a statement of facts read yesterday morning by prosecutors in the Anne Arundel County courtroom of Circuit Judge J. Michael Wachs.

Police said the victim of a fatal shooting in Northeast Baltimore on Wednesday night was a 17-year-old boy, the sixth juvenile killed this year. Dewayne Lawrence was sitting in the front passenger seat of a vehicle as it pulled out of the Cedonia Inn parking lot, in the 5900 block of Moravia Road, when a gunman began firing at the vehicle, police said. Detective Nicole Monroe, a police spokeswoman, said "numerous rounds" struck the rear windows of the vehicle. Lawrence, of the 1600 block of Ramblewood Road, was hit at least once in the head.

Dwayne Price had been arrested 11 times and had run away from state custody at least once. Yet at the age of 18, the state's juvenile justice system gave him one final chance at rehabilitation, sending him to Pennsylvania's Camp Adams, a youth lockup north of Allentown. Less than three weeks later, Price escaped. Pennsylvania authorities quickly caught, charged and convicted him as an adult. But because he had been waiting in jail for 145 days, they paroled him three days after he was sentenced, putting him back on the streets - likely years before he would have been if he hadn't escaped.

When Jeffrey C. Butler ran away in November from an out-of-state treatment facility where he was serving a sentence for a carjacking in Baltimore, a judge issued a warrant for his arrest. The warrant languished for months. City police said they did not receive information about it until March 21, as part of a joint effort with the state to reduce a backlog of juvenile warrants. And by the time officers went looking for Butler on March 24, it was too late. He had been shot and killed the day before on a Southwest Baltimore street.