Juvenile Court

A 14-year-old Francis Scott Key High student has been placed on community detention for 30 days for sharing an anti-depressant prescription drug with five other students at school last week, authorities said.The students, who were not named because of privacy laws, all sought medical treatment for an adverse reaction to a generic form of Paxil, authorities said.One student was admitted overnight to Carroll County General Hospital on Tuesday, hospital officials said.The students are OK and have been referred to juvenile authorities for further action, state police said.

Baltimore County Circuit Judge Robert E. Cahill Jr. said Thursday that he will rule next week on whether Robert W. Gladden Jr., the teenager accused in the Perry Hall High School shooting, will be tried as an adult or a juvenile. In a separate court proceeding Thursday, Gladden's mother's live-in boyfriend, Andrew Piper, pleaded guilty to one count of illegal possession of a regulated firearm. After the shooting at the school, county police and officials with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives searched Gladden's mother's home, where they found several rifles and a handgun belonging to Piper.

Baltimore's juvenile court system is so inept that arrest warrants go unserved, violence breaks out in courtrooms and teen-agers leave the courthouse without a hearing because no one can figure out why they came.Furthermore, a city bar association committee concludes in a new report that "much of the dramatic street crimes, killings and drug trafficking in Baltimore City are a direct result of the failures of the juvenile justice system and the low priority placed upon it by our state and local officials and citizens."

It would be refreshing if one of our esteemed Maryland criminal defense attorneys qualified to win or obtain a proper sentence would step in and replace the court-appointed public defender representing Robert Richardson III, the Bel Air 17-year-old who allegedly killed his father one year ago. While the average reader of this paper would not have reason to know it, this state contains far fewer than 20 attorneys whom a person with means would hire...

The men and women sat in the jury room in the Anne Arundel County Courthouse, but they weren't jurors. They were the parents of juvenile court defendants, ordered into a new wake-up program on gangs because of what their children may have done. "They twist their fingers around, like this — I can't get my hands into the shapes they make," said Deputy Sheriff Greg Kies, contorting his hands as his small audience laughed. "But those are hand signals, and that is a way gang members communicate with each other," he said, as the parents' faces turned somber.

WHY DID 18-month-old Alicia Cureton die? So many details of her life in the child welfare system are hidden in juvenile court records, it's hard to even guess. What's clear is that there were plenty of warning signs that might have averted her death - and indications that keeping such secrets could be harming other children, too. Only a relative handful of people know what happens to the 36,000 children passing through the state's juvenile courts each year. Child welfare agencies, caseworkers, lawyers, judges and other court workers are forbidden, by state law and judicial procedure, from telling where these children wind up. That makes it hard to fix a system that produces such deadly results for Alicia and others.

Starting today Baltimore Circuit Judge David B. Mitchell no longer owns the misery in the hallway.Victims next to wrongdoers, children of neglectful parents, bullies and worse who will end up doing life on the installment plan -- they're all in a hallway in the bowels of the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse, waiting for their moment in juvenile court.For the past 11 years, they have been Judge Mitchell's responsibility as the juvenile court's administrative judge. But today, the 50-year-old judge will settle into the world of adult drug users and sellers, with people old enough to make their own bad decisions.

Torri is 16 years old. Like most 16-year-olds, he has lived all of his life with his parents. Unlike other 16-years-olds, Torri's problems do not involve studying for the SAT exams or who to ask to the prom.Torri has been severely handicapped since birth. He uses a wheelchair and needs constant care and attention. Yet, in many ways, Torri is lucky. Torri's parents have adapted their lives to meet his needs. For 16 years, his mother and father shared the difficult task of caring for their son, helping him bathe, dress, eat, and get in and out of his wheelchair.

Nancy Davis Loomis, an Annapolis lawyer, has been appointed as an Anne Arundel County juvenile court master.A graduate of the University of Maryland School of Law, Ms. Loomis will become one of three masters who decide juvenile cases in Anne Arundel County.Ms. Loomis was appointed by the nine Anne Arundel Circuit Court judges at a meeting Monday, Judge Robert Heller Jr., administrative judge, said yesterday.She was one of 24 lawyers who applied for the position, which was left vacant with the appointment July 22 of Essom V. Ricks as a District judge.

A 16-year-old from Laurel, accused of trying to pull a shotgun on police officers, had his case transferred to juvenile court Monday. After reviewing reports from the state's Department of Juvenile Services and a psychological evaluation, Howard County Circuit Judge Diane O. Leasure granted Joshua A. Alvandi's request to have the juvenile justice system handle the gun, attempted assault and reckless endangerment charges. Alvandi's lawyer, Clarke Ahlers of Columbia, argued that his client would be better served with the help of the juvenile system.

Two men, both 19, walked into a Baltimore hospital Thursday night with gunshot wounds. Police who responded to the hospital about 9:41 p.m. quickly determined both had been shot in the 5300 block of Lantern Court in the city's Westgate neighborhood, police said. Officers were actually on the scene, investigating reports of shots fired, when they were called to an area hospital. One victim was shot in the legs and the other sustained a graze wound to the arm. Baltimore police Det. Vernon Davis described the wounds as minor.

The mother of one of the boys who accidentally shot 13-year-old Monae Turnage helped drag the girl's body into an alley behind the home and then hid the gun in a police officer's car, authorities alleged in court papers filed Friday. The new accusations against Veronica Alford, 49, place an adult squarely in the middle of what had been portrayed as a horrific but youthful mistake. The March shooting prompted outrage from community members and city officials, as well as an investigation into the actions of a city police officer.

City prosecutors have declined to press charges against a Baltimore police officer after an investigation into his conduct following the accidental shooting death of a 13-year-old girl, saying they did not have enough information to pursue a case. Monae Turnage's death shocked the community last spring, when two of the teen's juvenile friends shot her and hid her body under trash bags in an alley. They admitted to their roles in the crime during a May hearing in juvenile court. A law enforcement source said shortly after the incident that investigators found the rifle used in the killing in Officer John A. Ward's personal vehicle.

The young boys involved in the shooting death of Monae Turnage, whose body they hid under trash bags in an East Baltimore alley, were sentenced in juvenile court Wednesday. The 13-year-old who said he pulled the trigger will be committed indefinitely to a treatment facility; the 12-year-old who helped him move the body will be monitored by the Department of Juvenile Services while living with a relative in Harford County. But the family of Monae — the bubbly 13-year-old who wanted to be a pediatrician — sat outside the downtown Juvenile Justice Center after the hearing, stunned at the outcome.

The mother of a juvenile suspect who admitted this week to accidentally shooting 13-year-old Monae Turnage is being investigated in connection with circumstances surrounding the killing, the woman's attorney has confirmed. The attorney, Isaac Klein, said a prosecutor told him his client's DNA was found on Monae's bra. Two of Monae's relatives gave a similar account, saying homicide detectives informed them that DNA from the mother of the 13-year-old suspect was found on the girl's body.

Three children - an 8-year-old boy and two 9-year-old girls - who police took out of their elementary school in handcuffs earlier this year had hearings before a juvenile judge on Tuesday. They had been charged with aggravated assault, accused of vicious playground attacks in Southwest Baltimore. But while the allegations were well published, driven by the ages of the children and where they were arrested, at a school in Southwest Baltimore's Morrell Park, what is happening to them now is shrouded in the secrecy of the juvenile justice system.

A hearing to move the case of a Columbia 16-year-old, accused of fatally shooting another teen during a fight last summer, to juvenile court has been postponed. The Howard County Circuit Court hearing, scheduled Monday, was postponed to April 27 because of a potential conflict of interest involving an investigator from the state's Department of Juvenile Services who was assigned to write a report, according to the postponement request filed by Joseph Murtha, defense attorney for Monti Mantrice Fleming.

In what would be a major policy change, court proceedings involving juveniles charged with serious offenses would be open to the public under legislation proposed by the Glendening administration and some lawmakers.While critics say the move would do little to curb crime, proponents say it would focus needed public attention on Maryland's juvenile courts and direct the community's shame on young offenders, whose identities have been shielded."Too often, the criminal and the system itself could hide behind the cloak of confidentiality," said Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who helped develop the proposal.

Two city youths charged with fatally shooting a 13-year-old girl in the chest and then hiding her body under a pile of trash in an East Baltimore alley admitted to their respective roles in the killing Tuesday afternoon in juvenile court. A 13-year-old boy tendered an admission — the juvenile court equivalent of a guilty plea — to a charge of involuntary manslaughter for accidentally shooting Monae Turnage in March. A 12-year-old friend admitted to being an accessory to the crime for helping move her body.

A Bel Air teenager was indicted Tuesday on charges he murdered his father last month. Robert C. Richardson, 16, was indicted by the Harford County Grand Jury on charges of first-degree murder, second-degree murder and use of a handgun in a crime of violence in the death of his father, Robert Richardson Jr., Harford County State's Attorney Joseph I. Cassilly announced late Tuesday afternoon. The case was presented to the grand jury and the indictment handed up earlier in the day, according to a new release from Cassilly's office.