Parole Board

This week, Gov.Martin O'Malleyis making a first, tentative use of one of his most fundamental powers as governor: to right injustices in the treatment of those who have been convicted of crimes. Mr. O'Malley is moving toward commuting the sentences of two inmates sentenced to life in prison, a welcome departure from his previous habit of simply ignoring the recommendations of Maryland's parole board in the case of lifers. He was pushed by the legislature, and he is wading gingerly into the issue.

A former Baltimore County man who has spent two decades behind bars for his role in a crime spree that culminated in one of the most notorious mass slayings in U.S. history is poised for his release from a Maryland prison.As a Cub Hill teen-ager in 1973, William C. "Billy" Isaacs joined his fugitive brother and half-brother on a two-week road trip that included stops to murder a high school senior near Cumberland and six members of a Georgia farm family. Yesterday, he moved a step closer to freedom when Baltimore Circuit Judge Elsbeth L. Bothe directed state officials to draw up conditions for his parole.

HOUSTON - Bringing an abrupt end to a case that had ignited debate over condemning the mentally ill to die, Texas prison officials executed a killer yesterday who was a diagnosed schizophrenic, who once claimed that a plate of beans had spoken to him and who accused his sisters of being spies. Kelsey Patterson, 50, was killed by lethal injection. Patterson was convicted in the 1992 slaying of a businessman and the man's secretary in his hometown of Palestine. After the shootings, Patterson went home, took off all his clothes except his socks and stood in the middle of the street until the police came.

Del. Carmen Amedori, a Republican who represents northeast Carroll County, has been tapped to fill a vacancy on the Maryland Parole Commission, according to the county's Republican Central Committee. Michelle Jefferson, chairwoman of Carroll's central committee, said yesterday that "we are hearing that it is supposed to be official as of July 1. Until it comes from the governor's office, it's not 100 percent." Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s office is keeping mum, declining to comment on personnel issues.

One day last summer at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup, a prisoner named Dennis Wise took a seat at the back of the tiny cubicle where I hold forth each week as a volunteer writing instructor. It's a loosely structured class and it isn't unusual that prisoners wander in for a session or two and then drift away. While always a possibility that such drifting is a commentary on the quality of the instruction, it is also true that writing is a painful business. The core of regulars who turn out every week come not because they want to, or because someone else wants them to, but because, in the true writer's motivation, they simply have to. Buried inside is something terrible, something wonderful, something that absolutely must come out. All their lives they have tried either to unlock long-imprisoned feelings or to escape them; that they have failed is as evident as their bleak existence in this ancient, decaying prison, far removed from the commerce of the normal world.

The woman stabbed to death in her Garrison apartment this week was under police watch and had sought a court order for protection against her alleged killer, a former boyfriend who had been threatening her for years, Baltimore County police said Thursday. Katie Hadel, 33, was three months pregnant when she died Tuesday night, her mother said. She was in the apartment with at least two children when police say Jeffrey Matthew Shiflett - a man who had made many violent threats to harm Hadel - arrived at her door.

If Justice's Robert Conrad does not get George elceted president, it cannot be done. BWI is 50 and getting a little hardening around the arteries, especially 295. ABC will merge Monday Night Football with Saturday Night Live for one real long, tacky, talky weekend. Texas parole board members are paid $80,000 a year to just say no. Applicants must be at least 21, residents of Texas and friends of the governor.

San Francisco -- TUPAC SHAKUR is a punk. Worse than that, he's a punk masquerading as a role model.In the April issue of Vibe magazine, the rapper-turned-actor-turned-shooter speaks from jail on Rikers Island and does his best to spread enough manure to fertilize the Nebraska cornfields.Tupac Shakur, 23, who was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison last month on a sex-abuse charge, would have us believe that he's been freed from his "addiction" to pot-smoking, club-hopping and his "Thug Life" persona.

On Sunday, January 18, 2004, OLIVE ELIZABETH WESTBROOKE QUINN, age 89, passed away peacefully. She was a retired Professor of Sociology at Goucher College having received her undergraduate degree from Goucher and graduate degrees from University of Chicago, before coming to Baltimore she was a professional photographer, high school teacher on the Faculty at Rhodes College. While at Goucher she served as Chairman of her department and on numerous academy committees, she had an appointment at NIH and served on Patuxent Pardons and Parole Board.

Described by the victim's family as a coldblooded murderer with "misspent intelligence," former Johns Hopkins University student Robert J. Harwood Jr. was sentenced to 35 years in prison yesterday for shooting his former friend outside a campus Republican club meeting.Harwood, 23, would normally be eligible for parole in 17 1/2 years. But as part of a plea arrangement in Baltimore Circuit Court, a judge is recommending him for a prison psychiatric program at the Patuxent Institution that could grant him an earlier release.