Potential Jurors

In a sweeping ruling on potential juror bias, the state's highest court said yesterday that any defendant is entitled to ask potential jurors if they harbor racial, ethnic or cultural biases that would make them unsuitable for his trial.The details of the case need not involve those prejudices for the defendant to ask would-be jurors about their attitudes, because the goal of the questioning is to flush out potential jurors who may be influenced by their biases, the Court of Appeals said.

In a sweeping ruling on potential juror bias, the state's highest court said yesterday that any defendant is entitled to ask potential jurors if they harbor racial, ethnic or cultural biases that would make them unsuitable for his trial.The details of the case need not involve those prejudices for the defendant to ask would-be jurors about their attitudes, because the goal of the questioning is to flush out potential jurors who may be influenced by their biases, the Court of Appeals said.

In a sweeping ruling on potential juror bias, the state's highest court said yesterday that any defendant is entitled to ask potential jurors if they harbor racial, ethnic or cultural biases that would make them unsuitable for his trial.The details of the case need not involve those prejudices for the defendant to ask would-be jurors about their attitudes, because the goal of the questioning is to flush out potential jurors who may be influenced by their biases, the Court of Appeals said.

TEMPERS ARE short at the Baltimore City courthouse these days. Efforts to reduce case backlogs have necessitated summoning so many potential jurors they have nowhere to sit. Vending machines are empty. Of 12 public toilets at the Mitchell Courthouse, only two women's and three men's are working.Circuit Court Clerk Frank M. Conaway complains of "substandard" overall conditions -- falling plaster, dirty hallways, dusty and clogged vents and roach infestation. "This is certainly an emergency situation and one that should be given immediate attention," he wrote recently.

After a day of patient waiting and tedious questioning, scores of potential jurors went home last night with plans to return this morning as jury selection in the Ruthann Aron murder-for-hire trial continues.Montgomery County Circuit Judge Vincent E. Ferretti Jr., who at 4 p.m. announced to jurors that he would work into the evening to complete jury selection, reappeared just before 7 p.m. to apologize."When you're the judge, you have to take the heat," he told the group of nearly 200, who packed Courtroom One of the county judicial center.

With a murder trial due to begin next week in the starvation death of 9-year-old Rita Denise Fisher, the Baltimore County Circuit Court is preparing to question 300 potential jurors -- one of the largest pools in county history."

TRENTON, N.J. -- Everyone knows what the prosecutors say happened to Megan Kanka.In the summer of 1994, they say, the 7-year-old girl was lured into the home of a neighbor with a record of sexual offenses against children, where she was raped and strangled. Her body was left in a pile of weeds in a park near her home in Hamilton Township.That story is well-known because her death almost immediately spawned a law in her name in New Jersey, as well as a federal law and laws in other states, aimed at notifying communities of sexual offenders in their midst.

The trial for a man accused of raping a 15-year-old girl behind Howard County's Central Library in Columbia's Town Center will be moved to Carroll County Circuit Court.Timothy Bryan Chase, 29, will stand trial in that county after Howard Circuit Judge Diane O. Leasure ruled that pretrial publicity prohibited Chase from receiving a fair trial in Howard. No trial date has been set. Last week, Leasure granted a #F last-minute defense motion to move the trial, saying an article published in The Sun was so detailed it could prejudice potential jurors.

The Maryland Court of Appeals turned down yesterday a convicted murderer's request for a new trial, saying that the dismissal of several potential jurors from his case was not racially motivated.The court, in a unanimous ruling, upheld a decision by Prince George's County Circuit Judge James Magruder Rea, who said county state's attorneys had other valid, race-neutral reasons for dismissing the jurors in the case of Peter Donald Harley.Harley was charged with murder and related offenses in the 1991 killing of Timothy Kidd, who was shot in the head when a drug buy went awry in the Nalley Road apartment complex of Washington Heights, said Assistant State Attorney General Gary E. Bair.

John J. Merzbacher's first criminal trial on charges that he sexually abused students started slowly yesterday, with the defense losing its bid to have potential jurors given a lengthy background survey.As the case finally was called for trial, nearly a year and a half after the former Catholic school teacher was arrested, the defendant was asked again to give his plea to the charges. His firm "not guilty" sent derisive murmurs throughout a courtroom peppered with former students who say Mr. Merzbacher raped and molested them over the seven years he taught at Catholic Community Middle School in the Locust Point section of South Baltimore from 1972 to 1979.

Take the daily pay for a Baltimore Circuit Court judge, prosecutor, public defender, two cops, a government chemist, sheriff's deputy and court clerk. Multiply by two. What do you get? The cost incurred this week when a two-day drug trial went down the tubes because one of the jurors spoke little English. The prosecution and defense had done their things, two alternate jurors had been sent home, and the jury was a couple of hours into deliberations when it sent a note to Judge Emanuel Brown.

WASHINGTON -- The perjury and obstruction trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby turned into an examination of the credibility of the Bush administration yesterday, with lawyers for the former White House aide asking potential jurors how they feel about the war in Iraq and whether present and former administration officials who might be called to testify could be believed. Libby is charged with lying to investigators about conversations he had with journalists about a CIA operative who is married to a critic of the administration's war policies.

A state panel of lawyers and judges has shelved a proposal to ban public access to potential juror lists and to release only the names of people sworn in as jurors, saying it failed to address several issues. The proposal sought to ease the growing reluctance of people to serve on juries out of fear that their safety might be threatened or their private data compromised, or that they might be harassed after a trial. It has met stiff opposition from lawyers, who use the data to select juries, and from public information advocates, who say the proposal could remove the jury process from scrutiny.

WASHINGTON -- In a prelude to the court-martial of Navy's star quarterback last season, who is accused of raping a female classmate in January, prosecutors and defense attorneys questioned potential jurors about their impartiality, experience with alcohol use and sexual abuse. The military judge, defense attorneys and Navy lawyers eliminated nine of 14 "members" -potential jurors in military courts - because of their perceptions about Lamar Owens' guilt, past relationships with him or the alleged victim, and prior experience with sexual assault.

ROCKVILLE -- One by one, they walk down the aisle, some 300 prospective jurors, stealing glances around the nearly empty courtroom, before their eyes flash on the man for whom they are here. He is John Allen Muhammad, who faces six counts of murder in Montgomery County arising from the Washington-area sniper rampage in 2002. And nearly every one of the summoned county residents knows that he was convicted of a sniper shooting in Virginia in 2003. Prospective juror Andrew Truszkowski of Germantown said it felt "creepy" sitting across from Muhammad, who is on Virginia's death row. "He's a cold-blooded killer.

ROCKVILLE -- The difficulty of finding jurors in Montgomery County who had not decided that convicted sniper John Allen Muhammad was responsible for the county's six sniper killings in 2002 became immediately apparent yesterday as the presiding judge questioned the first batch of 300 potential jurors. During initial questioning - which was disrupted by a profanity-laced outburst from a victim's relative - nearly all of the first 25 potential jurors said they believed that Muhammad committed six murders in the county, and many were aware that he had been convicted of a sniper killing in Virginia.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- Two Muslim immigrants were qualified as potential jurors. So was a career Navy veteran once assigned to the Pentagon who nearly lost a friend on Sept. 11. So was a young woman seeking to become an FBI agent, who believes Zacarias Moussaoui still might be conspiring to attack the United States. One by one yesterday, U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema asked a diverse group of prospective jurors whether they could put aside their anger over the attacks and fairly decide if the only man in this country who has admitted to being a Sept.

FORT HOOD, TEXAS -- Acknowledging Pfc. Lynndie R. England's participation in some of the most notorious abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, a lawyer for the young Army reservist asked the jury yesterday to look beyond the photos in which she appeared with nude detainees posed in pyramids and in sexually humiliating positions. "The pictures are indisputable," Capt. Jonathan Crisp told the five Army officers serving as jurors. "The defense is not going to say that was not Lynndie England. The defense is not going to say that what those pictures show didn't happen.

It was the fourth question yesterday that put the brakes on jury selection in the trial of two Mexican immigrants charged with killing three children last year in Northwest Baltimore. "Does anybody believe they have heard or read anything about this case?" Baltimore Circuit Judge Thomas Ward asked a courtroom crowded with about 250 potential jurors. When nearly all hands shot up, Ward began the tedious process of interviewing each person separately about his or her knowledge of the crime for which Policarpio Espinoza, 23, and his nephew, Adan Canela, 18, are charged.

The president of the NAACP's Anne Arundel County chapter expressed alarm yesterday at a defense lawyer's request in a high-profile trial, saying it could lead to eliminating blacks from a jury that will decide whether a white teenager is to blame for an African-American youth's death in a brawl last summer. Stating that he was worried about juror bias, the lawyer for the first defendant facing trial in Noah Jamahl Jones' death told a judge yesterday that he wants prospective jurors asked if they belong to groups that pushed for prosecutions in Jones' death.