Prison

A Columbia woman whose conviction in the 2005 strangulation of a fellow Loyola College doctoral student was overturned in September agreed to a plea deal yesterday in Howard County Circuit Court that freed her from prison. The state Court of Special Appeals had ruled that Melissa Burch Harton, 27, was entitled to a new trial after being convicted of involuntary manslaughter because Howard County detectives waited until she made incriminating statements to advise her of her Miranda rights.

Sentencing system defrauds the public Does anyone understand why Arthur Bremer, who was convicted of attempting to assassinate a presidential candidate, is being released from prison this year after being sentenced to 53 years in prison in 1972 ("Wallace shooter to be freed," Aug. 24)? He is not being released because he has been a model prisoner. He is not being released because a parole board determined that he has earned the right to live outside the prison walls. He is not being released because of his work tutoring other prisoners.

State officials have abruptly shut down the Maryland House of Correction, an antiquated and notorious maximum-security prison in Jessup where inmate violence had spiraled out of control and corruption had run rampant. Prison administrators had planned to convert the 128-year-old prison - where a correctional officer and three inmates have been killed within the past year - to a minimum-security facility in coming months. But the state's top correctional official said yesterday that he began laying plans to close the prison within hours of the non-fatal March 2 stabbing of a correctional officer there.

An Edgewood man pleaded guilty yesterday in federal court to receiving child pornography, according to the U.S. attorney's office. Federal prosecutors said that Matthew Justin Perry, 28, had responded to an Internet advertisement in 2005 that was posted to computer newsgroups by an undercover U.S. postal inspector. Perry indicated he was interested in buying videos of child pornography and sent payment for videos to an Ohio post office box, prosecutors said. After Perry signed for the package of videotapes delivered to his home, law enforcement officials searched his home and computer, finding more than 2,000 image of child pornography.

By the time police caught up with Bertha Theresa Marie Keene in Florida on Dec. 1, nearly 20 years had passed since the night she used a rope of bedsheets to flee the maximum security women's prison in Jessup. It was her fourth successful escape, a record that still stands.Thirty years had passed since, in an LSD-alcohol haze, she fatally shot the doorman at a Waverly nightclub for refusing to let her in, a crime that got her a life sentence.And it had been even longer since she emerged from a troubled childhood to become a dancer on The Block at Blaze Starr's Two O'Clock Club.

Two Patuxent Institution inmates were arrested in a stabbing yesterday at the prison that left another prisoner in serious condition, a state corrections official said.Warren James Courts, 20, formerly of the 3800 block of Cottage Ave. in Baltimore, was stabbed in the neck with a homemade knife, said Leonard A. Sipes Jr., a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Courts was in serious but stable condition last night at Maryland Shock Trauma Center.

He was supposed to spend "the remainder of his natural life" in prison, a sentence of life plus 95 years for his role in the 1975 killing of a state police sergeant and the rape of a woman whose car he stole after the slaying.Instead, Charles Edward Watson, once on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List, has had several sips of freedom -- thanks to legal twists and turns that led to a reduced sentence. He picked up golf on a recent vacation to Texas.This month, Watson, 52, landed behind bars again, the terms of his early release violated when he was accused of tampering with a jar of charity money at a Glen Burnie restaurant.

Several of a Jessup prison's worst inmates attacked a group of corrections officers yesterday afternoon, stabbing two of them in what prison officials say was an isolated and unprovoked assault.The two officers from the Maryland House of Correction were flown to Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, where they were treated for stab wounds to the head and back and released last night. Officials identified them as Gregory McGowen and Officer Alonzo Galloway.Two other officers suffered minor injuries in the assault.

The union representing employees at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup is backing efforts by state officials to investigate corrections officers suspected of smuggling drugs into the prison."

Shortly after raiding a Jessup prison this year to clear out an inmate gang, corrections officials began acting like general managers of a baseball team. They placed phone calls and bargained, making a deal that sent a troublesome convicted murderer to rural Arizona.In exchange, officials say, Arizona sent Maryland a 42-year-old convicted kidnapper who was causing security problems.Across the country, state officials are exchanging dangerous inmates -- often those involved in drugs and gangs behind bars -- for troublesome convicts in other states.

A Howard County judge sentenced a Baltimore man Thursday to 40 years in prison for a 2008 break-in and attack on his estranged girlfriend's mother and the mother's then-fiance at a Columbia townhouse. Judge Richard S. Bernhardt sentenced Gregory S. Imes Jr., 27, formerly of the 4900 block of Parkton Court, to two consecutive 20-year sentences. Imes was convicted in June of two counts of second-degree attempted murder, two counts of first-degree assault and burglary. Assistant State's Attorney Maurice Frazier asked Bernhardt to exceed the sentencing guidelines of 15 to 50 years in prison, saying that the guidelines "do not reflect the terror, the horror and the mayhem" of the attack.

Nine years later, the pain hasn't subsided. Laurie Platt's mind won't allow it. Neither will the judicial system. On Oct. 14, 2000, Laurie Platt lost her husband, her preschool-age children lost their father and the city lost two of its officers, Sgt. John D. Platt and Kevin McCarthy, when a drunk driver going 63 mph ran a stop sign in Hamilton and rammed their police car. In the nine years since, the driver, Shane Daniel Weiss, was convicted of...

In the continual cat-and-mouse game between corrections officials and the inmates they oversee, the newest form of contraband are cell phones smuggled into prisons by visitors, contractors and corrupt guards. Inmates use the devices to communicate with associates and direct criminal enterprises from behind prison walls almost as easily as if they were still on the streets. No one really knows how many contraband phones are floating around in the system, but over the last year Maryland has seen an increasing number of cases in which prisoners used cell phones to run drug operations, harass victims' families, plan escapes and even order witnesses killed to prevent them from testifying.

A twice-convicted murderer was sentenced Thursday to life in prison without parole in the 2007 killing of a 28-year-old during a fight in the city's Barclay neighborhood. Baltimore Circuit Judge John C. Themelis imposed the maximum after noting that this was Donnell Johnson's eighth conviction; that he had been put on probation four times, completing it successfully only once; and that he had been cited for 11 infractions in prison. In 1995, Johnson, 35, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a 12-year sentence but faced up to 18 more years in prison if he violated probation during the three years after his release.

A proposal to allow prison officials to jam the signals of cell phones used illegally by inmates is about preventing crimes and saving lives. Public safety officials in Maryland and elsewhere say such technology would allow them to stop illegal phone calls at the source and save the manpower used now to search for cell phones that have been smuggled into prisons and jails. But the wireless industry has thrown up its own barrier, opposing federal legislation that would permit the jamming.

I talk to a lot of guys who just came home from prison - within the last week, the last month or the last year. They're looking for a job. They call here almost every day because someone - maybe a counselor at a drug treatment center, or a probation officer or cop or girlfriend - will tell them I have a magic list of Baltimore-area companies that have a record of hiring ex-offenders. The list is a few years old now. It's hardly magic. Still, when requested, I mail it to a guy looking for work.

A 17-year-old Dundalk boy pleaded guilty yesterday to first-degree murder in the fatal shooting of a teenager whom he and his friends picked at random to beat up in January. William R. "Billy" Ferandes could receive a sentence of up to 60 years in prison, according to the terms of a plea agreement reached between prosecutors and the defendant's lawyer. Baltimore County prosecutors had been seeking life in prison without the possibility of parole. But Baltimore County Circuit Judge Patrick Cavanaugh agreed to impose a sentence of no more than life in prison with all but 60 years suspended and a concurrent 20-year prison term for a handgun charge to which the teenager also entered a guilty plea.

Teen admits slaying man after watching him kill Less than an hour before 18-year-old Dwayne Erving murdered Joseph Bryant, he witnessed the 29-year-old kill one man and wound another. Erving feared Bryant would come after him, so he killed him first, according to a spokeswoman for prosecutors. Yesterday, Erving pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of Bryant. Erving told police that he watched Bryant kill Taavon Mitchell, 27, in the 1400 block of N. Milton Ave., about 50 minutes before he launched a pre-emptive attack against Bryant in the 2300 block of E. Oliver St., early Aug. 8, 2007.

A convicted murderer sentenced to an added 15-year term for assaulting a fellow inmate told an Anne Arundel County judge yesterday that he is being threatened in prison by gang members and was forced to resort to violence to protect himself. Richard Janey, 43, is serving a 30-year sentence at the Western Correctional Institution in Cumberland for the murder of an Annapolis woman in 1994. Janey was convicted of second-degree murder in the killing of 29-year-old Susan McAteer, who was stabbed 58 times.

For Phyllis Bricker, a rare tour yesterday through the Supermax prison - where her parents' killer is housed on death row - was the latest step in a painful odyssey as she awaits an execution that has been on hold for years. "My parents are gone, and he's still here," Bricker said while standing inside the fortified building north of downtown, at the state prison complex on East Madison Street. For Lisa Spicknall, whose husband killed their two children in 1999 and was later slain by another inmate in prison in Jessup, there was some relief.