Prosecution

Regarding the Casey Anthony case, the truth is hardly ever decided by courtroom antics played out for the camera. This was not about the truth. This was about obfuscation and casting doubt. The defense did a good job of that. The prosecution overreached. The jury was not ready to convict a woman for her sociopathic behavior. They didn't have to buy the abuse story to set her free. The burden of proof was on the prosecution, and the prosecution floundered because it didn't know how Caylee died.

People who are facing some kind of financial distress are often the most vulnerable to fraud. The recent case in Harford County Circuit Court, in which a man was convicted of duping an Edgewood couple out of money he said could be used to reduce their mortgage debt, is a lesson often taught but seldom learned until it is too late, namely that if it sounds too good to be true, it almost assuredly is. In this particular case, the couple lost...

Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a moderately obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar — another brick to add to the wall of your working vocabulary. This week's word: GRAVAMEN Terms from law sometimes sidle into the general language. One such is gravamen (pronounced gruh-VAY-men), meaning the most serious part of a complaint or accusation. It derives from the Latin gravis , "heavy," and came into English in the seventeenth century as an ecclesiastical term for formal presentation of a grievance.

The trial of Gahiji Tshamaba, the former Baltimore City police officer accused of murder in the death of Marine veteran Tyrone Brown outside a downtown nightclub last year, was bound to produce conflicting witness testimony and evidence to support both the prosecution and defense cases. The verdict Thursday by Circuit Judge Edward R. K. Hargadon finding Mr. Tshamba guilty of voluntary manslaughter and a handgun violation showed that despite the complexity of the case and the intense emotions it generated, the system was still able to produce a result of which it can be said justice was done.

Almost a year to the day after Baltimore police Officer Gahiji Tshamba shot to death an unarmed Marine, the state concluded its murder case against him Monday without calling several expected witnesses — including the victim's sister, who saw the confrontation. The omission shocked Tshamba's lawyers, who said they will call Chantay Kangalee themselves when they begin presenting their defense Tuesday. "I did not expect to get into my case so quickly," said defense attorney James L. Rhodes, noting that at least two other prosecution witnesses — a police investigator and an expert in law enforcement procedures — were also passed over without being called to testify.

From the perspective of a citizen, not a baseball writer, it seems right for Barry Bonds to serve some jail time for his felony conviction on obstruction of justice. Some believe U.S. District Judge Susan Illston would be within her legal rights to throw out the conviction when she brings the participants from the 31/2-week trial back into her courtroom May 20. Maybe she will do that, but it seems Bonds deserves some real punishment, not just a slap on the wrist. Bonds thumbed his nose at the legal system, as he and hundreds of other steroid cheats had at baseball officials and fans in the years when there was no drug testing.

Last month, an estimated 2,000-3,000 copies of the Towerlight, the Towson University student newspaper, were stolen from a dozen sites on campus. University police had little trouble cracking the case, as security cameras captured the half-dozen perpetrators in the act. The information was promptly referred to the office of the Baltimore County state's attorney. Although the newspaper is free, the suspects had apparently broken a 1994 statute that specifically prohibits the theft of free newspapers in Maryland.

In his op-ed, "Same-sex marriage is contrary to the public interest" (Feb. 2), Peter Sprigg states that the purpose of marriage is to generate children. For that reason, he would limit marriage to opposite-sex couples. Would this then mean that opposite-sex couples who do not produce children or who do not wed for the purpose of having children would be in violation of the state-approved marriage license? Would this make them vulnerable to prosecution? Would their transgression be considered a misdemeanor or a felony, and would we allow a sentence of probation before judgment to grant them sufficient time to crawl back between the sheets and get the job done?

A federal judge refused Monday to release the names of potential defense witnesses in a criminal case against a former NSA employee accused of leaking classified information to a reporter, calling the prosecutors' request "highly unusual. " The U.S. Department of Justice had argued that it needed to know witness identities now, months before the scheduled March trial, to ensure that they could be trusted with sensitive information. But attorneys for defendant Thomas Drake, who worked at the National Security Agency until mid-2008, said the government was overreaching.

Several hundred people gathered on Paul Laurence Dunbar High School's football field Sunday afternoon to protest state plans to build a $100 million, 230-bed detention facility in Baltimore for juveniles criminally charged as adults. The two-hour rally culminated in a candle-lit march to the proposed construction site, a quarter-mile away next to the Baltimore City Detention Center, where protesters — chanting "educate, don't incarcerate" — used bolt-cutters to strip away the chain link fence protecting the property.