Prosecutor

Moments after hearing his cellmate talk about his desire for some harm to befall a Baltimore County prosecutor, Timothy Bryce made a promise. "No matter what happens," the jailed man told fellow inmate Michael B. Martin, "what you have told me will never go beyond us." But about two hours earlier, detectives had fitted Bryce with a digital recorder that captured much of what was said during the men's conversation. Excerpts of that recording were played yesterday during the second day of Martin's trial on charges that he solicited his cellmate to kill both the prosecutor who handled a 2005 sex-abuse case against him and a developer who proposed building a child care center in Martin's community, and to set fire to the home of an elderly woman who told people at Martin's church about the abuse allegations.

Scott D. Shellenberger was a first-year law student, working as a stockboy and clerk at Kmart, when Baltimore County State's Attorney Sandra A. O'Connor offered him a job as a law clerk 25 years ago. Yesterday, the former prosecutor and veteran litigator took the oath of office to replace his former boss, who retired last week after 32 years as the county's top prosecutor. Shellenberger, 47, received a standing ovation from the staff of more than 50 prosecutors who gathered for a swearing-in ceremony at 8 a.m. yesterday at the Circuit Courthouse in Towson.

Patricia Jessamy's mouth has taken her a long way, from the Mississippi cotton fields to the job of Baltimore's chief law enforcement officer.She started talking in sentences at 10 months old. "My mouth is going to make my living," she once told a teacher trying to hush her in class.In recent months her mouth has gotten her into trouble. As suspects in violent crimes were being set free because of trial delays, Baltimore cried out for a crime-busting prosecutor. Instead, it got a state's attorney defending her office, complaining about lack of money, losing her cool.

MOSCOW -- In an apparent miscalculation, the Kremlin demanded a showdown vote over Russia's chief prosecutor in the upper house of parliament yesterday and was handed an embarrassing defeat.The Federation Council, as the upper house is known, refused to accept President Boris N. Yeltsin's dismissal of Yuri Skuratov, who began to make trouble for the president and his inner circle a year ago with the opening of an investigation into kickbacks by Mabetex, a Swiss construction company.The vote shows that regional leaders who sit on the council are not interested in smothering the blossoming corruption scandals and that the Unity political bloc set up by Yeltsin's associates for the December elections is short on influence.

If the Baltimore State's Attorney's Office is not given millions of extra dollars, the city's crippled justice system will be virtually impossible to fix, a report to state legislators concluded yesterday.The report, ordered by state lawmakers in April after revelations that several criminal suspects had been set free because of chronic trial delays, says the long under-funded city prosecutor's office needs nearly $6 million more from city coffers."Without an increase in staffing, the State's Attorney's Office will continue to be handicapped," the 39-page report says.

MOSCOW -- In an astonishing and unprecedented attack on Russia's powerful financial barons, the prosecutor general's office issued an arrest warrant last night for Boris A. Berezovsky and said it also was seeking Alexander P. Smolensky for questioning.Each was accused of illegally making off with millions of dollars, but in a country where nearly everyone is considered guilty of something, there was little speculation about whether the charges were true.When scandalous accusations arise here, Russians rarely ask, "Did he do it?"

SOL WACHTLER, former chief judge of New York, once said, "Any prosecutor who wants could indict a ham sandwich."This became part of judicial folklore, a chilling reminder of how little removed every slob of a citizen is from the expense and grief of a criminal trial.If Linda Tripp were a whole ham, she couldn't be less a threat to public safety. But, as Washington Post columnist Tony Kornheiser points out, she has the misfortune of always managing to look like she's chewing a rancid anchovy.

An Annapolis man was ordered jailed without bail in the Anne Arundel County Detention Center yesterday on charges that he tried to kill his wife, the deputy state's attorney in Dorchester County.District Judge Nancy Davis-Loomis also ordered an emergency mental competency evaluation of Douglas D. Lund, 36, of the first block of Colonial Ave., at the request of prosecutors and defense lawyers.An emergency evaluation must be conducted within 72 hours.Lund was at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital from the time of the Sept.

The day Sandra A. O'Connor was sworn in for her seventh term as Baltimore County state's attorney, her staff surprised her with a slide show displaying an artifact from her political past -- a campaign bumper sticker from the last time she actually had a political opponent.That bumper sticker is 12 years old. O'Connor, entering her 25th year as the county's top prosecutor, is Maryland's senior state's attorney, seemingly immune to political challenge at a time when prosecutors nationally are at the mercy of the electoral winds.

A top Howard County prosecutor abruptly resigned yesterday, saying she wanted to become a private attorney.Christine B. Gage was a team leader who was supervising two other attorneys in the county state's attorney's office. She has worked for the Howard office since 1991. Before that, she was a prosecutor in Baltimore County for six years."It was time for me to move on," Gage said. "I resigned today, and I'm leaving today."The news that Gage had resigned and was leaving so quickly shocked prosecutors and others in the courthouse.

Baltimore City Councilwoman Helen L. Holton's on-again, off-again criminal trial is back on, after a judge's ruling that portends a steady flow of court action in the City Hall corruption case through the remainder of the year. A Circuit Court judge ruled Thursday that campaign finance charges against Holton should stand, meaning her trial will go forward Dec. 7. It marked the second time this week that Judge Dennis M. Sweeney, who is overseeing four City Hall corruption cases brought by the state prosecutor, slapped down defense arguments.

The infamous Baltimore ACORN video has become so widely viewed, and the behavior exhibited on it is so outrageous, that a criminal investigation should have been announced by someone somewhere before the first 100,000 or so YouTube hits. Too bad it took until Monday - a week and a half after the video taken at ACORN's Baltimore office was first released - for a prosecutor to step forward and do just that. Maryland Atty. Gen. Douglas F. Gansler's decision to look into the matter is welcome not only because the act of advising a pimp and prostitute, phony or not, on how to falsify income tax records merits such scrutiny, but because taping people without consent - as the filmmakers have obviously done - is a pretty clear violation of the law. Mr. Gansler has indicated that his office will investigate all of it. ACORN officials say the two employees involved were acting counter to the organization's policies (and both have since been fired)

Investigators with the State Prosecutor's Office found that Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon made $13,800 in "unexplained cash" deposits in a six-week period during the spring of 2004, one of many details to emerge in a mammoth court filing that raises questions about Dixon's financial dealings as City Council president. Ronald H. Lipscomb, a former Dixon boyfriend, provided about $4,000 of the sum, but investigators do not know the source of the rest of it, a fact that prompted one member of a grand jury investigating the mayor to ask: "Does the City Council President make that kind of money?"

Baltimore County's top prosecutor will handle the case of a Middle River soccer coach charged with solicitation of child pornography, sexual solicitation of a minor and distribution of obscene matter to a minor. Court documents say Charles Louis Friedel, 33, attempted to meet a 14-year-old girl at a convenience store for sex. Friedel was arrested in July after police detectives assumed the identity of the 14-year-old girl and arranged a meeting. Friedel faces an additional charge filed Wednesday by prosecutors.

WASHINGTON - -U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is poised to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA abuses committed during the interrogation of terrorism suspects, current and former U.S. government officials said. A senior Justice Department official said Holder envisions a probe that would be "narrow" in scope, focusing on "whether people went beyond the techniques that were authorized" in Bush administration memos that liberally interpreted anti-torture laws.

A Baltimore grand jury handed up two new indictments Wednesday charging Mayor Sheila Dixon with nine criminal counts and painting a picture of a top city official who repeatedly sought gifts - and even cash - from local developers who stood to benefit from her favor. The new charges include perjury, for allegedly failing to report thousands of dollars that one developer spent on her, and theft, for allegedly using gift cards she had solicited on behalf of the city's needy. The indictments replace one that was handed up in January, but five of the 12 charges in that case were dismissed by a judge in May. State Prosecutor Robert A. Rohrbaugh said in a news release Wednesday that the original case will be dropped.

Baltimore County Councilman Kenneth N. Oliver pleaded guilty Tuesday to pocketing $2,300 donated to his political campaign, but he did not have to account for an additional $15,000 that prosecutors say he mishandled. As part of a plea deal, the 64-year-old Randallstown Democrat agreed to pay a $2,500 fine and to serve 50 hours of community service observing the work of an accountant who is an expert in the proper use of campaign accounts. He also must serve a six-month period of probation, which will be supervised until he pays the fine and court costs.

Attorneys for Mayor Sheila Dixon have moved to block the state prosecutor's attempt to get additional information from one current and one former city employee he has called to testify before a grand jury. The lawyers filed a motion this week to quash subpoenas issued to Dixon's scheduler, Zoe Michal, and Anne Lansey, who previously worked in the city's Department of Transportation. Michal and Lansey were to appear Thursday at the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse. In his motion, Dixon's attorney, Arnold Weiner, said that the state prosecutor is abusing the grand jury process by subpoenaing witnesses to gather more evidence for the mayor's coming trial.

Two men convicted on drug charges in Baltimore City Circuit Court will get new trials after the Maryland Court of Appeals found that "egregious" behavior by the judge who presided in their cases denied them the right to fair and impartial trials the first time. The appellate court, the highest in Maryland, found that Judge Charles G. Bernstein acted as a "co-prosecutor" and in one case bolstered the prosecutor's case while implying he didn't believe the defense, creating an "aura of partiality" in front of the jury.

Attorney General Eric Holder will have his hands full cleaning up the mess at the Department of Justice. The department drew a steady stream of criticism during the Bush years for unprofessional conduct by government lawyers and political meddling in appointments and high-profile cases. Mr. Holder's selection last week of two career prosecutors to lead the effort to restore the department's reputation signals he is serious about turning his agency around. In naming Mary Patrice Brown as head of the Office of Professional Responsibility, which monitors misconduct by government lawyers, and H. Marshall Jarrett to run the executive office of U.S. attorneys, which directs and coordinates the work of the 94 U.S. attorneys around the country, Mr. Holder stressed they were chosen for their competence rather than for their political connections.