Public Defender

Chief Judge Robert M. Bell told the General Assembly yesterday that more judges are not the cure for the backlog of delayed cases in Baltimore's Circuit Court.Delivering his State of the Judiciary address to a joint session of the Senate and House of Delegates, Bell warned legislators that the city's public defender and state's attorney's office will need more lawyers to handle an increased criminal caseload.Referring to newspaper accounts of repeated trial delays leading to dismissals of serious criminal cases, Bell said, "Those stories have not furthered our quest to inspire the public's confidence in the judiciary."

THERE'S another reason for the current crisis in Baltimore's criminal-justice system: greed. Too many people profit from the current bedlam.Bail-bond businesses have undertaken a furtive campaign to kill a bill seeking to unclog Baltimore's criminal court system. Their fear is that their lucrative trade would suffer if suspects were represented by counsel at bail hearings, resulting in lower bonds or defendants' release on their own recognizance.Besides bail-bond businesses, some lawyers are worried.

A judge will be appointed to resolve disputes over the exchange of evidence in Baltimore's Circuit Court, signaling a crackdown on persistent problems that have led to a wrongful murder conviction, trial delays and case dismissals.During a meeting on Wednesday, Judge David B. Mitchell, in charge of the city's criminal docket in Circuit Court, informed the prosecutor's, public defender's, and clerk's offices that he plans to name a judge to improve the process of sharing evidence, according to several participants.

Alan Hamilton Murrell, a renowned defense attorney who was hand-picked in 1971 to create Maryland's public defender's office, died of pneumonia early yesterday at an Annapolis nursing home. He was 97.The longtime resident of Ten Hills in Southwest Baltimore served as the state's top public defender from the age of 69 to 88, when he retired."To the end, he was bright as a penny," said Joan Whelihan of Potomac, Mr. Murrell's only child. "He left [the defenders' office] in 1990 when my mother became ill. But he loved his work so much, he would have liked to have been carried out."

A judge will be appointed to resolve disputes over the exchange of evidence in Baltimore's Circuit Court, signaling a crackdown on persistent problems that have led to a wrongful murder conviction, trial delays and case dismissals.During a meeting on Wednesday, Judge David B. Mitchell, in charge of the city's criminal docket in Circuit Court, informed the prosecutor's, public defender's, and clerk's offices that he plans to name a judge to improve the process of sharing evidence, according to several participants.

In 1995, Baltimore County Circuit Judge Joseph F. Murphy was giving a talk on shrinking the sentences of felons at a conference, and he used an unnamed case to illustrate a point.In the audience, Anne Arundel County's assistant public defender, Rodney Warren, heard something familiar. The unnamed convict, whose bid to shorten a life-plus-10-years sentence for murder was pending before Murphy, had just given testimony that helped prosecutors win a double-murder conviction and death sentence in another county.

A longtime fixture in the county's legal arena is heading to the Republic of Georgia to help get the fledgling legal system in the former Soviet state on its feet.District Public Defender Alan R. Friedman is joining the American Bar Association's Eastern European law project as of Oct. 1 for an expected one-year stint, taking his first sabbatical since starting as an assistant public defender in Annapolis two decades ago. His task will be to help Georgians put into practice legal reforms that so far exist almost exclusively on paper in the country that came into its own again only nine years ago. About 95 percent of the trial-level judges have been on the bench less than a year.

To public defender Carol A. Hanson, winning is a matter of perspective -- and being prepared.In a recent case, Hanson didn't argue for leniency after her client pleaded guilty to driving under the influence. Instead, she did her homework, recommending that the man serve 36 consecutive days and one weekend a month in jail for a year, to drive home the reminder that drinking has consequences.Though prosecutors pushed for a six-month jail term, the judge sided with Hanson."You have to have credibility with the court," said Hanson, 46, the district public defender for Howard and Carroll counties.

Since May, attorneys for the poor have turned away hundreds of indigent people facing felony drug charges in Baltimore Circuit Court, saying they did not have enough staff.All the while, state legislators who control the purse strings of state government say, the Office of the Public Defender could have requested more money, but it waited more than six months to do so.The lawmakers say that was too long. State Sen. Barbara A. Hoffman, a Baltimore Democrat who chairs the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, said yesterday that state public defender Stephen E. Harris placed political concerns over constitutional rights.

WASHINGTON -- As a federal public defender in Maryland, Steven F. Reich got used to representing clients with the odds against them.There was the Virginia man who stole $19,000 raised to buy toys for needy children and the former Baltimore trucking executive who showered campaigns of Maryland politicians with dirty money.Now, Reich, 37, represents a different breed of underdog: the badly outnumbered Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee. As deputy chief investigative counsel for the minority, Reich's job is to pore over independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's evidence against President Clinton and represent the interests of the Democrats in determining what to do with it.Part of an elite team of nine attorneys advising the Democrats, Reich could be playing a prominent behind-the-scenes role if the committee decides to conduct an impeachment inquiry.

Several Maryland senators said Tuesday that they believe the public defender oversight board overstepped its authority by firing the agency's director in August and promised legislation next year to change the board's makeup. Former Public Defender Nancy S. Forster and all three board members testified at a Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee hearing in Annapolis prompted by the ouster. Board Chairman T. Wray McCurdy, a private attorney in Baltimore County, said Forster was fired after board members combed the public defender budget for savings in tight fiscal times and she refused to make their cuts.

Until Aug. 21, few people - including state lawmakers and longtime attorneys - had ever given much thought to the Office of the Public Defender Board of Trustees or even knew it existed. But that day, the three-member panel fired the state's chief public defender, Nancy S. Forster, a decision that thrust it into the spotlight and made it an immediate target of reform. This month, a Senate committee in Annapolis will consider how to reshape the governor-appointed board. Lawmakers and national experts say the board's small size leaves it vulnerable to political whims, from which defenders of the poor are supposed to be shielded.

Second of two parts on the trial of a teenager in the shooting death of Deron Hope in 2007. Baltimore jurors trying to decide whether William Key shot a 16-year-old amid a dispute over a girl or executed him as part of a gang initiation ceremony sat through five days of testimony and argued for three more behind closed doors before ending deadlocked. It was only after Circuit Judge Timothy J. Doory declared a mistrial that it emerged that the lone holdout for a verdict of voluntary manslaughter instead of first- or second-degree murder, as the 11 others wanted, was a defense attorney who works for the state public defender's office in the same courthouse in which the trial took place.

There was no direct evidence showing that Vernice Harris was the person who gave her 2-year-old daughter a fatal dose of methadone. But with the promise of drug and mental health treatment instead of hard time, Harris pleaded guilty last year to manslaughter. She quickly failed out of the program, and now is serving 10 years in prison. Harris' lawyer, public defender Maureen Rowland, remains haunted by the result. Her client's right to a fair trial was overshadowed, she believes, by her agency's bent toward social work.

The state oversight board that governs Maryland's public defender's office may be able to avoid answering questions about its sudden firing of the agency's head, Nancy S. Forster, by hiding behind the state law protecting personnel decisions from public disclosure. But that does not absolve it of the duty to inform the public about its intentions for a vital agency that ensures the fairness and equity of our criminal justice system. The only hints we have about what led two of the three board members to fire Ms. Forster come from a memo written by Ms. Forster listing changes she says they wanted in the department, including the disbanding of the capital defense and juvenile protection departments of the office; closing a community defenders operation; outsourcing Child in Need of Assistance representation to private attorneys; and firing the Baltimore County public defender, Thelma Triplin.

State law biased against bicyclists, pedestrians I read about how John "Jack" Yates - a 67-year-old working on his third master's degree - had mentored Charles "Boots" Pratt prior to Mr. Pratt's death by gunfire, and Mr. Yates' death when his bicycle collided with a tanker truck. Neither of these deaths had to happen. People who abhor gunfire and violence think nothing of careless driving that can also lead to someone's death. Why should riding his bicycle to drop off an item at the University of Baltimore have resulted in Jack's death?

The state's chief public defender was fired Friday after she refused to overhaul her office, calling demands made by a governor-appointed oversight board "unlawful and wrongful." Nancy S. Forster said changes ordered by the Office of the Public Defender Board of Trustees - which could be implemented within days - would "destroy all progress made by the agency over the past 10 years." Forster also raised the issue of racial bias, saying she had been asked to fire an African-American division chief "for absolutely no reason," and pointing out that the only black trustee on the three-member board disagreed with the reorganization and with Forster's termination.

Lamont Davis, the 17-year-old arrested and charged as an adult in the shooting of a 5-year-old girl last month, pleaded not guilty at an arraignment Tuesday as his public defender released closed-circuit camera footage of the incident that he believes could help exonerate his client. The video was recorded July 2 from an unmanned and constantly rotating camera perched at a Southwest Baltimore intersection. The camera, during a brief pause, captures the incident as it unfolds. A man in a black shirt, cap and khaki shorts can be seen running up to a group of people and firing at another man as the others scatter.

Corrections officers escorted the twin brothers into the courtroom together, the smaller one trailing just behind the other, their hands shackled behind their backs, their feet shackled at the ankles. Both wore blue jeans and white T-shirts. They looked younger than their 17 years. The guards brought them into the sixth-floor room after most of the day's chaotic docket of drugs and violence had concluded and the spectator benches had emptied but for two women. The youths stood in front of Baltimore Circuit Judge Charles G. Bernstein to be arraigned on adult charges that they had weapons in their home on South Pulaski Street.

The trial of four people accused of being members of an abusive cult was delayed again Tuesday after the leader and a follower chose to defend themselves against charges that they starved 2-year-old Javon Thompson to death. The murder trial has been postponed several times because Queen Antoinette, 40, and Trevia Williams, 21, said they had a lawyer when, in fact, they did not, or said they were going to hire a lawyer and never did. Prosecutors Julie Drake and Patricia McLane had attempted to have Antoinette, the leader of the defunct 1 Mind Ministries, and Williams psychologically evaluated for a possible insanity defense, but the two defendants refused to cooperate.