Quotas

A Howard County judge threw out charges Thursday that an Ellicott City woman was driving under the influence of alcohol, ruling that they were linked to an illegal quota indicating that officers had to cite two to four motorists every hour. It was unclear how many other county cases might be affected by the ruling, which involved federally funded initiatives that targeted drunk and aggressive drivers from January through April of 2011. At least two other similar cases are pending before the same judge.

Administrative law judges who evaluate disability claims for the Social Security Administration want a federal court to ease a workload that they say makes errors more likely - the latest in a series of challenges confronting the Woodlawn-based agency. In a federal lawsuit filed this month, 1,400 judges said the agency's expectation that they decide as many as 700 claims per year is causing them to rush evaluations and possibly approve claims that should be denied, at a potential cost of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV says President Bush is lying. That is a harsh word. But it is a euphemism for what the West Virginia Democrat is really accusing the president of doing. He is really accusing him of resorting to racist demagogy for political gain."Republicans want to drive people apart to win elections," Senator Rockefeller told an AFL-CIO conference recently. "They want to turn our attention from what George Bush and Ronald Reagan have been doing for the last 10 years. That's why George Bush is making all that noise about the civil rights bill.

Maryland's annual bear hunt will begin Oct. 22 with more hunters and the highest quota of bears allowed killed since the hunt was reinstituted after a 50-year hiatus in 2004. According to Harry Spiker, the bear biologist who runs the hunt for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, 340 hunters have been issued tags with a quota set between 80 and 100 bears. After setting a quota of between 55 and 80 bears last year, a total of 72 were killed. The number of hunters has increased from 260 in 2011.

WEST POINT, N.Y. -- President Bush declared yesterday that he wanted to "destroy the racial mistrust that threatens our national well-being as much as violence or drugs or poverty" and called for support for his civil rights bill, saying it would avert employment quotas."

Oakland, Calif. -- RIGHT AFTER the November election, a reporter for The Sun asked Rep. Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., outgoing chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, to comment on the electorate's loudly heralded swerve to the ideological right."

A high-ranking Baltimore Police Department official has denounced the use of arrest quotas, a move apparently aimed at preventing orders such as the one recently issued in the Southwestern District. The Sun reported Friday that three sergeants had ordered Southwestern District officers to make at least two arrests a week, among other activities. Deputy Commissioner Kenneth L. Blackwell issued a memo Friday afternoon stating that directives such as the one drafted by the sergeants must be approved by superiors before being distributed.

VIENNA - OPEC ministers agreed yesterday to keep production quotas at an 11-year low to maintain oil prices at about $25 a barrel at a time of slowing world demand. Members said they want to increase output after their September meeting, choosing for now to wait for world economies to rebound. Concern about possible disruptions to oil supplies because of violence in the Middle East has contributed to a 26 percent jump in prices this year to $25.24 a barrel in London. "The current price is reasonable," said Saudi Arabia's oil minister, Ali al-Naimi.

VIENNA, Austria - Facing a credibility problem and rampant overproduction by members at a time when oil prices are expected to slide, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries moved yesterday to increase official export quotas while demanding that members rein in their cheating. OPEC said that it would raise official export quotas to 23 million barrels a day from the current 21.7 million barrels, while asking members to cut production by 7 percent, or 1.7 million barrels a day. OPEC's credibility has eroded over the past few months because its members have been pumping about 3 million barrels more a day than they agreed to. After a meeting of oil ministers, OPEC said it would ask members to comply with the new quotas.

Public health nurses and the Anne Arundel County Health Department are squabbling over quotas the department wants to institute to measure the nurses' job performance.The Health Department says the 11 nurses who administer the state's Healthy Start home-visit program in Anne Arundel should see at least 80 patients per month, a number most already meet or exceed.But the five nurses who are state employees -- the others are contract workers -- argue that their average is not that high and that meeting quotas will force them to cut corners with patients, who are pregnant mothers and newborns.

Three cheers for county prosecutors' plans to appeal a judge's dismissal of charges against a woman accused of driving under the influence of alcohol because, the judge ruled, the police had illegal quotas for issuing DUI citations. It was a misguided decision and should be overturned. On Jan. 5, District Court Judge Sue-Ellen Hantman dismissed a case involving an Ellicott City woman who had been stopped for speeding and then found to have a blood-alcohol content more than twice the legal limit.

I was dismayed to learn that a suspected DUI offender's case was thrown out of court without due process ("Judge throws out DUI case, citing quotas," Jan. 6). District Court Judge Sue-Ellen Hantman should have allowed the case to go to trial, where any issue of police misconduct could have been adjudicated. The driver's alcohol blood content of .17, which is twice the legal limit, was a serious matter involving public safety, which is why we have a judicial system that is subject to appeals.

Even as prosecutors weigh an appeal of a Howard County judge's decision to throw out drunken-driving charges and rule that they were tied to illegal citation quotas, defense lawyers are considering whether the same defense might apply to past or current cases. District Court Judge Sue-Ellen Hantman's ruling in a case against an Ellicott City woman has raised questions on both sides - as well as eyebrows around the legal community. Leonard Stamm, a Prince George's County lawyer who wrote a legal handbook called "Maryland DUI Law," said the case puts lawyers who defend people charged with drunken driving on notice for a potential avenue for defense.

What's on the mind of a police officer when he or she pulls someone over on suspicion of drunk driving? If it's a desire to meet some kind of enforcement quota, that can be a problem - but one that can be remedied without endangering the public. A sergeant who tells the New Year's Eve shift to be extra vigilant against intoxicated motorists should be commended. But a supervisor who announces that every officer should ticket x number of drivers each week or face demotion has likely violated a 2006 state law that bans quotas on arrests or citations.

A Howard County judge threw out charges Thursday that an Ellicott City woman was driving under the influence of alcohol, ruling that they were linked to an illegal quota indicating that officers had to cite two to four motorists every hour. It was unclear how many other county cases might be affected by the ruling, which involved federally funded initiatives that targeted drunk and aggressive drivers from January through April of 2011. At least two other similar cases are pending before the same judge.

Hampered by bad weather, Maryland watermen were able to catch just 82,567 pounds of striped bass during the two-day commercial gill net season that ended Monday. That total leaves a surplus of 120,802 pounds, which will be rolled over to the December season or used to cover any additional poaching discovered by Natural Resources Police. The season closed on Feb. 4 after officers found illegal nets containing 10 tons of striped bass in the waters off Kent Island and state officials acknowledged they could not ensure that the February quota would not be exceeded.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush and Democrats want Japan and other countries to open their markets to U.S. goods, but in the international trade debate the United States does not come to the table with clean hands.In comparison with Japan and other major U.S. trading partners, the United States is less protectionist, but many barriers to imports remain.Quotas double the price of sugar and limit imports per American to no more than seven peanuts, a pound of dairy cheese and a lick of ice cream each year.

Public universities should set goals - but not quotas - for minority enrollment, state university system Chancellor William E. Kirwan said yesterday. He said they "need to be pushing the limits of the law" to increase diversity on campuses. For too long, Kirwan said, universities have been afraid to aggressively promote diversity out of fear of lawsuits. The University of Maryland, College Park, for instance, retreated after a federal court struck down its blacks-only Banneker scholarship in 1994.

A rmed with an ancient stopwatch and a brand-new hangover that made the glowing numbers on the digital clock seem as piercing as the searchlights at Alcatraz, I picked up the telephone at 4 a.m. New Year's Day and dialed my way into legality. By 4:09, I was a federally registered angler, a process that proved to be less painful than the throbbing inside my brainpan. All it took was remembering who I was, where I lived, when I was born, my phone number and the three states where I hope to fish this year.