Representation

WASHINGTON -- Like millions of other Americans, I recently performed my civic duty by serving on a jury for a case of murder in the first degree. As a longtime resident of the District of Columbia, I, along with my fellow 572,000 citizens, pay the second highest per capita federal tax burden in the nation after Connecticut. More residents of the District, as Washington is known to locals, have died in our country's military conflicts than residents of 10 states. Reserve units from the nation's capital continue to serve and risk their lives in Iraq.

When I became president of Freedom Area Citizen' Council 3 1/2 years ago, State Sen. Allan Kittleman attended my first meeting, along with Del. Susan Krebs. Since that time, I saw him only once more and that was to an event to which I had sent him an invitation. Kittleman represents both Howard and Carroll county citizens. I do not know what he has done for Howard County, but I know of nothing he has done for South Carroll - and I am active in my community. So currently, for the 9th District, we are represented by a senator who lives outside our county (Kittleman)

Taxation Without Representation" - emblazoned on District of Columbia license plates - could be on its way out. The House voted 241-177 yesterday to give the District a voting representative in Congress. "This has been a 206-year labor of love," said Eleanor Holmes Norton, a nonvoting delegate who represents Washington's 550,000 people. However, the fate of the measure is uncertain in the Senate, where Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, is expected to introduce a version of the bill soon.

Why is a conservative foundation in Iowa seeking to roll back a civil rights law in Maryland? Three weeks ago, a federal lawsuit funded by the Legacy Foundation was filed against Maryland's proposed congressional redistricting plan. But the lawyers seem particularly concerned with condemning Maryland's "No Representation Without Population Act," a first-in-the-nation civil rights law that essentially ends the process of providing conservative communities in which prisons have been built with legislative districts larger than the number of voters who live there - at the expense of inmates' home communities.

Derrick Dunn went to jail recently, charged with driving on a suspended license. Under normal circumstances, he would still be in the Baltimore City Detention Center, trying to figure out how to make bail.But a group of law students from the University of Maryland picked up his case and gave him something that most people accused of crimes in Baltimore and throughout the state rarely receive -- legal advice and representation during bail reviews shortly after they are arrested.Dunn is one of almost a dozen people held on nonserious charges who have been released on bail or on personal recognizance because of the month-old project.

Nickolaus Mueller writes that "Tax cuts across the board [i.e., for the very wealthiest as well as the other 98 percent of U.S. taxpayers] make sense because the government doesn't have any right to spend individuals' earnings on any public project they choose in the first place. " (Readers respond, Sept. 15.) Excuse me, that "first place" is the U.S. Constitution, and it gives just the right you claim is nonexistent. I suggest you read Article 1, Section 8, the first paragraph, as well as the Sixteenth Amendment, which give the federal government the power "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare" and "to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.

The secretary of commerce has determined that the 5.3 million people who eluded the Census are not Republican or deserving of representation.People still swim in U.S. coastal waters though the fish, who know better, increasingly don't.Mideast talks are on again, if only to keep Jim Baker busy.

A March 31 article regarding Baltimore's legal settlement with former Fire Battalion Chief Andrew P. Shows might have left the wrong impression about the actions of the fire officers union leadership. Union President Stephen G. Fugate says that while the union leaders did not agree with the premise of Shows' argument, they provided the required legal representation for Shows through the Civil Service Commission appeal process.

CENSUS FIGURES and history tell us why the Anne Arundel County NAACP thinks a majority-minority county council district is necessary. Anne Arundel is 13.6 percent black, but only one African-American has served on the county's council since charter government began in 1964. All seven current council members are white. But race can't be the sole factor in determining how to represent communities fairly, and racial gerrymandering is not the answer to unfair representation. Moreover, with the county's dispersed minority population, it would seem impossible to contrive a majority- minority district.

At-large elections don't represent all Far from being "the more democratic system" as described by many Harford County residents, at-large representation should be denounced as the instrument of racism that it clearly is in a county with such stark ethnic dividing lines. Uncritical support of such is shameful in this day and age. My observations aren't expressed to endorse any political position, but rather to address a fundamental issue of fairness and respect. The equitable solution to the issues of conflicted boundaries for police, fire companies and rec councils is to adjust the boundaries, not institute the de facto disenfranchisement of a portion of our diverse citizenry.

A contentious battle is unfolding in the quiet town of Westminster, where rank and file police officers seeking union representation are squaring off against the police chief and mayor, a former state cop with nearly three decades experience. Town leaders accuse the Fraternal Order of Police of rabble rousing and infiltrating the 45-member department to make trouble and expand their union ranks. A top police union executive says 32 city cops signed a letter wanting to organize to get their voices heard.

The battle over legislative redistricting in Maryland provides only the latest evidence of the failure of winner-take-all congressional elections in single-member districts. In these districts huge numbers of people will, by design, vote regularly for losing candidates and be left feeling that they are without meaningful political representation. As everyone knows, single-member districts are a standing invitation to computer-facilitated partisan gerrymandering, a process that has turned ferocious all over America.

When temperatures in the classrooms of Ridgely Middle School reached the high 90s, Julie Sugar and other parents invited Baltimore County school board members to check out the problem. The board members didn't come — but local lawmakers did. "That's when we realized that our school board was not responsive or accountable to the public," said Sugar, who once headed the middle school's PTA and is now president of the Loch Raven High School PTA. "And it made us realize that they did not have to be responsive or accountable to the public because the public didn't put them on the school board.

The several gerrymandered congressional redistricting plans now being considered by the General Assembly are self-serving and cynical. The heavy-handed manipulation of Maryland's voters is an crass perversion of how districts should be drawn, and it points up the corruptive danger of long-term one-party rule. Supreme Court rulings and federal laws require that congressional districts must be contiguous, compact, and equally populated. Please explain how any of the proposed districts meets the definition for being compact.

Your editorial opined "Election by council district makes a lot of sense, and should go a long way toward making the board more diverse in its racial and ethnic makeup. While no Howard council district has a 'minority majority,' at least two of them can claim significant minority populations. " Please inform your readers what the "right" makeup is for a board to improve its "racial and ethnic makeup. " Please explain how melanin, skin pigment or ethnicity makes one qualified to represent another person with a similar genetic code.

Imagine if your legislative representative served only one-half or even one-third of the number of constituents he or she currently represents. Do you think your vote would matter more? Would your representative more accurately represent your community if given fewer constituents? Of course they would; they would be elected by a much smaller voting populace. The likelihood of seeing your elected official campaigning on your street could be twice or three times as likely. This could become a reality in Maryland's House of Delegates.

Every decade, Maryland redraws its legislative districts to reflect the state's changing demographics and to ensure that voters in different parts of the state are given equal weight in electing representatives in Annapolis. But Baltimore has never been able to count city residents who are incarcerated in other parts of the state for the purpose of drawing legislative boundaries — even though most of them eventually return to the city after serving their sentences. This year, lawmakers moved to correct that situation — a seeming violation of the Supreme Court's "one man, one vote" rule — by enacting legislation to count inmates as residents where they lived prior to incarceration, rather than as part of the population in the districts where they are held.

A Virginia man awaiting retrial since 1996 in a decade-old murder case has hired a lawyer known for his representation of Linda Tripp in her Howard County wiretapping case. Adel George Hagez's decision to hire attorney Joseph Murtha - replacing New York lawyer Samuel A. Abady, who was thrown off the case in July - restarts the clock in a case that stalled after appeals ran out last year. It has been five years since the Court of Special Appeals overturned Hagez's murder conviction, saying a prosecutor's actions interfered with Hagez's right to a fair trial.

As reported in The Sun, the state legislature formed a summer study task force to examine the current school board selection process in Baltimore County ("Elections for school boards weighed," Aug 4). The group was formed after legislators received numerous complaints from parents and community groups regarding BCPS and their poor handling of issues such as botched school renovations, major overcrowding in schools, AIM, and banning PTA craft fairs and community groups from public schools.

Last week, longtime University of Maryland basketball coach Gary Williams announced his retirement, and very quickly Maryland announced that Texas A&M Coach Mark Turgeon will replace him. No one doubts that during contract negotiations, Turgeon had lawyers advising and representing him. Coincidentally, just days before Mr. Williams made his announcement, Jordan Williams, Maryland's star sophomore basketball player, lost his eligibility to play...