Sergeant

Services for James F. Carpenski of Glen Burnie took place Nov. 1 at Singleton Funeral Home. Burial followed at Arlington National Cemetery.Mr. Carpenski, 45, died Oct. 30 at North Arundel Hospital.The Maryland native retired in 1986 as an Army staff sergeant in the transportation department and won numerous medals during his 12 years of service. He was a member of Holy Trinity Catholic Church.Mr. Carpenski is survived by his wife, Inge Carpenski; a son, James Carpenski Jr. of Glen Burnie; two daughters, Michaela Meader of Virginia and Christiana Mozingo of Stafford, Va.; a twin brother, Joseph A.Carpenski; four sisters, Rita Beck, Patricia Roberts, Genieve Bush and Martha Kift; and three grandchildren.

LOS ANGELES -- An aggressive young prosecutor and a veteran Los Angeles police sergeant squared off in the Rodney G. King civil rights trial yesterday, dramatically disagreeing about how much force police officers were entitled to use in arresting Mr. King.Sgt. Charles L. Duke testified for the police officers accused of violating Mr. King's rights, and he vigorously defended their actions.He told jurors, for instance, that Mr. King continued to pose a threat even after he had been knocked to the pavement with a series of baton blows because his movements continued to suggest that he was defying police orders to stay down.

Facing an internal probe for his relationship with a woman married to the owner of a Block bar under investigation, state police Sgt. Warren Rineker has quit the force -- three years shy of qualifying for a retirement package.Sergeant Rineker, 43, an undercover officer in the Block investigation, submitted his resignation last month after 22 years on the force. He forfeited his retirement, offered little explanation for his departure and asked only that the department provide him with health benefits for 90 days.

A county police sergeant was suspended yesterday for 15 days after he agreed to plead guilty to failing to supervise his squad during a wild chase last summer in which officers threw flares and fire extinguishers at a fleeing suspect's pickup truck, police sources said.The agreement came at the start of what was to have been the third day of a departmental hearing for Sgt. William Darner, of the Northern District, who was charged with failing to supervise his squad and ordering them to omit information from their reports.

WASHINGTON -- An Army sergeant won a decade of legal skirmishing with the military yesterday over his right to continue in uniform even though he is gay.A brief order by the Supreme Court, with no explanation, means that Sgt. Perry J. Watkins, 42, of Tacoma, Wash., will be able to serve until he is eligible for retirement -- as long as he does not engage in explicit homosexual acts.A 15-year veteran, Sergeant Watkins had told the Army at the time he was drafted in 1967 that he was homosexual.

Paul John Lioi, a highly decorated retired police sergeant who headed arson investigations in Baltimore and once delivered a baby, died Friday of complications from diabetes at Florida East Hospital in Orlando. The former Cedonia resident was 72. In his 27-year career with the Baltimore Police Department, he received numerous commendations, including a top honor for his 1972 rescue of a woman held hostage at gunpoint. Sergeant Lioi was described in The Evening Sun in 1977 as "a small, quiet man, always neatly dressed and always very polite."

WASHINGTON -- A 26-year-old Army National Guard sergeant facing deployment to Saudi Arabia took President Bush to court yesterday, claiming Mr. Bush must gain the consent of Congress first.In doing so, Sgt. Michael R. Ange of Boone, N.C., joined burgeoning numbers of U.S. soldiers resisting Persian Gulf duty. A counselor for the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia, which advises military resisters nationwide, said he had received 650 to 700 inquiries since the first U.S. troop deployment Aug. 6."

LOS ANGELES -- Defense lawyers in the O. J. Simpson murder trial opened their assault on the Los Angeles Police Department yesterday, unleashing their most celebrated courtroom interrogator on the sergeant who initially supervised officers on the scene where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald L. Goldman were killed.Waking up a courtroom grown sleepy with tedious testimony about police comings and goings after the killings, the defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey suggested that inept police officers had trampled over or otherwise obliterated important evidence, overlooked crucial areas of inquiry, failed to summon a coroner quickly enough and neglected to warn Mr. Simpson himself that whoever had just killed his former wife might well be out to kill him, too.Most egregiously, Mr. Bailey suggested, a parade of police officers who arrived at Mrs. Simpson's condominium in the early morning hours of June 13, 1994, marched over the very plot of squishy earth the killer or killers would just have traversed, blithely trampling on what might have been crucial footprints.

A group of inmates at the Baltimore County Detention Center said they would end a brief hunger strike last night after two of them met with reporters to express the group's outrage that a police officer charged with murder won his freedom on reduced bail while some of them remain imprisoned on lesser charges."