State Court

Had he known that prosecutors were willing to offer him 10 years in prison in return for a guilty plea, convicted rapist and child abuser John Merzbacher would have accepted the deal "most graciously" instead of standing trial and getting the multiple life terms he has been serving since 1995. That's what Merzbacher claimed a few years ago during a post-conviction hearing in Baltimore to determine whether his defense attorneys had told him about the plea deal. That deal — and a federal judge's conclusion that Merzbacher's lawyers erred in keeping it from him — is central to the latest chapter in one of Maryland's highest-profile child sex abuse cases, involving dozens of victims, male and female, who were students of Merzbacher's at Catholic middle school in the 1970s.

The case before the Maryland Court of Appeals is straightforward. Detectives in Montgomery County got a warrant to intercept cell phone calls of a suspected drug dealer. They caught him in the act and made an arrest, finding marijuana in his suitcase. A jury convicted the man and he was sentenced to five years in prison. But he argued that the cops exceeded their authority. The telephone conversation the cops picked up was placed in Virginia, and was made to another man in another state.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court rejected yesterday the plea of a Michigan woman who wants to turn off the medical machinery that keeps her brain-damaged husband alive. The action appears to give states new authority to limit the "right to die."The court did not issue a ruling in the dispute. But it did vote to leave intact a decision by the Michigan Supreme Court that sharply reduced the authority of relatives to carry out a person's wishes to die after becoming medically hopeless.If that individual had not spelled out the exact circumstances under which life-support systems should be withdrawn, the state court said, family members may not do so, even if they believe they know from conversations what the individual wanted.

A key labor battle in Anne Arundel County will go before the state's highest court next month, when the Court of Appeals tackles the dispute over binding arbitration for the county's public safety unions. Angering the nine unions, the county moved last year to give the County Council final word in collective bargaining disputes, a role formerly held by an arbitrator. Union leaders hope the Court of Appeals will undo the council's vote and the unions' subsequent loss on appeal before a county judge.

A week after being moved from Baltimore Circuit Court to federal court at the request of the defendants, one of two lawsuits filed by attorney Peter G. Angelos against lead paint manufacturers is back in state court.U.S. District Judge Frederic N. Smalkin ordered the return of a lawsuit seeking $15 million in damages from several corporations for each of six children, who allegedly suffered severe lead poisoning.Smalkin said a "sufficient possibility" existed that one of those corporations, Bruning Paint Corp.

The second of two lawsuits charging paint manufacturers with conspiring to conceal the hazards of lead poisoning has been ordered by a federal judge to be sent back from federal court to state court.Attorneys for the manufacturers filed a "notice of removal" last month to move the lawsuits -- filed by attorney Peter G. Angelos in Baltimore Circuit Court -- to federal court, arguing that the plaintiffs lived in Maryland but the defendants were incorporated in other states.This month, U.S. District Judge Frederic N. Smalkin rejected that reasoning, sending one lawsuit -- seeking $15 million in damages for each of six children with lead poisoning -- back to state court.

WASHINGTON -- Bolstering a multistate campaign to end criminal prosecution of private sex acts between homosexuals, the Georgia Supreme Court struck down that state's law against sodomy yesterday.The Georgia court became the seventh state tribunal in recent years, including a Baltimore City court last month, to nullify or severely weaken state laws that are designed mainly to outlaw gay and lesbian sex.Among gay rights issues being fought in courts and legislatures, the challenges to anti-sodomy laws have most often succeeded -- even as efforts to overturn restrictions on gays in the military and on same-sex marriages have failed.

When one of Charles Dickens' characters said, "The law is an ass," he could easily have been referring to the recent Maryland Court of Appeals decision that makes it practically impossible for the state to prosecute legislators for taking bribes - unless, perhaps, they are caught on video or with a wired informant. Instead of taking the opportunity to put teeth in the state bribery law, the Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of the indictment against Baltimore City Councilwoman Helen B. Holton on the grounds of "legislative privilege.

The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to decide whether patients can sue HMOs in a state court for refusing to pay for care recommended by a doctor. The issue is at the core of the tension between insurers' efforts to rein in health care costs and patients' fears that they might be denied needed treatment. The case involves two patients from Texas who sued their health maintenance organizations for complications they said they suffered because of their HMOs' cost-related decisions. A federal appeals court upheld the right of those patients to sue in state court under a Texas law. Their insurers, Aetna and Cigna, appealed, arguing that the suits must by tried in federal courts where, unlike state courts, damages are severely limited.

WASHINGTON - Lawyers for Texas Gov. George W. Bush urged the Supreme Court yesterday to issue a ruling that would solidify his certified presidential victory in Florida and insulate that victory from the contest Vice President Al Gore is now waging. If the court does as Bush's team asked, his lawyers said, it would "substantially diminish" the possibility of a "constitutional crisis." A crisis would occur, Bush's side argued, if both candidates laid claim to having won the state. Gore's claim, they said, could be based on a slate of presidential electors awarded to him by the Florida courts as a result of his current contest in state court.

A man with no country has a chance to stay in the United States a bit longer. Maryland's highest court has ruled that 36-year-old Mark Denisyuk, who has been in the United States illegally for more than two decades, deserves another trial on five-year-old assault charges because no one told him his guilty plea could lead to his deportation. The ruling means Denisyuk can stay in the country — his lawyer says he's been released from the custody of federal immigration officials — at least until his case is resolved in Harford County.

Maryland's highest court has overturned the most controversial part of the state's new ground rent law, throwing out the section that takes ownership of ground leases away from owners who fail to register them with the state. The General Assembly enacted ground rent changes in 2007 after a series of articles in The Baltimore Sun and legislative testimony that depicted people losing their homes for failing to pay a pittance in ground rent. In a 5-2 decision issued Tuesday, the Court of Appeals held that the provision that took away ground leases that were not registered violates state constitutional rights.

Winners of the state court system's sixth conflict-resolution bookmark-art contest will receive awards Thursday at a reception in Annapolis for the more than 450 pupils across the state who participated. First-place winners, who receive a $75 prize, are: Matthew Campbell, a second-grader at Prettyboy Elementary School in Baltimore County, in the kindergarten to second-grade group; Molly Twigg ,a fifth-grader at Bishop Walsh School in Allegany County, in the grades three to five group; and Lily Fu, an eighth-grader at Urbana Middle School in Frederick County in the grades six to eight group.

Lawyers for the owner of an island in the Magothy River argued Thursday that if the state's highest court forces David and Diana Clickner to open their beach to the public, it would set a troubling precedent and raise liability issues for all waterfront property owners. But an attorney for the Magothy River Association, which sued the Clickners for access to a 1,200 foot swath of sand, argued that her clients have met the legal requirements to be granted an easement. The Court of Appeals on Thursday took up the case of the beach on Dobbins Island – whether the public has a right to use a beach that is privately owned, mainly because they have always done so. Last year, Anne Arundel County Circuit Court Judge Ronald A. Silkworth granted what's called a "prescriptive easement," ruling that the beach up to where grasses and shrubs grow is public, and ordered the Clickners, who purchased the 7-acre island in 2004 with plans to build a home there, to remove a fence they'd erected.

When one of Charles Dickens' characters said, "The law is an ass," he could easily have been referring to the recent Maryland Court of Appeals decision that makes it practically impossible for the state to prosecute legislators for taking bribes - unless, perhaps, they are caught on video or with a wired informant. Instead of taking the opportunity to put teeth in the state bribery law, the Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of the indictment against Baltimore City Councilwoman Helen B. Holton on the grounds of "legislative privilege.

The state's highest court erased Friday the first-degree murder conviction and life sentence of a Baltimore woman accused in the 2007 fatal shooting of her boyfriend, ruling that city police violated her constitutional rights. Investigators should have advised Juanita Marie Robinson, now 31, of her Miranda rights — the well-known warnings that begin with, "You have the right to remain silent" — before her second and third statements about the killing of Andre McBride, the justices decided.

A Maryland District Court judge dismissed more than 10,000 debt-collection cases against Maryland consumers Thursday, part of the terms of a settlement in a federal class action lawsuit against debt collector Midland Funding LLC. Chief Judge Ben C. Clyburn signed a motion to dismiss 10,168 cases of consumers who were sued in state court over unpaid credit card and other debt. Midland Funding, buyer and collector of debt, was accused in the U.S. District Court case of working as a debt collector without a state license.

John Joseph Merzbacher, a notorious Baltimore child abuser accused of molesting dozens of students at the Catholic school where he taught, could soon be released from a life sentence, under a federal court order handed down Friday. Merzbacher, now 68, is a former middle school teacher at the city's Catholic Community School. He was sentenced in 1995 to multiple life terms after a jury found him guilty of raping a preteen Elizabeth Ann Murphy decades earlier. He has already served 15 years.

In an appeal that offers the state's highest court its first look at Maryland's new death penalty law, attorneys for a prisoner awaiting a capital murder trial said Friday that the judge who will try the case should be allowed to assess prosecutors' evidence and decide if it merits such a trial. But an assistant attorney general urged the court to throw out the appeal. He argued the Court of Appeals should rule that the defense has no right to a pretrial hearing that one judge said would be "a preview of coming attractions" in the case against prisoner Lee Edward Stephens.

A Maryland District Court judge dismissed more than 10,000 debt-collection cases against Maryland consumers Thursday, part of the terms of a settlement in a federal class action lawsuit against debt collector Midland Funding LLC. Chief Judge Ben C. Clyburn signed a motion to dismiss 10,168 cases of consumers who were sued in state court over unpaid credit card and other debt. Midland Funding, buyer and collector of debt, was accused in the U.S. District Court case of working as a debt collector without a state license.