Testimony

Nathaniel Hicks was killed for making fun of his friend's tennis shoes. A group of people throwing back Hennessy and Coronas in Northeast Baltimore watched the killer fire six shots into a sober Hicks shortly after midnight on Mother's Day 2007. Detectives collected three witnesses. The best of them, a teenager, was murdered before he could testify. Another witness said she was pulled into the back seat of a car and ordered to change her story. The third denied everything. At trial, inconsistent stories and substance abuse histories damaged the testimony of the two remaining witnesses, leaving only one juror convinced that Dominick Harrison shot Hicks.

Taking the witness stand to defend himself against charges of abuse and murder in the death of his young son, John J. Griffin said yesterday he had been too busy with work to notice the boy's worsening condition, and that he had not seen any wounds on the child before taking him to the hospital, where a doctor pronounced him dead. In the two months preceding the death of Andrew Griffin on Dec. 26, 2007, when he was almost 3 years old, his father said he was so consumed with his job as a computer systems engineer that he sometimes worked 18-hour stints and, leaving home early and returning late, would often not see Andrew for days at a time.

Reginald Amos was on his way to a video rental store in the Towson area when, he said, he saw a red truck run down a grandmother pushing a stroller across the road and keep going. He testified yesterday in court that he called 911, followed the truck and told the driver to wait when she briefly pulled over in a neighborhood about a mile from the crash scene. "I was telling them, `Hold up,'" Amos told the judge hearing the case of the woman charged in the dragging death of the toddler who was in the stroller.

WASHINGTON -- A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency's secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former government officials briefed on the program. It is not clear why the database searches, known as data mining, raised such a legal debate. But such databases, compiled by American companies and stored in the United States, contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans.

A Rosedale man fatally shot in front of his home in July had been ordered killed to silence his testimony in a Baltimore murder trial, police said yesterday. Carl Stanley Lackl, 38, was the target of a plot launched by jailed murder suspect Patrick Albert Byers, 22, according to Baltimore County police. Lackl was killed eight days before he was to testify as a key witness in Byers' trial. Police accused Byers of sending a text message to an associate's BlackBerry giving Lackl's name and address and offering $1,000 for his death.

Residents can offer budget priorities Howard County Executive Ken Ulman is inviting residents to share their priorities at his first residents' budget meeting for the fiscal year 2009 budget cycle. The meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 13 in the Banneker Room of the George Howard Building, 3430 Court House Drive, Ellicott City. Those who wish to testify must sign up individually and in person. Signup begins at 6:30 p.m. Testimony will be heard in the order in which residents have signed up. Testimony also can be presented via the Internet at www.howardcountymd.

The supervisor of a Baltimore police officer who is on trial on a rape charge testified yesterday that the door to his office -- where the attack is said to have occurred -- was defective and could not have been closed, an account that differed from the alleged victim's testimony. Jemini Jones, 29, is accused of coercing a woman to have sex with him in exchange for freedom from drug charges. Sgt. Robert Smith took the stand as a defense witness shortly after Assistant State's Attorney JoAnn Stanton rested the prosecution's case.

A 17-year-old girl took the witness stand yesterday and described how a dispute over $1 preceded the fatal shooting of her father during her Sweet 16 party at their Southwest Baltimore home last year. The two defendants, Jamal Charles, 17, and Dwayne Drake, 18, have been charged with first-degree murder. The victim, Bryant C. Jones, was shot to death in April while hosting a party marking the 16th birthday of his daughter, Tamirra Jones. Prosecutors say Drake urged Charles to shoot Jones.

BRAZIL, Ind. -- The fate of Orville Lynn Majors, on trial on charges of murdering seven nursing home patients with lethal injections of potassium chloride, is in the hands of 12 jurors, who began deliberations yesterday.After weighing testimony they heard during the six-week trial, jurors will have to decide whether the patients, many with histories of serious illness, died of natural causes at Vermillion County Hospital in 1994 and 1995, as the defense maintains, or whether they were murdered.

The key witness whose testimony sent an Annapolis man to prison for 30 years for nearly beating a bar owner to death has recanted and says he made up the story to save himself from a lengthy prison term in his drug case."

Close up, Michael Jackson seemed fragile, his face a ghostly white, his eyes invariably shielded behind dark glasses, even indoors. When he spoke, the sound was an almost breathless whisper. Occasionally, some of us who were writing about his 2005 trial in Santa Maria, Calif., on charges of child molestation would relieve the tedium of endless testimony by ruminating on what color lipstick Jackson had chosen to wear that day - peach, perhaps, or was it orange? What struck me most was that regardless of how salacious or crude the testimony details, or how embarrassing they might appear to be, Jackson remained absolutely expressionless, his body immobile in his chair a few feet from us. For Jackson, once a pop star of sensational talent, the trial in Santa Barbara County Superior Court was undoubtedly the lowest point of a long career.

Damien West took the stand last week and aired his dirty, bloodstained laundry. He talked about shooting the federal witness at the center of the current case, about dealing cocaine in Baltimore, about robbing random people and about being the chauffeur and protege for James Dinkins, who's on trial accused of drug conspiracy and multiple killings. So far, West is the Department of Justice's best witness. The federal government is relying on some serious criminals - murderers, drug dealers and gang members - to make its case in the double death penalty trial under way in Baltimore's U.S. District Court.

Taking the witness stand to defend himself against charges of abuse and murder in the death of his young son, John J. Griffin said yesterday he had been too busy with work to notice the boy's worsening condition, and that he had not seen any wounds on the child before taking him to the hospital, where a doctor pronounced him dead. In the two months preceding the death of Andrew Griffin on Dec. 26, 2007, when he was almost 3 years old, his father said he was so consumed with his job as a computer systems engineer that he sometimes worked 18-hour stints and, leaving home early and returning late, would often not see Andrew for days at a time.

Nathaniel Hicks was killed for making fun of his friend's tennis shoes. A group of people throwing back Hennessy and Coronas in Northeast Baltimore watched the killer fire six shots into a sober Hicks shortly after midnight on Mother's Day 2007. Detectives collected three witnesses. The best of them, a teenager, was murdered before he could testify. Another witness said she was pulled into the back seat of a car and ordered to change her story. The third denied everything. At trial, inconsistent stories and substance abuse histories damaged the testimony of the two remaining witnesses, leaving only one juror convinced that Dominick Harrison shot Hicks.

Man, 23, sentenced In East Baltimore killing A 23-year-old Baltimore man was convicted and sentenced yesterday to 45 years in prison for the murder of an acquaintance, who identified his killer seconds before dying in the middle of an East Baltimore street. Prosecutor Richard Gibson primarily relied on testimony from the victim's niece, who heard the gunshots from her residence in the 1000 block of Broadway about 2 a.m. Nov. 4, 2007. She ran to her uncle's side. There, Norman Smith, 30, repeated, "Brando shot me."

A Baltimore City Circuit Court judge barred the testimony yesterday of an expert witness on false confessions from the new trial of a man convicted in the 1987 rape and murder of a Southeast Baltimore woman. James Owens was sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of Colleen Williar in her home, based on testimony by jailhouse informants, scientific testing available at the time and a confession by James Thompson Jr., his co-defendant. DNA testing of semen from the victim's body last year revealed that neither of the two men had raped her, and, as a result, a judge granted Owens a new trial, which is scheduled to start Oct. 16. Owens' attorneys, who allege that Thompson wrongly confessed to witnessing the crime, wanted to call in an expert on false confessions to testify about police interrogations and the concepts of influence and coercion.

A federal drug case that put a Baltimore man with a long criminal record behind bars for 20 years is being appealed - and the defendant has an unusual ally in his corner: a city police officer who said in court that he has known the suspect since he was 11 years old. Antonio Green, a seven-year veteran assigned to the department's violent crime impact division, testified at an evidentiary hearing that two bags of cocaine found in the silver BMW were...

JERUSALEM - A New York fundraiser and businessman testifying in a corruption investigation told an Israeli court yesterday that he gave $150,000, mostly in cash, to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert. The businessman, Morris Talansky, 75, who is at the heart of the investigation involving Olmert, told the court that he believed the money was used for Olmert's political campaigns and also for his expenditures on hotels and first-class flights. But Talansky said he never received anything in return for the cash and other money, such as payment of credit card bills.

WASHINGTON -- The recommendation by the top U.S. commander in Iraq to suspend troop reductions reflects a bleak assessment that Iraqi forces remain unprepared to take over the mission of securing their own nation, senior administration and military officials said yesterday. In a second day of congressional testimony, the commander, Gen. David Petraeus, left Democrats and some Republicans again frustrated as he steadfastly declined to spell out what more would have to happen on the ground before he would endorse withdrawals to take the number of U.S. troops far below the 140,000 set to remain there after July.

A homeless man was convicted yesterday of first-degree murder for fatally beating another homeless man near an Anne Arundel County shelter and robbing him of $500 that a relative had just given him. Allan Jake Clark, 23, faces up to life in prison for killing Michael Walter Evans Sr., whose body was found April 5 on an outside air-conditioning unit in Glen Burnie, a block from the Arundel House of Hope's Resource and Day Center. A county jury also found Clark guilty of second-degree felony murder, assault and robbery.