Trial

WASHINGTON -- Acting at the behest of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, a federal judge ordered Monica Lewinsky yesterday to submit to a high-stakes interview before House impeachment prosecutors, enraging Senate Democrats and deepening the partisan divide at President Clinton's trial.Hours later, the former White House intern flew into Dulles International Airport and was whisked off to a downtown hotel with camera crews in pursuit. After two weeks of often-dry trial deliberations, the order to Lewinsky re-introduced an element of melodrama, overshadowing the second day of questioning by senators.

WASHINGTON -- "Mr. Chief Justice, I object." Rising from his seat at the back of the Senate chamber, Democrat Tom Harkin of Iowa single-handedly brought the Republican prosecution's carefully scripted presentation to a halt last week.His objection had nothing to do with something President Clinton said or Monica Lewinsky did. It concerned the senators themselves -- and the seemingly technical point of whether it is proper to call them "jurors."Though the impeachment trial has begun in earnest, the senators are still struggling to define their role as they sit in judgment on the president's fitness to remain in office.

A Florida judge has postponed the start of the trial of three brothers charged with killing two Columbia men and seriously injuring another during a spring break trip in April 1998.Judge Shawn L. Briese decided last week to delay the start of the trial because he needed additional time to review motions, said Linda Brinker, a spokeswoman for the Volusia County state attorney's office.The brothers -- Jonathan Trull, 28; Christopher Trull, 26; and Joshua Trull, 19 -- each face two counts of first-degree murder in the stabbing deaths of Matthew Wichita, 21, and Kevans Hall, 23. They also have been charged with the attempted first-degree murder of Seth Qubeck, 22.Brinker said the trial, which had been scheduled to begin Nov. 29, likely will start in January.

WASHINGTON -- The technique used in Baltimore to resolve hundreds of asbestos injury claims by lumping them together for a single court trial withstood a constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court yesterday.Without comment, the justices refused to hear an appeal by John Crane Inc., a maker of pipe-sealing products that included asbestos, seeking to challenge $10.6 million in verdicts against it.Crane was one of five companies found liable for tens of millions of dollars in damages in a single trial that involved 1,300 cases.

Manuel Bautista, a missing man at his own trial, had his day of reckoning in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court yesterday.Handcuffed and subdued in the court room, the 22-year-old received two concurrent five-year sentences and a tongue-lashing from a judge not amused by Bautista's flight the day of his trial in January on charges stemming from an August motel robbery in Glen Burnie."

When John Edward "Liddy" Jones placed a call in January 1998 from the Baltimore jail to his girlfriend and instructed her to tell The Furniture Man that he wanted "the little chairs," he wasn't talking about decorating his dream house.What Jones was doing, according to federal prosecutors, was masterminding a drug ring within the detention center with the help of a prison guard.The Furniture Man was Roderick Parham, the owner of a West Baltimore store called Mattress & More who prosecutors allege supplied marijuana that was smuggled into the detention center by a guard bribed by Jones.

Manuel Bautista, a missing man at his own trial, had his day of reckoning in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court yesterday.Handcuffed and subdued in the court room, the 22-year-old received two concurrent five-year sentences and a tongue-lashing from a judge not amused by Bautista's flight the day of his trial in January on charges stemming from an August motel robbery in Glen Burnie."

WASHINGTON -- With Congress set to reconvene tomorrow, Senate Republican Leader Trent Lott is struggling to overcome Republican objections to a bipartisan plan for a speedy impeachment trial of President Clinton.Lott and Senate Democratic Leader Thomas A. Daschle are scheduled to meet with their rank-and-file members tomorrow morning and hope by the end of the day to forge some agreement on how to proceed."We're certainly going to work on doing our duty and reaching a consensus as best we can," Lott told reporters on his trip back to Washington yesterday from a holiday stay at his Mississippi home.

The Senate acquitted President Clinton yesterday, and Marylanders said it's about time.Tonya Berkley, owner of Kente Rose, a Baltimore flowers-and-balloons gift shop, was standing beside her delivery van at Lexington Market soon after the Senate vote.She had been following the trial closely but said, "It's not like we were holding our breath, waiting to see what would happen."They wasted our time," she said of Congress. "We've known this for days, and I'm happy that it's finally over. The president can finally get on with running the country.

MANY Americans were shocked and outraged when the Israeli Supreme Court refused to extradite Samuel Sheinbein to stand trial for murder in Maryland. Mr. Sheinbein fled to Israel in 1997, just two days after the mutilated body of an acquaintance was found hidden in a Montgomery County garage.He claimed Israeli nationality through his father, who had lived in Israel until 1950. On that basis, the Israeli court denied Maryland's request that Mr. Sheinbein be returned for trial, holding that Israeli law prohibits the extradition of its citizens.

After watching Mayor Sheila Dixon stand for four hours straight at the judge's bench, next to the mostly male lawyers prosecuting her and those defending her, I thought of that famous line about Ginger Rogers. The one about how she did everything her much more renowned dance partner Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels. I don't mean to reduce Dixon to her four-inch black pumps. But then, Dixon is not only Baltimore's first female mayor, but its first to be in office and on trial simultaneously.

Baltimore City Councilwoman Helen L. Holton's on-again, off-again criminal trial is back on, after a judge's ruling that portends a steady flow of court action in the City Hall corruption case through the remainder of the year. A Circuit Court judge ruled Thursday that campaign finance charges against Holton should stand, meaning her trial will go forward Dec. 7. It marked the second time this week that Judge Dennis M. Sweeney, who is overseeing four City Hall corruption cases brought by the state prosecutor, slapped down defense arguments.

On one of his last days of summer vacation, Hunter Sears would have preferred to still be in bed at 10 a.m., or maybe just settling in for a few good hours of television. So why, exactly, was the 13-year-old Anne Arundel County boy sitting in his Annapolis pediatrician's office yesterday, his orange T-shirt rolled up to his shoulder as a nurse first took blood from his arm and then gave him a shot he didn't need to get? Hunter was pediatric volunteer No.1 of an expected 600 nationwide for an experimental vaccine against the H1N1 influenza virus, a new strain of flu that appeared in April and which officials fear will be widespread come fall.

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.

When Jarrell Richey refused five years ago to shake his former friend's hand and let bygones be bygones, he apparently committed an unpardonable offense. Spurned and furious, Gregory Deshaun Wilson returned later that day with a gun and, according to prosecutors in his trial for attempted murder, shot Richey in the leg and the chest, paralyzing him. Yesterday, Wilson was given a life sentence in Baltimore County Circuit Court for shooting Richey on March 28, 2004, in the parking lot of an apartment building in Essex.

A Baltimore man's armed robbery convictions were overturned this week after the state's second-highest court said the judge tipped the trial in the prosecution's favor by asking too many questions of witnesses - more than 125 of them. "The trial judge, in our view, overly injected himself as an inquisitor through the testimony of the witnesses, the result of which was to unduly give the perception that he favored the State's version of the factual presentation," the Court of Special Appeals wrote Monday regarding Antwan Derrell Smith's convictions.

Almost three years ago, the FBI informant brainstormed with Prince George's County Superintendent Andre J. Hornsby over how best to disguise a secret payment to the head of Maryland's second-largest school system. Buy him some land? A truck? Art? A yacht? While Hornsby worried about federal investigators already on his tail, the informant, former employee Cynthia Joffrion, handed him a $1,000 down payment in a Bowie hotel room. "If I give you cash ... in this room ... how in the [expletive]

The jurors in the Baltimore murder case were deadlocked, and when they came into the courtroom to be dismissed, their body language showed the prosecutor that something was amiss with juror No. 10. So Assistant State's Attorney Theresa Shaffer talked to the woman, as attorneys sometimes do after trials. She asked her why she hadn't wanted to convict, what the problem was. The 23-year-old woman answered that "there wasn't enough evidence." Then she added, "When my brother pled guilty to first-degree murder ... " Every so often, a person who shouldn't be a juror - such as someone whose relative is a convicted felon or someone whose religious beliefs prevent him or her from passing judgment on others - slips onto the panel.

Sitting behind her desk in the basement of this city courthouse, prosecutor Jessica Paugh all but disappears among the accordion folders and manila files piled on her office chairs, strewn about her desk and stacked all over the floor. Paugh usually has about 60 open gun and nonfatal shooting cases. On this day, moments after a judge handed down a 30-year prison sentence to a man she prosecuted for attempted murder, she's about to present two indictments to the grand jury before hustling back to her office to prepare for two interviews with shooting victims and two trials slated to start the next day. All this after spending eight hours on a Saturday trying to catch up. "I always feel like I'm a day late and a dollar short," she says.

MIAMI -- As the curtain opened yesterday in the nation's biggest terrorism trial, a dozen jurors heard wildly different accounts about whether Jose Padilla and two others were supporters of al-Qaida or of freedom fighters for persecuted Muslims abroad. A federal prosecutor portrayed the three as key members of a South Florida-based terrorist cell that plotted to promote "violent jihad" through Islamic newsletters, phony charities and fundamentalist recruits for terrorist groups stationed in Bosnia, Chechnya and other countries.