Washington Lawyer

The NAACP will not pay the Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., its recently fired executive director, any of the more than $300,000 in salary due on the balance of his three-year contract, according to a settlement agreement to be made public today.Sources close to parties on both sides of the agreement said the Baltimore-based civil rights group would pay only $7,400 to cover two mortgage payments on Dr. Chavis' Ellicott City home, as well as extend his family's medical benefits and his life insurance through April.

WASHINGTON -- If the Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide reclaims his presidency -- or if the United States gets sucked into Haiti's bloody morass trying to make it happen -- a former Maryland congressman will get a big share of the credit or blame.Michael D. Barnes, now a Washington lawyer, has emerged as both the exiled leader's top U.S. adviser and an influential voice in maintaining U.S. pressure on Haiti's de facto military rulers.His passionate advocacy, persistence and political ties have helped keep Washington's attention focused on restoring Haiti's elected leader to power.

WASHINGTON -- Barry Johnson and Jeff King boast no clients, haven't taken the bar exam and do their best work in the library. They are law students. But for a summer, as they stride the halls of one of this city's most politically connected law firms, they are also something else:Power brokers in training.The two are among hundreds of attorneys-to-be who migrate here every year to work as summer associates -- law students recruited for a few months to research case law, do lunch and otherwise try on the life of the Washington lawyer.

Scotland E. Williams, accused in the shooting deaths of two Washington lawyers in their weekend home in Winchester on the Severn, may be a thief, but he is no killer, Craig M. Gendler told an Anne Arundel County jury yesterday.Mr. Gendler, Mr. Williams' defense lawyer, said the prosecution's evidence may show that Mr. Williams drove one of the lawyer's cars, used her bank card and was wearing her watch when he was arrested, but it can't place him inside the house where she was killed.Mr. Williams, 31, of Arnold went on trial on first-degree murder charges yesterday in the deaths of Jose Trias, 49, and Julie Gilbert, 48. The lawyers died of single bullet wounds to the backs of their heads.

Recently, two events have brought the name of John Wilkes Booth back into the news. Last month, Harford County officials announced they were considering purchasing Tudor Hall, the boyhood home of Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin, who had lived there with his father and brother, who were also noted 19th-century Shakespearean actors. The other was the publication of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, a fast-paced, well-researched and tightly written account by James L. Swanson, a Washington attorney and Lincoln scholar, of the pursuit of the president's killer, which launched the greatest manhunt in American history.

Breckinridge L. Willcox, a retired Washington lawyer who served as Maryland's top federal prosecutor from 1986 to 1991, died yesterday morning at his wife's ranch in southern California after a battle with cancer. The Bethesda resident was 62. Former colleagues praised Mr. Willcox for his transformative impact on the U.S. attorney's office headquartered in Baltimore. They noted his creation of a cadre of career prosecutors inside the office while roughly doubling the size of his staff and extending its reach into the prosecution of savings-and-loan institutions as well as large-scale illegal drug organizations.

When the National Security Agency trains its agents in the highly technical art of eavesdropping, they naturally need to practice.And the law gives them the right to practice on you.NSA agents can hone their listening skills and test their equipment on the most intimate telephone calls of ordinary U.S. citizens, as long as notes and tapes are destroyed "as soon as reasonably possible.""We listened to all the calls in and out of Washington," says one former NSA linguist, recalling a class at the Warrenton Training Center, a CIA communications school on a Virginia hilltop.

The National Security Agency, whose size, secrecy and mission were spawned by the Cold War, is in the midst of !B personnel changes that current and former employees warn are a threat to national security.In interviews and in federal lawsuits, NSA workers say some of the agency's most senior personnel are being forced out as the nation's biggest intelligence agency attempts simultaneously to reduce and diversify its staff.An uneasy atmosphere, some say, has fostered strife over promotions and job security at the elite electronic-eavesdropping agency.

Over dinner or coffee or drinks -- whatever incarnation the first date happens to take -- Mark Woodard will have some ver- sion of the same conversation with the woman across the ta- ble."You've never been married?" she will undoubtedly ask th42-year-old lobbyist. "Well, why is that?"a subject that has to be served up, chewed on and digested early in the date, sometime around the foie gras or mixed greens, Mr. Woodard has found."There's a presumption to be overcome," believes the assistant executive director for the Maryland Association of Counties.

State health investigators disclosed Wednesday that they have uncovered evidence of "fraud or willful misrepresentation" by an Eastern Shore drug treatment and mental health clinic, including overbilling and charging for the work of physicians who were not at the facility. The inspector general of the state health department sent a letter Wednesday to Warwick Manor Behavioral Health Inc., near Cambridge, saying the state has suspended all Medicaid payments to the clinic. Warwick Manor treats roughly 2,000 patients a year and billed the state's Medicaid program $1.5 million last year.