Weathersbee

A 21-year-old Jessup man was acquitted of first-degree murder and related charges by a Howard County Circuit Court jury late last evening. The man, Shamal Ira Chapman, was accused of firing a semiautomatic pistol through two closed doors at a chaotic birthday party in a Columbia hotel in January. The bullets killed Long Reach High School senior Andre Devonne Corinaldi, 18, and seriously injuring Lauren Nicole Perkins, 18, of Elkridge. The jury deliberated for more than eight hours before finding Chapman not guilty.

Former Washington Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr. was sentenced yesterday to a year's probation and community service in a dispute with a female janitor who accused him of shoving her in a Baltimore-Washington International Airport bathroom and then exposing himself. The four-term mayor vehemently denied the allegations. He said he entered the temporarily closed bathroom because - since his 1995 prostate cancer surgery - he needs to urinate more frequently and with greater urgency. Barry, 65, maintained his innocence yesterday in agreeing to a form of plea before Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Joseph P. Manck.

An inmate who escaped from the Anne Arundel County Detention Center last week pleaded guilty yesterday to two counts of first-degree assault in a Christmas Eve burglary in which an Annapolis woman was shot. Derrick Dion Jones, 23, also pleaded guilty in Anne Arundel Circuit Court to first-degree burglary and using a handgun in the commission of a felony. He is being held without bond and is scheduled to be sentenced May 2. Jones could receive 90 years in prison. Jones, whose last known address was in the 200 block of Zepplin Ave. in the North County community of Pumphrey, has also been charged with escape after scaling a 20-foot razor-wire fence at the detention center on Jennifer Road on Thursday.

Anne Arundel County's NAACP branch wants local prosecutors to drop misdemeanor assault and exposure charges against former Washington Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr., echoing his own view that the case is politically motivated. But a spokeswoman for State's Attorney Frank R. Weathersbee said that the jury trial in Circuit Court on Tuesday will go on as planned and that the prosecutor is "between a rock and a hard place." "If we drop the case, it would be alleged we dropped the case because he is the former mayor of Washington, D.C.," said Kristin Riggin.

Last summer's racially tinged vandalism of the Aris T. Allen statue has been returned to Annapolis city police for further investigation, after the county state's attorney's office completed its review. State's Attorney Frank R. Weathersbee met with black community leaders yesterday to share a report from his top investigator on evidence in the Fourth of July vandalism. Although a suspect was arrested, prosecutors dropped the charges when witnesses failed to show up for the trial Jan. 2. The decision outraged some in the black community who felt more should have been done to ensure the witnesses would testify.

The county's top prosecutor met last night with members of an African-American coalition to discuss a racially tinged case - vandalism at the statue of a prominent black Annapolis leader - that was dropped last month. The man initially charged with defacing the statue of Aris T. Allen, a physician and legislator who died in 1991, said he's sleeping with a loaded shotgun at his bedside - worried about strangers seen near his rural Crownsville cottage. "I don't feel safe here anymore," John Exner Jr. said Wednesday night in his first interview since his arrest in August.

The state has approved its first subsidy for prosecuting crimes that occur inside Maryland prisons, ending a stalemate that had the Anne Arundel state's attorney refusing to take on new felony cases from state prisons in Jessup until he saw some state dollars. With approximately $60,000 approved, Anne Arundel County State's Attorney Frank R. Weathersbee lifted his ban on new prison crime prosecutions. He has sent a grand jury one of two potential cases from the state prison complex in Jessup - a case that his office sat on for months.

In an unusual move, Anne Arundel County Councilman Bill D. Burlison stepped from his seat to the public podium Monday night to criticize the refusal of State's Attorney Frank R. Weathersbee to take on new felony cases from the Maryland prison complex in Jessup. Frustrated by the lack of state dollars to pay for prosecuting inmate crimes, Weathersbee has blocked two potential cases - a homicide and a felony assault - that have been ready for presentation to a grand jury for more than a month.

Escaping a potential life sentence, a North Laurel man pleaded guilty yesterday to fatally shooting a Beltsville teen-ager in a parking lot brawl last year. As the parents of William "Kirk" Vanness Jr. wept, Roger Thomas, 24, told a Howard County Circuit Court judge that he is guilty of second-degree murder in the killing of Vanness, 18, and of attempted second-degree murder in the shooting of Karum Taylor, 21, also of Beltsville. The crimes carry a maximum penalty of 60 years in prison - 30 years for each of the two charges he pleaded guilty to. As part of a plea agreement, the state reduced the first-degree murder charge against Thomas and agreed not to prosecute him on lesser charges.