Witness Stand

Jack Kevorkian has been busier than ever with his carbon monoxide machine. He helped three people die in 10 days last month, raising his total to 31 assisted suicides.And dozens of desperate people call every day.Michigan has tried every conceivable way to prosecute Kevorkian. But juries and the public seem to support him -- in some cases adore him. Some are appalled by his relentless pursuit of legalizing assisted suicide, but many Americans consider Kevorkian a folk hero, albeit an extremist and an eccentric one.Kevorkian has been tried three times on five charges of assisting suicides, in violation of Michigan law, and acquitted every time.

A Baltimore middle school assistant principal was found not guilty yesterday of charges that he sexually abused a former foster son several years ago.The Baltimore Circuit jury deliberated for more than an hour before finding Charles Michael Shockney Jr., 40, not guilty of sexual child abuse, a third-degree sex offense, and assault and battery of the boy, who is now 11.Shockney, who has been assigned to administrative duties in the Northeast region of...

A lawyer defending Morgan State football coach Ricky Diggs yesterday tried to chip away at the sexual harassment claims of a former athletic department employee by arguing that she had made only a few narrow complaints to school officials.The former academic coordinator, Elizabeth A. Stearns, also had received several warnings about her performance before being transferred, the lawyer said.Stearns claims in a federal lawsuit that Diggs sexually harassed her almost from the start of her tenure in August 1991.

ATLANTA -- A Memphis Criminal Court judge ruled yesterday that James Earl Ray, the confessed assassin of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., will be allowed to subpoena witnesses in support of his assertions of innocence and his request for a new trial.In what one prosecutor termed a "bizarre" situation, Judge Joseph Brown said he was constrained by Tennessee law to deny the new trial being sought by Ray because the time limit allowed for such appeals had long since expired.Judge Brown is hearing Ray's ninth appeal since he pleaded guilty in 1968.

A Virginia man convicted in the shooting death of his then ex-wife's boyfriend at a Jessup hotel in June 1991 asked for a new trial in Howard Circuit Court yesterday.Adel George Hagez, 46, of Richmond could be sentenced to life in prison if Judge Cornelius Sybert Jr. denies his request and upholds his conviction for first-degree murder and a weapons violation.At yesterday's hearing, Baltimore attorney William H. Murphy Jr. told Judge Sybert that he erred in ordering the defendant's wife to the witness stand even though he knew she would not testify.

When 16-year-old Chaquista Spriggs was shot dead in December on the railroad tracks that run along Northwest Baltimore's Wabash Avenue, her family figured she must have died in the course of a robbery. After all, her boyfriend was shot, too. Critically wounded, in fact.Now, 10 months later, the 20-year-old boyfriend is on trial, charged with arranging his sweetheart's murder.Prosecutors are trying to convince a Baltimore Circuit Court jury that Maurice Osborne wanted Chaquista dead because their relationship of two years had begun to cool.

From where Tonya Lucas sits -- and yesterday her seat was on the witness stand -- much of the testimony during her murder and arson trial has been a far cry from the truth.Denying that she set the July 7, 1992, fire that killed six of her children, Ms. Lucas told a Baltimore Circuit Court jury that everyone from her alcoholic sometimes-boarder to her neighbor to her landlord to police detectives to firefighters to a city eviction prevention officer has fudged the facts during her trial. And Eugene R. Weddington Jr., the man who said he saw the East Baltimore woman torch her rowhouse, is an out-and-out liar, Ms. Lucas said.

A Virginia woman who bucked a judge's order and refused to testify Friday in the murder trial of her husband will be sentenced for contempt of court tomorrow.Howard Circuit Judge Cornelius Sybert Jr. found the woman, Virginia Dorhan Hagez, 44, of Richmond, Va., in contempt after she refused to answer the prosecutor's questions on Friday.Judge Sybert explained to Mrs. Hagez that she could face jail time for refusing to testify before the jury of seven women and five men."I'm telling you to answer [the prosecutor's]

NEW YORK -- Woody Allen was the only one to take th witness stand yesterday. But it was the voice of a child that seemed to resonate loudest in the packed courtroom.A letter that Moses Farrow Allen, 14, wrote to his adoptive father was read by Mia Farrow's attorney, revealing a child's-eye view of the heartbreak that this nasty custody battle has apparently wrought."You've done a horrible, unforgivable, needy, ugly, stupid thing," Moses wrote to Mr. Allen, 57, after his affair with Ms. Farrow's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Farrow Previn, 22, became public last year.

LOS ANGELES -- Under relentless cross-examination by defense attorneys, Rodney King admitted he lied in the past about some aspects of his beating, and he testified he is not now sure if the police officers who beat and kicked him used racial epithets.Saying he initially denied that racial slurs were used at the request of his mother, Mr. King said yesterday that his testimony the previous day was the truth but he couldn't be sure whether the officers were saying "nigger" or "killer" as he was taunted during his violent arrest on March 3, 1991.

Tommy Sanders III was born in Baltimore and grew up in Park Heights, near Virginia Avenue, "a high drug- infested area." He had friends "who sold and who indulged in drugs" and, he said, he was rousted by city cops for no reason. It is an often-told tale of inner-city life. But while some of his friends grew up and went to prison, Tommy Sanders grew up and became a Baltimore police officer. Then the biases he had against cops were turned on him. "I have had more people disgusted with police than people who liked me," Sanders said.

After three days of deliberations, a Baltimore jury deadlocked yesterday in the murder trial of a man prosecutors accused of doing what the criminal justice system failed to do: punish the murderer of his little brother. After retired Circuit Judge Thomas J.S. Waxter declared a mistrial, Assistant State's Attorney James Francomano said that he would retry Darnell Edmonds, 25, in the killing of Kenneth Worrell, 28, of the 800 block of Bethune Road in Cherry Hill. Worrell was found dead in that block with multiple gunshot wounds to his upper body in December 2006.

WASHINGTON -- Today, lawyers for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby will begin their defense of the indicted former White House aide with a parade of witnesses, including prominent journalists, former co-workers and maybe even his old boss, Vice President Dick Cheney. But will Libby testify? Libby and his lawyers face a tough choice about what is normally the make-or-break decision in criminal trials. His unusual defense to perjury charges in the CIA leak case - that he misspoke because he was having to juggle so many other duties as Cheney's chief of staff - would seem to require that he personally take the witness stand to explain it. But if he does testify, Libby risks exposing himself to serious questions about his credibility and a grilling by a prosecutor with a reputation for doggedness.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Saddam Hussein took the witness stand at his trial for the first time yesterday and openly incited insurgents to continue resisting the U.S. military presence in Iraq, prompting the chief judge to close the session to journalists and the public. Rather than answer capital charges that he orchestrated the torture and killing of Shiite Muslims in the 1980s, the deposed president delivered a rambling 49-minute harangue, his longest and most inflammatory of the five-month-old trial.

Three witnesses. Three taped statements to police. Three recantations. One accused murderer set free. That about sums up the outcome of the recent murder trial of Matthew Troy Johnson, a 15-year-old who was acquitted in the shooting death of a 19-year-old man in an alleged dispute over drugs. Prosecutors took the extraordinary step of jailing two of the witnesses to ensure they wouldn't disappear, but it didn't matter. Once on the stand, witnesses said they had lied, changed their original stories or conveniently forgot.

The best part of Leonard Hamm's speech to the Baltimore City Council this week was its precise geography. The acting police commissioner talked insightfully about Park Circle and McElderry Street and Harlem Park. He mentioned them by name and pathology. He talked about Greenmount Avenue and North Chester Street and Keyworth Avenue. He knows exactly where they are. Some of our previous police commissioners got the job without knowing how to find City Hall. Hamm is the city of Baltimore's best hope now that all the excuses are done on crime.

William "Tippa" Thomas III, He didn't know who shot him. He didn't know how many bullets were fired that day. And he didn't know why anyone would open fire on a crowd of students at his high school on a sunny Friday afternoon in the midst of graduation preparations and prom season. So for six days, William "Tippa" Thomas III, who was left partially paralyzed by the May 7 shootings at Randallstown High School, wheeled himself into courtroom No. 2 in Baltimore County Circuit Court and listened.

MANASSAS, Va. - Sniper suspects John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo came face to face in a Virginia courtroom yesterday, looking each other in the eye for the first time since they were charged nearly a year ago in a spate of killings that terrified the Washington region. The pair authorities have called a "killing team" exchanged several long glances but displayed little emotion as a packed courtroom watched Malvo answer several perfunctory questions while Muhammad stoically stared at the witness stand.

An 11-year-old Baltimore boy who was hit by a stray bullet in the neck last summer in a crime that touched off a political battle about the city's criminal justice system testified yesterday in Circuit Court that it "burned" when he was shot. "It burned and I felt dizzy like I was about to drop," said Tevin Montrel Davis, a fifth-grader who speaks clearly despite having lost part of his tongue and some of his teeth in the shooting. Yesterday was the second day of trial for Perry Spain, 20, the man charged with attempted murder in the shooting of Tevin, who lived on the same block as Spain and once called him a "friend."

Former Carroll County schools Superintendent William H. Hyde took the witness stand yesterday in a pretrial hearing on charges that he raped and molested an elementary school-age girl, describing a verbal and emotional "beating" he said he took before saying in an apology letter that he had inappropriately touched the girl. "My sense was they were dictating what needed to be said," Hyde, 61, testified, referring to the girl's mother and to the investigators who interrogated him in the hours before he was arrested in August at the Maryland State Police barracks in Westminster.