On the Record

Slate had an interesting story yesterday about the last meals of death row inmates in anticipation of convicted “Beltway Sniper” John Allen Muhammad’s execution last night in Virginia. (Muhammad chose not to reveal his last meal to the public.)

The Slate story provided links to the Web site of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which posted the final meals requested by offenders until 2004, and continues to post their final statements.  Psalm 23 appeared to be a popular choice judging by a random sample. (Muhammad “ignored a request” to make a final statement, according to news reports.)

The Texas sites are eerie and chilling. Delbert Teague Jr., for example, was executed in 1998 for murdering a Fort Worth man in 1985. He did not request a final meal, but at the “last minute he decided to eat a hamburger at his mother’s request,” according to records. His last statement was as follows:

I have come here today to die, not make speeches. Today is a good day for dying.

Est Sularus Oth Mithas (My Honor Is My Life).

As someone commented on the Slate story, “there is something disgustingly voyeuristic about it all.”

Back in 2007, I wrote about the fascinating case of a Mississippi convicted killer and the Ober Kaler lawyers who were helping with his post-conviction appeals.

At first, Alan Michael Rubenstein claimed to have stumbled on the decomposing bodies of his stepson, stepson’s wife and their 4-year-old daughter. But he was later convicted of killing the family himself in order to collect the insurance money on his step-granddaughter. In my story, the Ober team said there were a number of irregularities in Rubenstein’s trial:

The Ober Kaler team says the evidence was not as clear as prosecutors made it out to be. They say there were major problems with a forensic expert’s testimony at trial. They say Rubenstein may not have done it, and will try to persuade Mississippi courts to order a new trial.

“My theory is that jurors wanted to convict somebody of this very horrible crime, especially when there’s a little girl and the pictures are gruesome,” [former Ober partner Ray] Shepard said. “I believe Mr. Rubenstein may, in fact, be innocent.”

The team has a tough battle ahead. The highest court in Mississippi has already soundly rejected most of Rubenstein’s direct appeal claims, and the prosecutors who handled Rubenstein’s case at the trial level say there is no doubt he is the killer.

“He’s a con man and a shyster,” said Dunn Lampton, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, who handled the case when he was district attorney of Pike County, Miss. “He’s just an unbelievably evil human being.”

Rubenstein was originally sentenced to death, but the Mississippi Supreme Court vacated that sentence in 2006.

I just discovered that last month, Rubenstein was resentenced to life without the possibility of parole, which will run concurrently with his two other life sentences.

Legendary comedian Soupy Sales died last week at the age of 83. Sales is perhaps best known as the master of the pie-in-the-face and estimated he had been hit more than 19,000 times, according to his obituary in The Washington Post.

You might say Sales could be considered an authority on pie throwing with all of his experience. And he almost was, according to this nugget from The Post’s obit:

He became something of an expert on the messy staple of slapstick comedy and once testified at a Navy court-martial on behalf of a sailor accused of throwing a pie in an officer’s face. The military court was not amused, and the sailor was convicted.

No word if the sailor turned to the pie-throwing experts from Dewey, Cheatum & Howe on appeal.

Slate has an interesting article today on research showing that about one-tenth of criminal defendants in Maryland may have been given the wrong sentences. The article is based on a University of Maryland economics student’s dissertation.

Writer Ray Fisman explains that before sentencing a defendant, a judge gets a recommendation, which is based on factors like the nature of the offense. The Ph.D. student, Emily Owens, discovered that errors in the sentencing worksheets filled out by prosecutors and signed off on by defense attorneys were leading to judges getting incorrect recommendations. Fisman writes:

With the stakes so high—months and years of freedom gained or lost—how could Maryland’s Sentencing Policy Commission have been so sloppy? For academic research—a matter trivial by comparison—it’s common to have data entered independently by at least two typists, whose output is then cross-checked for accuracy. Yet it turns out that complacent bureaucrats weren’t to blame for the sentencing mistakes. The work sheet had to be filled out by the state attorney prosecuting the case, with the final form signed and approved by the defense attorney (who, if he was doing his job properly, would have done the work sheet calculations independently). The commission had, by design, handed off the task of work sheet completion to parties that it assumed would have every incentive to get the numbers right, but it apparently never accounted for widespread incompetence in Maryland’s legal profession.

Owens discovered that judges, who don’t have to follow sentencing recommendations, were definitely influenced by them. They gave longer sentences to those whose recommended sentences were mistakenly inflated and short sentences to those who wrongly got too-short recommendations. When she looked at how much time the offenders actually spent in jail, she found that the parole board managed to more or less normalize the sentences of those who had been incorrectly sentenced to too little time, but not the sentences of those who got too much time.

On the Cover:  Welcome to the first Monday in October! This morning marks the Supreme Court debut of Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler and Assistant Public Defender Celia Anderson Davis, who will argue over a Hagerstown man’s child sex abuse conviction. The question is whether a request for counsel, years earlier, should have stopped police from questioning the suspect without a lawyer after they obtained additional information. Read the main story, some advice from Gansler’s predecessor, and a preview of the new term.

In the News: The Court of Appeals heard argument in a legal malpractice case that challenges the “case within a case” methodology … the ban on self-represented lawyers claiming attorneys’ fees applies even to bad faith or frivolous actions, the Court of Special Appeals holds … Maryland Legal Services Corp. renews its quest for a higher filing-fee surcharge … Sen. Ben Cardin finds a civil audience for his health-care talk at UB Law… and a former CBS Early Show personality appeals a ruling that knocked out his medical malpractice claim.

Also:

• Paul Tiburzi remembers the time he argued against the D.C. lawyer who went on to become Chief Justice of the United States;
• An Owings Mills man got a $588,000 verdict in his lawsuit against a home-improvement contracting firm, but will also seek to hold the contractor individually liable;
• Read the Week in Review and our Law Digest, this week with cases from the Court of Appeals, the 4th Circuit and the U.S. District Court for Maryland.

If my home were ever burglarized, I think the strangest thing a thief could pilfer would be an 18-inch-tall sailor statue that sits on a side table in my living room. (Old Salty is good at his job; I’ve never gotten seasick nor have I been attacked by pirates while sitting on my sofa.)

I thought about this after I received a press release from Baltimore County police yesterday warning residents that the burglar of a Monkton home took two hand grenades that possibly could explode.

The suspect stole so-called “pineapple” hand grenades commonly used in World War II. Here are the key sentences from the police e-mail:

“The caretaker of the weapons does not remember whether the grenades were disabled or are live. These grenades are DANGEROUS, and can cause injury or death.”

I would have to echo a person who responded to The Sun’s story about the burglary: why did the homeowner have possible live grenades in his home?

Both of Maryland’s law schools are located on campuses that are among the most dangerous in the country, according to a new ranking.

Both the University of Baltimore and the University of Maryland-Baltimore made The Daily Beast’s list of the 25 most dangerous colleges. In fact, UMB is the third most dangerous school in the country, according to this list. The rankings are based in part on crime data the schools are required to report to the federal government and in part on crime stats for the surrounding neighborhoods.

Maryland has the dubious distinction of having more schools on the list than any other state except Massachusetts. The other dangerous colleges in the Free State are University of Maryland-Eastern Shore and Bowie State University. Notably, the Johns Hopkins University is not on there.

No Maryland schools made The Daily Beast’s list of the 25 safest colleges.

Students at the “dangerous” Maryland schools: do the rankings ring true? Do you feel unsafe on campus?

(An aside: I’m proud that my alma mater didn’t make the list. To my dad, who was worried about me going there because of safety concerns: I told you so.)

HT: TaxProf Blog via Above the Law.   

Happy Monday!

• Collaborative divorce isn’t so great, Dawn Bowie says.
• Is this gender-stereotyping discrimination, or is it sexual-orientation discrimination? “Prowel says he was harassed because he talked in a high voice, walked effeminately, was very well-groomed, liked to talk about art and interior design, and pushed the buttons on a work machine ‘with pizzazz.’”
• The woman whose online harassment of a 13-year-old girl arguably led the girl to commit suicide has had her misdemeanor conviction officially overturned.
• Anti-abortion groups can’t challenge over-the-counter emergency contraception.
• “Your Honor, Megan’s Law made me drive drunk.”

A few news organizations, including The Sun, were fooled today by a prank Web site carrying a message that purported to be from Mayor Sheila Dixon. The backstory is this: a British official compared the city of Manchester, which has had a spate of violence, to The Wire, which was, of course, about Baltimore.

A British blogger then made up a fake Web site made to look like Dixon’s official one, in which he, as Dixon, took the politician to task. The post read, in part:

To present a television show as the real Baltimore is to perpetuate a fiction that dishonours our city. It is as pointless as boasting that Baltimore has a per capita homicide rate a fraction of that in the popular UK television show Midsomer Murders.

The Baltimore Police Department is working hard to protect the people of this city and it should be remembered that The Wire was just a television show. As this video shows, there is so much more to Baltimore than The Wire.

The site, which appears to be no longer accessible, then linked to a video showing scenes from the violent Midsomer Murders show, accompanied by the theme song from The Wire. The video points out that there are more deaths in the British show than in the American one, then ends with the “Visit Baltimore” logo.

This afternoon, Dixon’s (actual) office sent out a statement correcting the record and saying that “The city’s Law department as well as the Mayor’s Office of Information Technology have been informed and are currently investigating this violation of the city’s website for copyright infringement of the City of Baltimore and the Office of Mayor.” Mayoral spokesman Scott Peterson also forwarded an e-mail from the blogger behind the fake site:

Scott,

I made a joke for my friends that was circulated more widely than intended. No-one was supposed to be fooled beyond the words “Midsomer Murders” and just in case, I made a little video and linked to it which was in no way conceivably genuine. I registered the domain in my own name, I wrote using English spelling, I left a message in the source code and at the bottom of the page I attributed the copyright to my blog pseudonym. I didn’t imagine anyone in the US or in the UK would believe it.

Please could you pass on my apologies to anyone in your office who has been inconvenienced by this prank. I will be editing the masthead to make it clear that it’s not the real site.

Yours,

Alex Hilton

The mayor’s spokesman told me that, despite the statement about the law department investigating, the city plans no litigation against blogger Hilton. “No, at the end of the day it’s a hoax,” Peterson said.

That said, “We want to make sure people understand that this is serious,” Peterson said. “It’s not a joke when you lift the website’s information…. It is dangerous and we’re just lucky that it wasn’t anything more of a serious intent.”

A woman was arrested Tuesday at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport after customs agents found 2.5 lbs. of cocaine concealed in her bra. The woman put the drug in two separate bags designed to blend in with her bra, according to customs agents.

If two bags are good, 19 is apparently not better; a Massachusetts woman was arrested Aug. 16 with that many packages of crack cocaine concealed in her bra. Detectives saw the woman holding one bag in her hand, after which she revealed the others under her shirt.

I guess you could say the women were bust-ed.