I’m not ashamed proud to admit it: I love “Jersey Shore,” the MTV reality show that became a cultural phenomenon.

For the uninitiated, the show followed eight twentysomethings for a month last summer as they lived and worked together on the beach in Seaside Heights, N.J. The Situation, Snooki, battling beats, GTL… the show has captured the cultural Zeitgeist with a pound of hair gel to spare.

Now comes word that one of the show’s stars has taken the LSAT. Vinny Guadagnino, known as simply “Vinny“, said he got a “mediocre” score on the test, which shot his plan of doing really well and enrolling at Yale or Harvard.

Vinny said he would like to practice business or corporate law one day. But right now, he is putting any law dreams he has on hold to ride out his newfound stardom.

“To tell you the truth, man, [being a] lawyer isn’t something I wanted to do,” he said.  “Nobody wants to be a lawyer — it’s hard work. But it was kind of my academic route.”

No matter where Vinny ends up, “Jersey Shore” fans know one thing – Vinny’s mom will love him.

So I was acquitted this morning.

Back in November, I got pulled over and cited for “failure to maintain and fasten vehicle registration plate in visible position,” a violation of Transportation Article 13-411. No, I wasn’t driving without a license plate. Rather, my plate had a thick clear plastic cover on it, which the officer told me was illegal in Maryland. We’d bought the cover years ago in Pennsylvania after idiots/thieves/take your pick twice (!) tore off half our plate.

Anyway, I looked up the definition of a registration plate cover under Maryland law, and here’s what I found:

(a) In this section, “registration plate cover” means any tinted, colored, painted, marked, clear, or illuminated object that is designed to:

(1) Cover any of the characters of a vehicle’s registration plate; or

(2) Distort a recorded image of any of the characters of a vehicle’s registration plate recorded by a traffic control signal monitoring article…

This morning, I headed to district court to fight the ticket. It was only a $60 fine, and going to court was an inconvenience, but I was convinced that the ticket was a mistake.

I waited my turn as dozens of other alleged traffic offenders came before the judge, mostly to plead guilty or guilty with an explanation. (Note to the dude who was clocked going 109: I’m thinking there’s no really good explanation for that one.) When my turn came, I pleaded not guilty and then waited until the end of the docket for my trial.

The officer told the judge that my car had a dark, tinted plate cover on it and that he had stopped me and written a citation. I countered that the cover was clear. I told the judge that the intent of the statute seemed to be to prohibit covers that would prevent someone from reading the plate, but that the officer had clearly had no problem reading mine, and those that would interfere with something like a red light camera. Mine doesn’t, as evidenced by the EZ-Pass violation notice I brought to show the judge. If EZ-Pass could read the plate well enough to send us a notice, surely a red light camera could, too. I explained why we had bought the cover; it wasn’t to obscure our plate, but to thwart thieves. We’d bought it in Pennsylvania, not here in Maryland, where the sale of such items is banned. Finally, I mentioned that in the years since we’ve lived in Maryland, no one who’s serviced our car has ever brought up the license plate cover law.

Well, I was either really annoying or really convincing, because the judge agreed with me. My first (and only, I hope) encounter with the traffic court system ended in a not guilty verdict.

I have nothing but praise for the judge, and not just because she did what I requested. As I sat there this morning, I heard my fellow defendants make every kind of excuse for their driving infractions. The judge must hear such things day after day, and it has to get old, yet she treated everyone who came before her with respect, even when condemning their driving behavior. I might not be so patient.

Oh, and the offending license plate cover? I unscrewed the thing and took it off the day after my ticket. I may have been in the right, but who needs the hassle? If anyone tears my plate in half again, though, all bets are off.

I’ve seen some strange case captions in my almost three years here at The Daily Record (especially in federal forfeiture actions), but a rearraignment scheduled for tomorrow morning in U.S. District Court in Baltimore might set a new bar.

Take a look at Judge J. Frederick Motz’s 10:30 a.m. engagement.

That’s right, a bank fraud and identity theft defendant named Brotha Workitout is finally pleading guilty (to a misdemeanor related to using fraudulent identification documents).

“That is actually his name,” confirmed Assistant Federal Public Defender Brendan A. Hurson, who is representing Workitout. “He had some mental health issues and he changed his name.”

Workitout, whose given name is James Weldon Hunter Jr., has been receiving treatment  since around the time of his not-guilty plea three years ago, and his deal with the government envisions more of the same.

“Things are better,” Hurson said, noting Workitout hasn’t had “a single brush with the law” since his indictment in 2006 . “But unfortunately the name remains.”

It is unclear what name Workitout, who is also identified in court papers as Hesman Wisteria Tall, will go by during his probation, but regardless, I’m glad to hear it’s all … working out.

Gov. O’Malley’s been pretty vocal about his opposition to the death penalty, speaking out about its fundamental wrongness and pushing hard for its abolition. The repeal efforts having failed, Charles Lane of the Washington Post wonders why O’Malley doesn’t just commute the sentences of the five men on Maryland’s death row:

To be sure, clearing Death Row wouldn’t achieve his ultimate goal of abolishing the death penalty. But it would save the lives of five people sentenced under what the Commission on Capital Punishment has told the governor was an irretrievably flawed process — and whose executions, according to O’Malley, would serve no purpose even if that process had been absolutely pristine.

So Lane asked O’Malley about it, and O’Malley was not, in his judgment, able to muster a convincing answer as to why he can’t or won’t commute the sentences. Lane concludes that it’s a political decision:

I suppose O’Malley’s re-election might be so important to the long-run cause of abolishing the death penalty in Maryland that it is worth exposing five actual condemned men to prolonged uncertainty, not to mention the risk of possible execution, in the here and now. But I’d sure like to see someone try to argue that publicly.

Baltimore County has been given another chance to answer a $13,000 question.

A White Marsh couple’s lawsuit seeking to recover money seized by police in a drug raid is headed back to district court to determine if the county should be afforded a new trial.

The county’s request previously had been denied, leading to a circuit court appeal heard in October.

Judge Lawrence R. Daniels, in a mid-December ruling docketed earlier this month, remanded the new trial question because the denial was issued as a chambers ruling.

“[W]ithout knowledge of the reasons for the trial court’s decision, we cannot say, with certainty, that the trial court ‘fairly’ exercised its discretion,” Daniels wrote, referring to guidelines for granting a new trial motion set out in a 1988 Court of Special Appeals case.

The case will be heard Feb. 23 in Baltimore County District Court in Catonsville, according to court records.

Police raided the home of Rogelio and Rosario Simon in February 2006 using a warrant and found 67 guns and small amounts of marijuana, methamphetamine and prescription medication in addition to the money. But only a few guns and the drugs were connected to Marlon Simon, the couple’s grown son and the one under investigation on federal drug charges.

Rogelio and Rosario Simon sued the county in November 2007, seeking to recover his guns and her money. The county claims it no longer has the firearms or the money, having turned everything over to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. But no one from the county appeared at the January 2008 district court trial in the case, leading to a $13,063 default judgment for Rosario Simon. Vinson said during the circuit court hearing that an error in the county’s mail system led to the district court absence.

Daniels, during the October hearing, took the county to task for failing to appear in district court. In his ruling, the judge also notes the county only hinted at its legal arguments with a boilerplate, “bald assertion” in its motion for a new trial.

But Daniels ultimately decided the county could have mounted a “meritorious defense” in district court to the Simons’ lawsuit and was therefore denied a “substantial right” by the lower court’s ruling.

“[T]he most fundamental right of a party against whom suit has been brought is the right to present a meritorious defense,” Daniels wrote.

The firearm lawsuit was dismissed when MacVaugh learned the county no longer had Rogelio Simon’s antique and modern weapons, which were returned to Simon in the fall.

Happy warm-but-rainy Monday!

• Let’s move on from the Judge Nalley tire saga, writes Ron Miller.
• “Courts seem to have difficulty with the concept that a member of one minority group may discriminate against a member of the same group on the basis of ‘color,’” says Baltimore employment lawyer Mary Keating.
• Pennsylvania hasn’t executed anyone since 1999, even though governors have signed death warrants for many, many inmates over the years. HT: How Appealing.
• Manhattan’s a hotspot for people changing their names to go with their changed genders. (Sometimes, prisoners troll the name-change advertisements for dates. Yikes.) HT: Baltimore Crime.
• Does tossing bodily fluids and waste on the floor for prison staffers to clean up constitute assault? The New Hampshire Supreme Court will take up the question.

Say hello to the new $107 million John and Frances Angelos Law Center (left), scheduled to be completed in the fall of 2012 and hold its first classes in the spring semester of 2013. The image is looking north from the intersection of Charles Street and Mt. Royal Avenue.

The rendering, plus floor plans and a 3-D model, were displayed three times Thursday – first receiving rave reviews from the state’s Architectural Review Board and Baltimore’s Urban Design and Architecture Review Panel and finally during a community briefing Thursday night at UB’s student center (where I saw it).

Stefan Behnisch, whose German architecture firm is teaming with Baltimore’s Ayers/Saint/Gross Inc. on the project, took community members through the 12-story glass building. The law school will hold 1,100 students and will feature lots of open and public space to promote interaction, as well as an atrium the full height of the building. It will also be LEED certified, although the exact level of environmental friendliness has yet to be determined.

The glass facade will control the amount of sunlight entering the building and will make the building look different to passersby depending on the time of day, Behnisch said.

The building will become the first landmark visible to people leaving Penn Station, Behnisch said, so the goal was to make it both blend in and stand out in the neighborhood.

“I think it defines…the urban fabric,” he said.

Steve Cassard, UB’s vice president for facilities and capital planning, said the project remains on schedule and within the budget.

Caroline Farrell did not meet David Gaudin while in Mississippi earlier this month with the Maryland Law Katrina Project. But when a foreclosure attorney from the Mississippi Center for Justice shared with her Gaudin’s story, Farrell knew she needed to help a stranger.

Gaudin has terminal cancer; doctors give him less than six months to live. His illness forced him to stop working, and he subsequently fell behind on his mortgage. Wells Fargo, Gaudin’s bank, threatened to foreclose on his home. Gaudin and his foreclosure lawyer rejected the bank’s proposed loan modification late last year – three months’ forbearance followed by a large, balloon payment.

The bank now wants to move forward with foreclosure proceedings against Gaudin after rejecting his request for a loan modification because of an outstanding balance of $650 on his account.

“This is so heartbreaking,” Farrell said. “It seems so egregious that the bank can’t be flexible.”

That the sticking point was a couple hundred dollars also bothered Farrell, a 3L and president of the Katrina Project.

“I said, ‘We could raise this in an hour,’” she said.

She’ll have three hours to do it Friday night beginning at 9 p.m. at Quigley’s Half-Irish Pub near the law school. All proceeds from the $10 admission fee will go toward erasing Gaudin’s outstanding account balance. Farrell and her classmates have been spreading the word through listservs and Facebook, and Farrell is confident the event will raise more than enough money for Gaudin.

(Farrell said donations can also be made online by writing “The campaign to save David’s house” in the comments section.)

As for the beneficiary, Farrell said Gaudin cried upon learning what the Maryland students were doing for him. He’s now in regular contact with Farrell, a stranger no more.

Parade Magazine had an interesting notebook item recently about jury duty. (And no, unfortunately, Howard Huge didn’t jump into a jury box thinking it was some sort of play space.)

The story reports many jurisdictions are experiencing an increase in the number of people “who say they can’t afford to serve or who simply don’t show up, causing cases to be delayed or even dismissed.”

The problem has been exacerbated by the recession; a Minnesota plumber was found in contempt of court and jailed for a day in November after saying during voir dire that he couldn’t afford to miss more than a day of work. “I don’t get paid when I’m not working,” he said, according to court records. “I could see myself just going with the flow to get it over with to get back to work.”

The American Tort Reform Association has proposed states pay jurors more, noting Arizona offers jurors $300 per day for trials lasting longer than five days.  By comparison, jurors in Maryland are paid between $15 and $30 per day depending on the jurisdiction.

So, what say you – is a larger per diem the best way to ensure citizens answer the call of jury duty? What else could be done to make the experience more palatable for potential jurors?

As I pointed out in my round-up yesterday, The New York Times had a Sunday piece on the misery of being a young lawyer these days. Sarah Waldeck at the Concurring Opinions blog writes that she hopes the article has been widely forwarded to prospective law students, and she gives her own simple advice for deciding whether to go to law school in the fall:

Only go to law school next year if (1) you have always dreamed of being a lawyer; or (2) you are accepted by a very prestigious institution; or (3) you are offered a full scholarship.

This advice probably would have kept Waldeck herself out of law school 15 years ago, but times were different, she says.

Lawyers, is Waldeck’s advice sound for people contemplating whether to enter the legal profession at its arguable nadir?

HT: Above the Law.