The sentencing of a Baltimore County lawyer and his wife on animal cruelty charges, set for Tuesday, has been postponed.

Hilton and Donna Silver were found guilty in April in circuit court of neglecting one of their horses, which was in such poor condition it had to be euthanized on the spot. The Silvers face a maximum of 90 days in jail. The April trial was an appeal of a guilty verdict the couple received in district court last August.

A new sentencing date has not been scheduled.

A call to Hilton Silver’s lawyer Tuesday afternoon was not returned. Court records indicate David A. Greenbaum filed a motion for a new trial in May. Prosecutor Adam Lippe said in an e-mail he did not ask for the postponement.

One reason for the delay might be that the judge, Thomas J. Bollinger, is in the midst of the Mary Koontz murder trial. I’ve seen judges delay the day’s testimony in a civil matter to handle a criminal issue, but I would imagine it’s a little more difficult to interrupt a murder trial for a hearing that could take a few hours.

Well, this could get awkward.

Alison Asti, who filed Monday to run for a seat on the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County, is a past president of the Maryland State Bar Association. So, do you think she can count on the MSBA’s endorsement?

Not likely.

The MSBA’s longstanding policy is to endorse the sitting judges, and a vote for Asti would be a vote to unseat Judge Ronald H. Jarashow (who joined the court on March 1) or Judge Laura S. Kiessling (Feb. 19).

Bet that next Board of Governors’ meeting will be fun, won’t it?

I should mention that Asti also chairs The Daily Record’s independent Editorial Advisory Board, but this paper has a foolproof way of dealing with endorsements. We don’t make them.

Happy Monday! Enjoy these law links to start your week:

• The suspects in Saturday night’s shooting at Harborplace allegedly got away by hopping on the “Fast. Friendly. FREE!” Charm City Circulator. Excellent.
• Washington Post letter writer on the Court of Appeals decision striking down a Montgomery County ordinance banning fortunetelling on grounds that the law violated free speech rights: “The [county] council should call the court’s bluff and set up a licensing scheme whereby it will grant a business license to anyone who can demonstrate that he or she has psychic powers.”
• Adding a .xxx domain name for sexually-explicit sites will eventually lead to censorship and criminalization of this material, Jon Katz writes.
• Surprise! Supreme Court hearings actually do produce lots of substantive, important questions for the nominee, a new study finds.
• Eight of the 13 southern states have female chief judges of their highest courts. Cool.

Earlier this week, I presented in this space details about a jury trial in a case concerning a mailman and a dog. The letter carrier, Mary Jo Davis, had sued Charles and Karen Cheelsman after their dog, Lucky, allegedly attacked Davis as she attempted to deliver the mail in 2007. Davis subsequently needed knee surgery and was seeking $550,000 in damages.

So what happened in Baltimore County Circuit Court earlier this month?

(I’ll give you a minute in case you want to “refresh your recollection.”)

A jury deliberated for less than an hour before finding in favor of the defendants. Andre M. Forte, the Cheelsmans’ lawyer, said the jury looked at Lucky’s history of human interaction in determining whether the couple was negligent.

“The past history of my clients’ dog showed he was a lovable dog who never showed a propensity of vicious behavior,” Forte said, describing Lucky as a “big, huge goofball.”

Forte, who has handled other dog bite cases and spoken on the subject, said neighbors testified that the worst Lucky ever did was growl or snarl at them.

Mary Ann Ryan, Davis’ lawyer, said last week that no decision on an appeal had been made. (No notice of appeal was listed in the court record at lunchtime Friday.)

Ryan agreed with Forte that the jury was reluctant to find the Cheelsmans negligent based on Lucky’s history.

“Every dog gets one bite,” she said.

Davis is recovering from surgery unrelated to the alleged attack, Ryan added, but she will soon return to her mail route. That includes the Cheelsman house.

Some faculty members at the University of Maryland School of Law can add a new title to their resume – blogger.

The school has launched Quoth the Raven, a faculty blog. (Sayeth I: if it has “quoth” in the title, it’s gotta be good.) The blog is a chance for professors to share thoughts “about current events and other concerns – including reactions to judicial and other decisions that affect law teaching and scholarship, ideas about legal education, commentary on political affairs and views about social justice,” Dean Phoebe Haddon wrote in the inaugural post.

The blog has featured several updates each day with headlines that grab your attention. My favorite so far: “Post-Racial ‘Race Talk’ and the Marketing of Tampons.” Incidentally, the blogger, Taunya Lovell Banks, also wrote a very interesting piece on noted seersucker aficionado Atticus Finch and the 50th anniversary of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

So welcome to the blog neighborhood, Quoth the Raven, and here’s hoping the posts are evermore.

I couldn’t help but think about the 1979 movie Kramer vs. Kramer as I previewed this week’s “Families Matter Symposium,” a two-day event at which attorneys, judges, professors, psychologists and accountants will meet in Baltimore to discuss ways to make divorce and child-custody proceedings less adversarial.

In the Academy Award-winning movie, Joanna Kramer (played by Meryl Streep) is fighting Ted Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) for custody of the son she walked out on when she left her husband. Ted’s attorney, John Shaunessy (Howard Duff), subjects Joanna to the kind of blistering cross-examination symposium sponsors say the event will seek to prevent.

Shaunessy: How can you consider yourself a fit mother when you have been a failure at virtually every relationship you have undertaken as an adult? [objection is sustained.] I’ll ask it another way. What was the longest personal relationship you have had in your life — other than parents and girlfriends?

Joanna: Ah … I guess I’d have to say … with my child.

Shaunessy: Whom you’ve seen twice in a year? Ms. Kramer, your ex-husband, wasn’t he the longest relationship in your life?

Joanna: I suppose.

Shaunessy: Would you speak up, Ms. Kramer? I couldn’t hear you. you.

Joanna:Yes …

Shaunessy: Were you a failure at the most important personal relationship of your life? Were you?       

Joanna: Yes.

[Shaunessy, having finished with the cross-examination, returns to counsel's table, where Ted whispers in his ear.]

Ted: Jesus Christ. Did you have to be so rough on her?

Shaunessy: Do you want the kid or don’t you?

I would tell you who wins custody, but why spoil one of the all-time great movies?

The often-contentious relationship between dogs and mailmen is part of popular lore and sometimes covered in bar exams.

And with the bar exam about a month away, we’ve decided to present the following case and let you predict the outcome, which will be revealed in this space later this week.

All of the information comes from documents in a case tried earlier this month in Baltimore County Circuit Court. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know if this is quite Freakonomics, but it turns out it’s a better idea to steal in Baltimore, then wait several years to turn yourself in, than to get caught swiping in Johannesburg — at least this month. Allow me to explain.

Both Baltimore and South Africa temporarily sped the wheels of justice recently, for different reasons and with different results.

Baltimore, with roughly 40,000 open warrants, put on its version last week of Fugitive Safe Surrender, a popular program run by the U.S. Marshals, offering “favorable consideration” and expedited disposition to non-violent fugitives who showed up at a Westside church. Almost 1,000 people turned themselves in during the four-day event, which seemed to be a good result for almost everyone involved. Many simply checked in, met with a public defender, prosecutor and maybe a judge, and were free and clear in a few hours. (A small number wanted for more serious offenses were carted off to jail.)

Several thousand miles to the southeast, South Africa, host of the closely-watched World Cup, set up so-called instant justice courts of its own this month. The National Prosecution Authority conceived of the courts to mete out swift and severe penalties for anyone behaving badly during the international event, and by extension, adding to the nation’s high-crime reputation. Steal a cell phone from a visiting soccer fan? Five years in prison.

So, what do you think of these quick fixes? Besides the fundamental question of fairness, are they just Band-Aids for good publicity or is there some broader virtue to such swift adjudication of criminal cases?

Update: The U.S. Marshals Service office in Baltimore reported Tuesday some results for the Safe Surrender effort. During the four days of the event, 979 individuals surrendered themselves on outstanding arrest warrants, 989 misdemeanor warrants were cleared, and 50 felony warrants were cleared.

The missive Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler and 10 of his East Coast colleagues sent Monday to embattled British Petroleum reads like the proverbial lawyer’s letter subtly threatening litigation if the Gulf of Mexico oil spill spreads to the Atlantic Ocean.

First, the letter from the 11 attorneys general contains the language of a legal claim for damages.

“Though the immediate area of impact from this catastrophe is in the Gulf region, portions of the East Coast are at foreseeable risk of substantial harm,” the letter states (emphasis added). “Even if our coast waters and communities are not directly impacted, there may well be significant harm to the migratory bird and fish species that form an important part of our natural resources and economy.” Read the rest of this entry »

Move over Prosser on Torts and make room for Tamber on the CSI Effect.

Writing for a unanimous Maryland Court of Appeals last week, Judge Lynne A. Battaglia displayed what we at On The Record regard as the great, good sense to cite our esteemed colleague Caryn Tamber’s seminal blog post, The CSI effect, in Maryland and Massachusetts. Battaglia referred to the landmark work in her opinion Friday overturning two second-degree murder convictions.

Battaglia concluded that now-retired Baltimore City Circuit Judge Charles G. Bernstein had improperly asked prospective jurors if they could put aside the television show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and “convict a defendant without scientific evidence.” She said that question improperly “suggested that the [potential] jury’s only option was to convict, regardless of whether scientific evidence was adduced at trial.”

In another self-serving plug, we at On The Record note that Battaglia also cited Cynthia Di Pasquale’s article in The Daily Record of Sept. 8, 2006, Beyond the Smoking Gun: Maryland’s Legal Community Debates the ‘CSI Effect.’