washingtonpost.com - Courts, Judiciary

AT FIRST blush, it may seem a little unsavory to arrest people for failing to show up for jury duty. After all, these folks did not steal identities and empty bank accounts. And they certainly did not mug little old ladies or commit any number of other, more violent offenses that plague the District of Columbia.

A Loudoun County man whose 21-month-old son died when he left him inside a hot sport-utility vehicle for 10 hours could face indictment as soon as today, and authorities are anxious to begin legal proceedings against him.

From a book-lined den on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, the attorney general is watching the clock.

From a book-lined den on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, the attorney general is watching the clock.

It could be seen as the sincerest form of flattery: Ask some activists on the left the kind of Supreme Court justice they would like to see a President Obama appoint, and the name you hear most is the same justice they most often denounce.

A Supreme Court nomination is perhaps the least predictable event in political life. A president never knows when a justice might decide to give up his or her lifetime appointment. It did not happen in Jimmy Carter's four years or in the first term of President Bush.

On June 29, Ronnie L. White was strangled in the Prince George's County jail, where he had been held on charges of killing a county police officer. If Maryland had met its constitutional obligation to provide White with a lawyer after he was charged with homicide, he might well be alive today.

Charles County Circuit Court Judge Christopher C. Henderson, who has served for 12 years, will step down this fall.

As a freshman senator in the Virginia General Assembly in 1972, Joseph V. Gartlan Jr. rose to the Senate floor to tell his colleagues that their budgetary sense was "appalling." Two years later, the Fairfax County Democrat questioned the ethics of legislators receiving per-diem expenses for days they spent at home.

Relishing a moment of triumph after a successful, long-running legal battle to end the District's handgun ban, Dick A. Heller strode into D.C. police headquarters yesterday with an unloaded revolver and began registering the weapon so he can keep it in his Capitol Hill home for self-defense.

Ikeaburger:

Thirty-two years after banning most D.C. residents from possessing handguns, the District government opened its doors yesterday to applicants seeking permission to own revolvers, bowing to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared the city's tough firearms restrictions unconstitutional.

AUSTIN, July 17 -- Now this is some serious smackdown, blogger style.

D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and his feisty attorney general, Peter Nickles, stood on the steps of the Wilson Building this week ostensibly to announce how the city will comply with the U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of Washington's ban on handguns. But really, they were delivering very much the opposite message: With only the narrowest of exceptions, we're sticking with our gun ban. Don't like it? Sue us. "I am pretty confident that the people of the District of Columbia want us to err in the direction of trying to restrict guns," Fenty told me, smiling broadly at the suggestion that what he's really trying to do is make it as hard as possible for Washingtonians to keep a loaded gun at home. Fenty and Nickles reject any interpretation of the Supreme Court decision as a clear statement that Americans may, with very few exceptions, keep and bear what Justice

CULIACAN, Mexico, July 16 -- A U.N. court ruled Wednesday that the United States should halt the executions of five Mexican nationals -- including a convicted killer sentenced to die in three weeks -- until their cases can be reviewed.

MOSCOW, July 16 -- The imprisoned tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose supporters say he was convicted because of his political opposition to then-Russian President Vladimir Putin, applied for parole Wednesday.

As a 30-year D.C. resident who has been called numerous times for jury duty and served many times, I found a recent remark by the chief judge of the D.C. Superior Court to be unreasonable ["D.C. Arrests Residents for Missing Jury Service," Metro, July 14].

Mayor Adrian Fenty and his feisty attorney general, Peter Nickles, stood on the steps of the Wilson Building this week ostensibly to announce how the District will comply with the Supreme Court's rejection of Washington's ban on handguns. But really, they were delivering very much the opposite message: With only the narrowest of exceptions, we're sticking with our gun ban. Don't like it? Sue us.