Courts

The Jenkintown Borough Council has scheduled a special meeting tonight to discuss hiring a monitor to enforce a ban on nonresidents' use of the high school basketball courts. A proposal to hire the monitor was discussed by the Jenkintown school board at a meeting Tuesday night. The proposal calls for the borough and the school board to split the cost of the monitor's salary. The board tabled the proposal because board President Robert C.Totaro was absent, and the board members decided they should hear his comments before voting on the proposal.

For nearly 23 years, Walt Slingerland has operated a service station across the street from Northeast Philadelphia Airport. He didn't worry about burglaries or other serious crime. Within the last six months, however, that has changed. His Academy Exxon, Grant Avenue and Academy Road, has been burglarized three times. Now Slingerland, 55, is hopping mad - not only because he was burglarized but because a 16-year-old boy has been charged with two of the break-ins. Police said the suspect had burglarized the station twice in a month.

A Common Pleas Court judge yesterday issued a protection order directing Geoff Gallas, the executive administrator of the Philadelphia courts, to refrain from abusing, harassing or threatening his wife. Judge Thomas D. Watkins issued the order in response to a petition filed last week by Gallas' wife, Denise. The judge, who heard testimony during a closed-door proceeding Wednesday, did not make any explicit finding that abuse had occurred. Watkins did not evict Gallas from the couple's Mount Airy home or take away his custody rights to the couple's three children, as Denise Gallas had requested.

SEPTA got some good and some bad news from the courts yesterday, but none of it had anything to do with the strike. In one case, U.S. District Judge Clarence C. Newcomer ruled that SEPTA's transit police physical-fitness test, which includes a 1.5-mile run in under 12 minutes, doesn't discriminate against women. "This court simply will not condone dilution of readily obtainable physical abilities standards that serve to protect the public safety in order to allow unfit candidates, whether they are male or felame, to become SEPTA transit police officers," the judge wrote in a 162-page opinion.

There's been a lot of speculation that some Philadelphia voters are so turned off by the choices presented to them in this election that they will stay home next Tuesday. I don't feel that way at all. In fact, I can hardly wait to get into that voting booth and start flipping levers. A big part of the reason for that has to do with the judges on the ballot. Perhaps never before has there been such a clear opportunity for voters to send the message that something has to be done about the judicial system.

Dawn Staley has played on a lot of basketball courts during her career, but one she has missed holds so much meaning for her. Growing up in Strawberry Mansion, Staley was a big-time 76ers fan during the time of Julius Erving, Andrew Toney, Billy Cunningham and of course Maurice Cheeks. Those teams played in the arena now called the First Union Spectrum. Next month, Staley will finally play there. She will be part of the USA Women's Senior National Team, which will continue getting ready for the 2000 Olympics with an exhibition game against the Hungarian professional club team MiZo-PVSK.

If variety were the measure of greatness, the men's team from Haverford would be the odds-on favorite to win the national championship in its division of the U.S. Tennis Association tournament. The squad, which leaves for Tucson, Ariz., today to play in the weekend event, boasts a bridge builder, a violin maker, a math professor, an engineer and a former amateur boxer. The team can produce a fairly heady resume of on-court accomplishments, too. In August, it won its division in the Middle States championship, in which amateur teams from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware competed in Princeton, N.J. That followed the team's triumph in local playoffs in July.

Disappointed by a recent contract offer from the New York Rangers, free-agent center Mark Messier said yesterday he will entertain offers from other teams. The 36-year-old Messier estimated that 15 NHL teams would be interested in signing him. He just completed a three-year, $18 million contract with the Rangers, whom he led to the 1994 Stanley Cup. He admitted in a conference call yesterday that he hoped to get a new contract from the Rangers before last season or during the 1996-97 schedule.

Ronald Davis said he knew it was going to happen. For a decade, he said, he warned the Family Court judges, the child advocate and the social workers. But it happened anyway. His estranged wife's 5-year-old daughter, Aliyah, was beaten to death with a stick. Police said the mother, Maria Davis Fox, watched her common-law husband, Charles Fox, beat the girl. At the time of Aliyah's death, Maria Davis Fox was on eight years' probation from a manslaughter conviction for the beating death of her 17- month-old son, Saeed, in 1973.

When it's time to dispense justice to accused criminals, Philadelphia courts are like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield: They get no respect. Want evidence? Just look at the no-show rate among defendants here, which is twice that of New York City courts. So many defendants skipped court dates that there were once 47,000 fugitives roaming free, an Inquirer series on the city courts revealed in late 2009. That made many city neighborhoods less safe, without question. But it also deprived a struggling city treasury of millions of dollars in bail forfeitures that the courts may never collect.