Nation in brief

Teen in boatyard arson gets review

At the order of a federal appeals court, a U.S. District Court judge in Portland, Maine, has reopened the sentencing hearing for a boy who as a 14-year-old in 2002 set fire to a boatyard containing an engine that belonged to former President George Bush and was sentenced to 30 months in a maximum security juvenile prison.

Reopening the case will give the family of the teenager, Patrick Vorce, a chance to argue that he was treated illegally when Judge George Singal, of U.S. District Court in Portland, had him sent to a juvenile prison in Pennsylvania that is under contract to the federal Bureau of Prisons, said his lawyer and stepfather, Robert Mongue.

The prison is a 13-hour drive from Patrick's home in Kennebunk, Maine, and provides little education or counseling services, his family and lawyers say.

The case is considered highly unusual because, under federal law, juveniles are supposed to be tried in local juvenile courts and incarcerated in local facilities. Patrick is the only juvenile from New England or from New York, Ohio or Pennsylvania in the custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons, a bureau spokesman, Dan Dunne, said.

There are so few juveniles in federal custody that the bureau does not even have its own juvenile prison, Dunne said.

Patrick's family and lawyers say that the original decision not to try him in the local county court, as the federal Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act requires, must have had something to do with the connection to the former president. Paula Silsby, the U.S. attorney for Maine, whose office prosecuted Patrick, has denied this.

Patrick pleaded guilty to the arson in July 2002 and was sentenced last summer. But Mongue appealed, and a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in Boston, ruled in February that Singal had not sufficiently considered the "location and rehabilitative capabilities of the detention facility chosen by the government" as required by federal law.

Acting on the ruling, Singal last week set an evidentiary hearing for April 29 to determine whether the Pennsylvania prison was appropriate for Patrick.

Mongue said he would ask Singal to allow Patrick to serve the balance of his time at a juvenile prison in Maine.

LOWELL, Mass. - A 92-year-old man will be considered for a police award because he helped wrestle a suicidal man from the edge of a bridge and restrained him until police arrived.

George Kouloheras was driving to a grocery store Saturday when he stopped his car to help Bob Michalczyk pull the distraught man off the bridge's railing. The suicidal man was not identified.

"I jumped him from behind and this other fellow got him from the front," Kouloheras said. "I got him down and sat on him. He wanted to get up, but I told him "no, no. Stay down.' "

Patrolman Dan Brady arrived to find Michalczyk pinning the man to the ground, holding his shoulders, and Kouloheras kneeling alongside trying to talk the man out of jumping.

Brady said he will seek citizen citations for Kouloheras and Michalczyk, 42.

Kouloheras has been a hero before. Eighty years ago, as a 12-year-old Boy Scout, he rescued an infant from a burning building.

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