by MELODY SIMMONS

      Still digesting their two-hour lunch, the unsuspecting jurors in the theft trial of Mayor Sheila Dixon returned to the courtroom yesterday unprepared for the sucker-punch announcement by Circuit Court Judge Dennis Sweeney:

     “There’s been a significant development in this case…” said Sweeney, a visiting judge from Howard County, before delivering Part II of what looked like a mid-day massacre of the prosecution’s case: Two of the seven felony charges against Mayor Dixon, he said, were dismissed while you were out.

     The action started a legal chain reaction that nullified days of droning testimony about Circuit City, Old Navy, Giant Food, and certain Target and Best Buy gift cards. It also signaled that the prosecution’s star witness — millionaire developer Ronald Lipscomb — the mayor’s ex-boyfriend, would not testify against Dixon and would instead be the city’s most famous no-show since Robert Irsay.

     Despite heated arguments in the dramatic downtown trial, defense attorneys failed in an attempt to get Sweeney to dismiss the remaining five charges and declare a mistrial. Much of the prior testimony over four days of testimony, now nullified along with 37 pieces of evidence, centered on the use of about $1,500 worth of gift cards intended for the city’s needy, but spent by Dixon. Basically, any testimony connected to Lipscomb was to be disregarded by jurors.

     Sweeney dismissed jurors early today as attorneys prepared closing arguments and jury instructions. He said the trial would resume tomorrow (Wednesday) morning at 9 am.

     The trial watchers — and allA of Baltimore, it seemed — were left to speculate on the day’s doings. What on earth, first of all, was the prosecution’s strategy, resting their case before calling star witness Lipscomb?

     This was the subject of on-air discussion today at Mark Steiner’s afternoon show on WEAA. (Brew reporters Fern Shen and Melody Simmons, who also reports for WEAA, discussed today’s Dixon doings along with other guests including Baltimore attorney A. Dwight Pettit and University of Maryland law professor Douglas Colbert.

      Pettit thought something weird must have happened over the last few days: the prosecution must have learned some damaging information about Lipscomb, to make such a drastic last-minute change in the game plan for their years-long prosecution. Colbert said, ‘don’t sell the prosecution short,’ they might be shrewdly taking away the defense’s main strategy: to portray Lipscomb in an unflattering light, ‘as a married man making a full court press on Sheila Dixon.’

     That would leave them to focus jurors’ attention on well-connected developer Patrick Turner who did, after all, testify that gift cards found later to have been used by Dixon to buy personal stuff were cards she pressed him to donate for needy children.

     Listen to the podcast to hear the whole discussion. The questions they debated were just some of the many that seemed to have all of Baltimore talking yesterday:

      Would Dixon take the stand in her defense? Her attorneys declined to answer. Will Lipscomb be called as a hostile witness by the defense to help support Dixon’s claim that he lavished anonymous gifts on her while they dated in 2002 and 2003?

     Turner’s testimony regarding $1,000 in gift cards he delivered in an unmarked envelope to Dixon’s City Hall office in 2005 remained on the record. And prosecutors are still hoping jurors contemplate what was described as a haphazard system of Dixon’s to hand out gift cards during an annual Holly Trolly tour at Christmastime in 2006. Some of those cards ended up in her home and others were spent by Dixon, testimony showed.

     So far, Dixon’s defense has centered on her character.

     Late Tuesday, Wanda Watts, who has known Dixon for 30 years through Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where they are both members, testified that she and the mayor have conducted numerous charitable projects for the city’s poor.

      “She is one of the most honest people I know,” Watts told the jury. “And she is sincere in that she loves Baltimore and the citizens of Baltimore.”