More courtroom antics! Read the whole story at Boston.com…

Chelsea court official allegedly had sex in courtroom
By Shelley Murphy

An assistant clerk at the Chelsea District Court was arrested by the FBI this morning on charges that he had sex with an accused prostitute in an empty courtroom while promising to help get a charge against her dismissed.

The assistant clerk made a brief appearance this morning before US Magistrate Judge Timothy S. Hillman, who released him on $10,000 unsecured bond and ordered him to return to federal court March 26 for a probable cause hearing. A spokeswoman for the state court system said he was suspended without pay.

“It’s a perversion of the legal system and a gross abuse of power,” said Assistant US Attorney Brian T. Kelly, head of the US attorney’s public corruption unit.

The accused prostitute was in the Chelsea court with her lawyer in December trying to get an old prostitution charge dismissed when she saw the assistant clerk. She confided to her lawyer that he had approached her when she was in the lockup at the courthouse on the charge in February 2005, asking her if she was a “working girl” and offering to get her case dismissed if she provided sex, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court.

The woman said the man took her into a courtroom, where she performed oral sex on him. However, the charges were not dismissed and are still pending.

After her lawyer alerted the FBI, the woman began cooperating with agents and secretly recorded conversations with the man, who allegedly acknowledged their earlier sexual encounter and offered to help her get the new charges dismissed if she helped him again, the affidavit says.

Read the whole story at Boston.com…

Program targets sex trade
City fights increase in teen prostitutes
By Katheleen Conti

In a six-week period late last summer, Chelsea police arrested 32 prostitutes – a high number even for a city where prostitution has threatened the quality of life for years.

“It was alarming we had that many girls in such a small period,” said Chelsea Police Captain Keith Houghton.

Of those, Houghton said, the 10 women most frequently arrested have been nabbed a total of 195 times – one of them 40 times alone.

Now police, in a partnership with the youth organization Roca, are hoping to put a wedge in the prostitution revolving door with the Restorative Justice Project, an aggressive alternative sentencing program funded by a two-year $200,000 grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Still in the conceptual stages, the program would be similar to Roca’s ex isting efforts with 14- to 24-year-olds involved in gangs or other high-risk street crime, said Susan Ulrich, who is working on the Restorative Justice Project at Roca.

Using a method they call relentless street working, Roca staff approach young gang members or drug dealers, for example, and talk to them frequently about the organization’s services and ways to get help.

“They may not believe they need services; they may be quite content being on the streets or being gang-involved. But we tell them they can do something different in the world,” Ulrich said. “When young people want to change and when they’re tired of doing the same thing over and over, and they’re tired of going to jail or being on the street, they think, ‘I have to start to do something different.’ “