Maryland State Judge Injured by Package Bomb : Terrorism: The device is left on his doorstep. U.S. officials doubt that the latest attack is linked to four previous ones.

As authorities ended a frantic week of mail-bomb investigations in the Deep South, another device exploded here Friday, injuring a judge, the third attack on court officials in seven days.

Washington County Circuit Judge John Printz Corderman, 47, was taken to a hospital, suffering from wounds to his groin and fingers after he opened a brown paper-wrapped package bomb that was left on the doorstep of his third-floor apartment in downtown Hagerstown.

After this latest bombing, warnings were sent by Teletype across Maryland to other judges and prosecutors, widening the list of potential mail-bomb targets around the country. Already on this list were federal judges and civil rights groups.

George Hopgood, a special agent at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said that agents had also found an unexploded bomb at the judge’s apartment. He refused to say whether it had been in the same package.

The bomb that did go off exploded in the judge’s hands, Hopgood said, but it was not particularly powerful.

Dr. Charles R. Chaney, Corderman’s physician, said that “it was a life-threatening bomb, but the injuries do not threaten him.” Corderman is expected to remain in the hospital for three days.

Authorities have no suspects in the Corderman attack, Hopgood said. He added that “there is no evidence that (the Hagerstown bombs) were connected to the others” in the South.

“It does not sound like the same (mode of operation),” Tom Moore, an FBI agent in Birmingham, Ala., said. “It sounds like a copy cat.”

Last Saturday, U.S. Circuit Judge Robert S. Vance was killed at his home in Mountain Brook, Ala., when a nail bomb, contained in a package delivered through the mail, exploded. A similar bomb killed Savannah, Ga., attorney Robert Robinson, and other bombs sent to the U.S. 11th Circuit Court building here and to the Jacksonville, Fla., NAACP office were safely defused.

The new bomb was less powerful than the other four devices, which were about the size of a shoe box, made of explosives-filled pipe surrounded by nails. Each bomb was in a package postmarked in Georgia.

Steven Keyes, a neighbor of Corderman, said that, when he heard the explosion, “I thought maybe it was a neighbor who had dropped something on the floor. It sounded like a muffled-type bomb. My brother-in-law thought the truck had backfired.”

Keyes said he had seen a deliveryman bring a package into the building about 20 minutes before the 2:30 p.m. explosion.

“It looked like a normal person to me, a normal delivery,” Keyes said, adding that the deliveryman stayed inside the apartment 5 to 10 minutes. Ten minutes after he departed, the bomb exploded, Keyes said.

Investigators’ theories about the earlier bombings center on race. They believe that a white supremacist or group of them may have committed the crimes in retaliation for court decisions upholding school integration and judgments against the Ku Klux Klan.

Maryland, like the Deep South, where the other bombings occurred, is known as a hotbed of klan activity, but it is not known whether Judge Corderman had been made a target of the group. A computer search did not link him to any race-related cases.

When asked about a possible motive in the Corderman case, police Lt. Robert Frick said: “He’s a judge. He’s put a lot of people away.”

In April, 1986, an angry burglary defendant, sentenced to four years, threw a chair at the judge. Corderman promptly added six years to the sentence, vowing to file assault charges, and said that the man “has demonstrated he doesn’t want to be rehabilitated.”

Just last Monday, the judge presided over a case in which a 28-year-old man pleaded guilty to beating a 90-year-old woman to death. The man, returned to jail to await sentencing, could get a life term.

Corderman, a Hagerstown native, has sat on Maryland’s 4th Circuit bench since 1977. He served as a state senator from 1975 to 1977 and was a deputy state’s attorney from 1971 to 1974. The Maryland State’s Attorneys’ Assn. named him Legislator of the Year in 1976. He served as president of the Maryland State Bar Assn. in 1984.

Despite his distinguished career, Corderman has not escaped controversy.

The conservative Washington Legal Foundation filed a complaint against Corderman in 1987 because of his support of Handgun Control Inc., a Washington-based lobbying group.

In an interview, Paul Kamenar, a foundation representative, said that the group filed the complaint because Corderman violated the code of judicial conduct in a “crusade to ban handguns.” Kamenar said he thought the judge had resigned from Handgun Control, and “that sort of took care of” the complaint. “Nothing further was done. That satisfied our concerns.”

No one from Handgun Control could be reached for comment Friday.

Hagerstown Police Chief Paul Wood said Friday that “I understand the judge held a permit to carry a weapon.”

In a controversial gambling case that went to the U.S. Supreme in 1986, Corderman was overruled in a decision that he had made in favor of bar and tavern owners.

In 1985, Corderman had ruled unconstitutional a state law forbidding gambling in bars. However, the Maryland Court of Appeals upheld the law, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case, allowing the law to stand.

Authorities said Friday that they have no suspects in any of the bombings and attempted bombings. They have called in FBI behavioral psychologist William Hagmaier, who worked on the California “Night Stalker” case, in which Richard Ramirez was convicted of a series of murders. Hagmaier, who has been working in Birmingham, had also conducted extensive interviews with mass murderer Theodore Bundy.

Hagmaier, who has been trying to develop a psychological profile of the bomb murderer, has provided investigators with “significant help,” FBI agent Moore said, but he refused to elaborate.

Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story from Atlanta.