A judge has granted a request by the union representing Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies to intervene in a lawsuit by the county demanding that Sheriff Alex Villanueva cooperate with the Office of the Inspector General's ongoing investigation into alleged internal LASD gangs. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant's order on Friday allows the Association of Los Angeles Deputy Sheriff's to participate in the county's petition brought against Villanueva on July 7.

Along with the uncertainty of his re-election campaign, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva now faces possible criminal contempt charges for failing to comply with subpoenas from last fall. The Civilian Oversight Commission, a Sheriff's Department watchdog, issued them to try and get Sheriff Villanueva to testify under oath, on two main things: Deputy gangs, and the allegation that he harasses, intimidates and sometimes investigates people who are critical of him.

For years, a federal lawsuit over the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles has hung like a specter over city and county elected officials. At times, it threatened to completely upend the region's complex and extraordinarily expensive system for combatting homelessness. But for the last six months, the suit has appeared to be sputtering toward a rather anticlimactic end.

Div. Three of the Fourth District Court of Appeal on Thursday affirmed the conviction of a woman for the murder of her husband, who was 21 years her senior, and conspiring with a man with whom she was having an affair, to do the deed, rejecting her claim that statements to police in violation of her Miranda rights were erroneously admitted into evidence.

The plaintiffs attorney suing a gun manufacturer over alleged accidental discharges botched his strategy after a jury ruled against his client, SIG Sauer is claiming. A New Hampshire federal jury ruled for SIG Sauer in July, and Judge Landya McCafferty refused to overturn the verdict in September. The decisions were bad news for plaintiff Kyle Guay, who claims the P320 pistol went off with out the trigger being pulled and shot him in the leg.

The Third District Court of Appeal has held where a judgment was obtained, to be satisfied through the sale of the judgment debtors’ real property at an auction, and the creditor instructed the sheriff to set an opening bid at $205,800, agreeing in writing that the indebtedness would be decreased by that sum, there was no remedy where the sheriff failed to announce the credit bid and sold the property for a penny to the sole bidder who showed up.

The Supreme Court on Monday removed its temporary guard that was preventing members of Congress investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection from collecting the phone records of two fake electors from Arizona. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito noted their dissent to the order, but there is no opinion from them or from the justices in the majority who concluded that married osteopaths Kelli and Michael Ward are not entitled to an injunction.

A Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who faked getting shot in a sniper attack was convicted of just a single misdemeanor count this week after the prosecutor failed to convince a jury that the lawman had lied to obtain workers' compensation benefits. Deputy Angel Reinosa was convicted Tuesday of filing a false police report regarding a shooting he staged in the parking lot of a satellite sheriff’s station.

The Los Angeles prosecutor’s office has assembled a new cyber-forensics team to investigate potential wrongdoing of East Lansing election software company Konnech. The district attorney last Wednesday dismissed all charges without prejudice against Konnech founder and CEO Eugene Yu. He was arrested and expedited to Los Angeles in October on extortion and grand theft charges for storing poll worker data on servers housed in China.

More than a dozen QAnon adherents rubbed shoulders with conservative journalists and bloggers at an undisclosed Phoenix location in August, gathering to hear new allegations from a far-right group convinced the 2020 election was stolen. Dubbed “the Pit,” the event was hosted by True the Vote, a group of election deniers who funded and appeared in the long-debunked propaganda film “2000 Mules” by right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza, which purported to prove that then-President Trump lost his bid for a second term because of coordinated ballot box stuffing by Democrats.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said Thursday it would not charge a deputy sheriff who was recorded on security video kneeling on the neck of an inmate during a fight in a courthouse lockup. The DA’s office said in a charge evaluation memo filed Nov. 15 that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove deputy Doug Johnson had committed assault under color of authority, and that the evidence, “suggests the amount of force used was not excessive.”

Two Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies involved in the fatal shooting of a 29-year-old Black man in the Westmont area will not face any criminal charges, with a report released Tuesday by the District Attorney's Office concluding the shooting could be reasonably considered self-defense.

Authorities with the Orange County District Attorney’s Office on Wednesday announced multiple felony charges against 33-year-old Johnny Anchondo, who led several law enforcement agencies on a multi-county high-speed pursuit that ended with an officer-involved shooting. A parolee from Moreno Valley, Anchondo has an extensive criminal background. He’s been arrested at least six times in L.A. County in the past two years, according to court records.

The vast majority of criminal cases being dismissed in Riverside County are coming before judges in Indio, who are voiding charges against defendants in both felony and misdemeanor cases, the District Attorney’s Office said Monday. The agency released data indicating that since the start of mass case dismissals on Oct. 10, a total of 614 cases have been booted - and the Larson Justice Center in Indio so far accounts for 351 dismissals, more than all the other courthouses in the county hearing criminal matters combined.

The Moreno Valley man accused of driving drunk and crashing head-on into an off-duty Riverside County sheriff’s correctional deputy, killing the corporal and his daughter, had not owned a valid driver’s license for 17 years at the time of the collision, the state Department of Motor Vehicles said. The license of Scott Brandon Bales, 47, expired in 2005, a DMV spokesman said Tuesday, Nov. 15.

The war against fentanyl rages on as the synthetic opioid continues killing children, teens and adults at alarming rates across the nation. As communities continue being ravaged by fentanyl deaths, one local prosecutor has made it his mission to deter drug dealers by handing down the harshest penalty against those tied to fentanyl fatalities - second-degree murder.

The Biden Administration has taken pains to distance itself from Donald Trump’s treatment of the media - which the 45th president delighted in railing against as “the enemy of the people.” And in late October, Attorney General Merrick Garland officially announced that the Department of Justice will no longer investigate members of the media for their news reporting - including for the possession of classified information.

Tesla will play a vital role in an upcoming trial for a 2019 manslaughter case that left two people dead and calls into question the potential hazards of autopilot, or vehicles equipped with advanced driver-assist technology. The trial was set to start November 15, but according to multiple reports, prosecutors are now asking to delay the trial.

The trial of a man accused of stabbing his girlfriend to death and killing their two young sons began Monday with a defense attorney acknowledging that the defendant is responsible for the woman’s slaying but denying he was responsible for the death of the two boys. The triple-murder trial of Shazer Fernando Limas, an Orange resident at the time of the alleged killings, comes more than a decade after the body of his girlfriend - 31-year-old Arlet Hernandez Contreras - was found dumped in a gutter in Los Angeles County.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a filmmaker and the wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, took the stand in Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault trial in Los Angeles on Monday, at times breaking into tears while alleging he raped her in a hotel room in 2005. Weinstein has pleaded not guilty to multiple sexual assault charges, including four counts of rape, four counts of forcible oral copulation, sexual penetration by force and sexual battery by restraint in incidents dating from 2004 to 2013.

Federal prosecutors investigating Rudy Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine have closed their investigation after more than two years and said no criminal charges will be brought. Prosecutors with the office of US Attorney for the Southern District of New York have been investigating Giuliani, the former personal attorney to former President Donald Trump, for possible violations of foreign lobbying laws since early 2019.

Legislation prohibiting the sale of flavored tobacco products statewide is now facing a possible courtroom battle, one day after it faced a ballot box battle. California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 31 on Nov 8. With more than 63 percent of the vote, Proposition 31 upholds the state law barring the sale of flavored tobacco, including menthol.

A Los Angeles police captain who sued the city, alleging a fellow LAPD captain - who recently won $4 million in her harassment suit against the city - and others wrongfully conducted a search of his home in 2021 plans to call that colleague as well as Chief Michel Moore as witnesses in the upcoming trial of his case. Lawyers for Jonathan Tom and his wife, Yoomi Tom, filed a tentative witness list on Wednesday with Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Richard Fruin ahead of the scheduled Nov. 28 trial.

Slightly more than 52 percent of those who took the state bar exam in July passed, according to State Bar of California officials Thursday. If those who passed the exam satisfy all other requirements for admission, each will be eligible to be licensed by the State Bar to practice law in California. Of the applicants who took the exam in July, 52.4 percent, or 3,753 applicants, passed.

A Virginia law firm is claiming defamation against a client's mother, alleging her false comments in a Google review harmed the firm's reputation. Binnall Law Group PLLC filed a complaint Oct. 28 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia against Brenda Linnemann alleging defamation. According to the plaintiff's complaint, Linnemann's daughter was a client of Binnall Law.

The Court of Appeal for this district held yesterday that a lawyer, merely by invoking Labor Code §925 which bars forcing California employees to have disputes with the employer adjudicated in another state, does not bar an out-of-state arbitrator from deciding the applicability of that provision. Justice Elizabeth A. Grimes of Div. Eight authored the opinion.

Justice Clarence Thomas berated the Sixth Circuit in a dissenting opinion on Monday for giving a death row inmate room to challenge his conviction based on a biased juror. Joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch in his rebuke, Thomas claims the Sixth Circuit has flouted high court precedent by continually granting relief to death row prisoners in violation of the law.

Few communities in Southern California have been more successful at saying "no" to large new developments over the last decade than Redondo Beach. The South Bay coastal city of 70,000 blocked a $400-million remake of its waterfront, reduced the size of proposed apartment buildings by dozens of units and even prohibited the construction of mixed-use residential and commercial projects in the city for a year.

New details emerged Thursday about the man accused of driving his SUV into a group of recruits, mostly from the LA County Sheriff's Department, including that it may have been an intentional act. Sheriff's investigators have now searched his home, and he’s been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. Prosecutors are reviewing the evidence for potential criminal charges against him.

Late on a Sunday night, Ellsworth Fortman, an assistant chief for the Los Angeles Fire Department, walked out of Marci’s Sports Bar and Grill in Santa Clarita and climbed into his Dodge Ram pickup truck for the drive home. Fortman had traveled less than a mile when he slammed into a parked Toyota Corolla, propelling it 160 feet into a parked Mercedes-Benz.

A defiant Sheriff Alex Villaneuva conceded defeat Tuesday in his re-election bid, but in doing so, he again lashed out at his critics for pushing what he called “false narratives” about his leadership of the department. Villanueva has been consistently trailing former Long Beach police Chief Robert Luna as results from last week’s election continued to be tallied.

Los Angeles residents jailed because they can’t afford to pay bail have filed a class-action lawsuit challenging the system that often keeps low-income people behind bars before they’ve been charged. The complaint was filed on Monday on behalf of six people in LA jails who were recently arrested but have not yet seen a judge, been arraigned or assigned a public defender.

A 25-year-old mother who vanished from her apartment in Simi Valley under mysterious circumstances was found dead Sunday and police said her ex-husband has been arrested in connection with her murder. Rachel Castillo had two young children and was last heard-from Thursday afternoon. Her sister called police when she discovered a large amount of blood in the apartment they share.

A Los Angeles Police Department gang and narcotics detective was arrested more than a year after allegedly trying to buy a silencer online, officials announced Tuesday. Luke Walden was arrested on Tuesday after an investigation. He allegedly tried to buy the silencer in April 2021, which is a felony, authorities explained. “Reverence for the law is an unbending expectation of each member of this department,” LAPD Chief Michel Moore said in a statement.

Dozens of people have been arrested after Los Angeles police cracked the case of alleged railroad cargo thefts. The investigation started more than a year ago when the Union Pacific Railroad Company reported that more than 90 containers had been broken into every day, KTLA reported. After conducting surveillance and executing 49 search warrants, officials were able to recover $18 million worth of merchandise allegedly taken from railroad cargo containers.

In October LAPD officers engaged a suspect in a foot pursuit. The fleeing man had reportedly crashed a stolen pickup truck. The encounter ended in a gun battle. The suspect died at the scene while the officers did not sustain injury. The incident began Oct. 11, 2022 at approximately 3:30 a.m. when police attempted an investigative stop of the suspect who was driving a blue GMC pickup truck. He fled and subsequently crashed into a tree on the traffic medium on East E Street before fleeing on foot.

During an earnings call this week, Target CFO Michael Fiddelke indicated the company has lost more than $400 million in revenue compared to last year. A Target spokesperson reportedly told Yahoo Finance that the “shrinkage” referred to by Fiddelke could be attributed to “organized retail crime.” During the earnings call, Fiddelke argued there were “a handful of things that can drive shrink in our business and theft is certainly a key driver.”

A homeless man grabbed a large butcher knife off the shelf at a downtown L.A. Target store and stabbed two people - including a young boy - before he was fatally shot by a security guard, police say. The terrifying attack unfolded around 6:20 p.m. Tuesday at a popular shopping complex near Figueroa and 7th streets. Police say a homeless man entered the Target store and grabbed a butcher knife with a 9-inch blade off a shelf.

Last spring, Los Angeles police officials decided to deal with a problem. Their officers, like cops across the U.S., had been trained for decades in the art of pretextual stops: Pull over a driver for a minor infraction such as broken taillight, use something vaguely suspicious - a shaking hand, a whiff of pot - to justify a search, hope to find drugs or weapons. The tactic is legal and has led to plenty of seizures.

Los Angeles police arrested a 28-year-old accused of providing drugs that led to the overdose of several people inside of a Granada Hills apartment building. According to the Los Angeles Police Department, officers responded to the 16900 block of Blackhawk Street and found five people: three women and two men, all between the ages of 20 and 40 years old, suffering from a drug overdose. "We had a total of five patients," LAFD Chief Jaime Moore said.

A new report from the California Legislative Analyst Office on Wednesday warned the state faces a $25 billion budget shortfall next year and said with the threat of a recession, revenue estimates represent the weakest performance California has experienced since the Great Recession. "It's not insignificant, but it is manageable," California Legislative Analyst, Gabe Petek said Wednesday.

A Northern California sheriff's office plans to suspend daytime patrols starting this week, citing "a catastrophic staffing shortage" throughout the agency. The Tehama County Sheriff's Office announced the suspension - which will start Sunday - in a news release stating that over the last several years there have been "difficulties with recruitment and retention of employees, which has been directly linked to pay disparities."

Aurora Police will soon have a new interim chief. The city announced Art Acevedo will take over as interim chief in early December. Acevedo has previously served as police chief in Austin, Texas, Houston and most recently Miami. He currently operates a law enforcement consulting company. The city of Aurora said Monday that Acevedo was consulting with the police department on its consent decree, and the city asked if he would apply for the interim position.

Philadelphia’s elected Democratic prosecutor faces a state Senate trial and possible removal from office after the Republican-led state House voted Wednesday to impeach him over progressive policies he has enacted amid rising crime in the city. The move toward removing District Attorney Larry Krasner began months ago and picked up momentum in the weeks before the midterm elections, with Republicans introducing the impeachment resolution late last month.

Oakland voters say noncitizen parents or guardians of school-age children should be allowed to vote in school board elections. The issue now heads to the City Council - and after that, to the courts, which already are wrestling with a similar law in San Francisco. Measure S, approved by 62% of the voters last Tuesday, would not immediately allow voting by non-U.S. citizens but would authorize such action by the City Council, which voted in June to place the measure on the ballot.

The state legalized adult-use marijuana more than a year ago but is yet to issue a single dispensary license. The result has been a weed free-for-all: Cannabis seems to be for sale everywhere - head shops, bodegas, even from folding tables on street corners. Some dealers brazenly sell in public, and many boast their products were grown in California. The outcome is not unlike what happened when California legalized marijuana.

He just can’t seem to keep his hands to himself. A prolific alleged pickpocket once featured in the NYPD’s “Nifty 50” deck of cards of the biggest subway-crime recidivists was busted again this week in two more heists, police sources said Wednesday. Darin Mickens, 55, who has more than 60 busts on his rap sheet, was arrested Tuesday on a fare-beating rap at the Chambers Street J train station - and then hit with grand larceny charges in the new cases out of Brooklyn.

Consumers love a good deal and will flock to the internet for Black Friday bargains. However, online shopping may be risky, dangerous, and little, if any, actual value. A Red Points survey found that 68% of consumers were worried about buying fake or low-quality goods online. The Counterfeit Report, an award-winning consumer advocate and industry watchdog, has removed listings for over 430 million counterfeit items offered on e-commerce websites, including eBay, Amazon, Walmart, Wish, Newegg, and Alibaba.

Thousands of smartphone applications in Apple and Google's online stores contain computer code developed by a technology company, Pushwoosh, that presents itself as based in the United States, but is actually Russian, Reuters has found. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the United States' main agency for fighting major health threats, said it had been deceived into believing Pushwoosh was based in the U.S. capital.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s largest appellate court and one of its most liberal, is a perennial target of Republicans, who have called for breaking it up while counting on the Supreme Court to overturn its rulings. A new book by two veteran journalists says Donald Trump, while president, asked an aide to try to eliminate the San Francisco-based court.

Dave Chappelle was on TV again. This time, the divisive comic spent the bulk of an extended monologue on Saturday Night Live giving his thoughts on Kanye “Ye” West’s rants about the Jewish community. On Sunday, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt criticized the NBC program, accusing the late night staple of “popularizing antisemitism.”

“Shadow Diplomats” is a first-of-its-kind investigation of a largely unregulated and under-the-radar system of international diplomacy that allows volunteer diplomats working from their home countries to represent the interests of other nations. Media outlets and governments around the world have for years described isolated incidents of criminal behavior and other misconduct among so-called honorary consuls.

Ventura County Superior Court Judge Patricia M. Murphy denied a motion to reduce the 18-year-old’s felony charges to a misdemeanor this week, despite pleas from the defense. The accused faced two felony charges, one being second degree burglary of a vehicle and the other being unauthorized use of personal identifying information of another. Present beside the accused for the sentencing hearing was Deputy District Attorney Jillian Ewan.

Former Los Angeles Dodgers player Yasiel Puig will plead guilty to lying to federal investigators who were probing an illegal sports gambling operation, prosecutors in Southern California said Monday. Puig, 31, will plead guilty to one count of making false statements, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California said in a statement. That charge carries up to five years in prison, but sentencing guidelines cited in plea agreement documents suggest a sentence of far less than that.

A US Navy nuclear engineer and his wife have each been sentenced to about two decades behind bars for conspiring to sell classified information related to the design of nuclear-powered warships to a foreign country in exchange for thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency. The Justice Department announced Wednesday that Jonathan Toebbe, 44, of Annapolis, Maryland, was sentenced to more than 19 years.

Over a dozen people in California were convicted and sentenced in connection to a series of Department of Motor Vehicle corruption cases throughout the state, including in the Los Angeles area, according to the Department of Justice. The DOJ said in a news release that the 20 defendants included DMV employees, owners of trucking schools, the affiliates who bribed them and various others who conspired to bribe employees, KTLA sister station KTXL reports.

Politics now trump public safety and criminal law in California, and even “prevent people from going to prison.” With California suffering deadly and devastating wildfires every year, it is astonishing that Parole Commissioners with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have approved letting a serial arsonist out of prison early, claiming the inmate no longer poses a risk of violence or criminal activity.

A San Francisco Superior Court Judge last week tentatively approved a $155 million settlement for more than 10,000 current and retired California prison supervisors who sought compensation for tasks they performed before and after their shifts. The decision likely ends a nearly 15-year litigation battle between the California Correctional Peace Officers Association and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

A California prison inmate serving a life sentence has died after he was attacked with hand-made weapons by two other prisoners, state corrections officials said Tuesday. William Quintero, 47, was attacked Monday in a recreation yard at Centinela State Prison and was airlifted to a hospital where he died about nine hours later, authorities said. Two weapons were recovered. The prison is located in Imperial County, north of the Mexican border.

The CalPERS Board of Administration approved new restrictions Tuesday on how long retired public employees may work without giving up pension payments. The board set an initial two-year limit, plus extensions, on retired annuitant appointments. The appointments allow retirees to earn paychecks for up to 960 hours of work per year from employers who participate in CalPERS. The new regulation addresses an ambiguity in California retirement law, which says retirees may return to work for a “limited duration” in emergencies and when employers need retirees’ specialized skills.

In light of continuing developments in relation to FTX, we wanted to provide additional context and transparency around our investment. In October 2021, Ontario Teachers’ invested US$75 million in FTX International and its US entity. In January 2022, we made a follow-on investment of US$20 million in FTX.US. These investments were made through our Teachers’ Venture Growth (TVG) platform, alongside a number of global investors, to gain small-scale exposure to an emerging area in the financial technology sector.

For more ADDA news and information, visit www.laadda.com.