A county cannot be held liable for the actions of an armed intruder who took hostages at a facility and, after a sheriff’s deputy fired several shots through the door of the room in which they were holed up, fatally shot the victims, a response allegedly sparked by the deputy initiating gunplay, Div. Three of the First District Court of Appeal has held.

California’s drought regulators have lost a major lawsuit that could undermine their legal authority to stop farms and cities from pulling water from rivers and streams. With California in its third punishing year of a historic drought, an appeals court ruled Monday that the State Water Resources Control Board lacks the power to interfere with so-called “senior” water rights holders and curtail their diversions of water from rivers.

The owners of a Hollywood bar/night club were properly granted summary judgment in an action against it by two men who were injured by acquaintances when a fight broke out, the Court of Appeal for this district declared yesterday, rejecting the plaintiffs’ theory that harm to them would have been averted if more security guards had been employed. Justice John L. Segal of Div. Seven authored the opinion which was not certified for publication.

A federal judge ruled on Friday that a new Arizona law restricting how the public and journalists can film police officers violated the First Amendment, agreeing with the American Civil Liberties Union and multiple media organizations that it did. U.S. District Judge John J. Tuchi issued a preliminary injunction that prevents the law from going into effect on September 24.

A California appellate court has found that ADA claims over public accommodation can’t proceed against an online-only business without a physical retail location, and that the plaintiff didn’t show the intentional discrimination required by California’s Unruh Act. The unanimous panel decision in Martinez v. Cot’n Wash, Inc. was issued earlier this month in California’s Second Appellate District.

A federal appellate court is giving a man who was subjected to an anal cavity search by a Memphis police officer without cause and against department regulations a chance to prove the agency slow-walked an investigation into the incident to avoid a lawsuit. A divided panel of the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals this week reinstated Deaundra Billingsley’s civil-rights lawsuit against the Memphis Police Department over the actions of Memphis Officer Christopher Tracy in a July 2019 encounter.

A federal judge has found that the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office provided incomplete and misleading information as it sought to overturn the death sentence of a man who killed an East Mount Airy couple inside their home in 1984, then shut off the heat and left their infant daughter inside to die. In a blunt opinion issued Monday, U.S. District Judge Mitchell Goldberg said top prosecutor Larry Krasner’s administration had failed to conduct a careful review of Robert Wharton’s case before asking Goldberg to vacate the death penalty and order Wharton to serve a life sentence instead.

After further consideration, the Supreme Court denied an emergency application from Yeshiva University on Wednesday that attempted to block the court-ordered recognition of an LGBTQ club. Last week the justices temporarily granted a stay to the Orthodox Jewish university in New York, allowing the school to ignore a lower court order that demanded the school immediately recognize YU Pride Alliance as an official club.

Before he became one the nation’s most radical prosecutors, Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón served as the "right arm" to LAPD chief William Bratton in the heyday of broken-windows policing. From 1987 to 2006, Gascón was as dedicated to a tough-on-crime approach as he was to Bratton, who called his assistant chief "my Patton." His aggressive shift to the left, first as district attorney of San Francisco and now as Los Angeles's top prosecutor, is a far cry from his earlier positions.

Federal prosecutors today filed criminal charges against nine defendants - seven of them dockworkers at the Port of Long Beach - who allowed more than $2.1 million in fraudulent claims to be submitted to their labor union’s health insurance plan for sexual services or for physical therapy that never was provided. The conspiracy’s ringleader, Sara Victoria, 46, of San Pedro, is charged in an information filed today with one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft.

A lawsuit filed by CA Attorney General Rob Bonta, targets Amazon's dealings with third-party merchants and suppliers. Amazon penalizes sellers and suppliers that offer lower prices at other internet sites, including Walmart and Target. Amazon seller sanctions included disqualifying them from winning the "Buy Box" (the box containing the "Add to Cart" button on the listing page the shopper clicks to add the product to their cart), demoting seller listings to the bottom of Amazon's organic search results, and blocking sellers from creating new listings in their third-party seller accounts altogether.

With only two days left on the statute of limitations, District Attorney George Gascón has filed battery and false imprisonment charges against a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department lieutenant - a year after the incident happened. It all began on Sept. 17, 2021, at the Matsuhisa Restaurant in Beverly Hills. According to a police report obtained by CBSLA, the LASD's newly promoted narcotics Lieutenant Howard Fuchs got into a "heated dispute" with a woman at the famed restaurant. 

The former dean of the USC School of Social Work has agreed to plead guilty to a federal bribery charge in a political corruption case involving suspended Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, prosecutors announced Thursday. Marilyn Louise Flynn, 83, is expected to plead guilty in the coming weeks to the bribery charge and pay a fine of at least $100,000, in exchange for prosecutors recommending that she serve an anticipated 10-year prison term through home confinement, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

A nurse accused of killing five in a horrific Los Angeles County collision "floored the gas pedal" to 130 mph just before the fiery August crash, prosecutors alleged in court filing Friday. Data from the Mercedes-Benz E-Class Coupe that Nicole Linton was driving show she accelerated in the 5 seconds before the multi-vehicle Aug. 4 crash, going from 122 mph to 130 mph, according to a motion filed by the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office and obtained by NBC Los Angeles.

More than a year and a half since the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department confirmed that it had launched an investigation into Marilyn Manson over allegations of sexual abuse, the L.A. District Attorney says it hasn’t received a filing yet. In an unusual move, George Gascón, the district attorney for L.A. County, posted an Instagram reel addressing the investigation into the musician, whose real name is Brian Warner.

A midnight shooting at a home in a suburb east of San Francisco left a married couple dead. Now an Alameda County sheriff’s deputy has been charged in their murders. Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley charged Devin Williams Jr., 24, with two counts of murder Friday morning. The investigation comes after Dublin Police Services got a 911 call Wednesday about a home intruder, and that gunshots were fired.

Justice Department criminal prosecutors are now examining nearly every aspect of former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election - including the fraudulent electors plot, efforts to push baseless election fraud claims and how money flowed to support these various efforts - according to sources and copies of new subpoenas obtained by CNN.

If Labor Day is the mark for when political campaigns heat up, then it didn’t take long for the Los Angeles City Controller’s race to ignite. On Tuesday, the already controversial contest to be the city’s next fiscal watchdog burst into a raging bonfire. The spark that ignited this political blaze was an open letter from former City Controller Laura Chick that targeted Kenneth Mejia, the left-leaning candidate who finished first in the Controller race during the June primary.

For the first time, the district attorney of Tulare County doubles as the president of California District Attorneys Association (CDAA), an organization representing district and city attorneys statewide. Tulare County District Attorney Tim Ward was sworn in as the 2022-23 president of CDAA on Sept. 8 at the association’s annual summer conference in southern California. This ceremony took place before a crowd of almost 600 California prosecutors and district attorney investigators.

Violence is on the rise in California, with significant increases observed during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the latest annual report from the California Study on Violence Experiences across the Lifespan (CalVEX). Led by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine, CalVEX is the nation’s only multi-year statewide assessment of violent experiences.

A sexual assault victim whose DNA was used to identify her as a burglary suspect sued the San Francisco Police Department on Monday, with her lawyer saying the genetic sample she provided to authorities had been “weaponized against her.” The woman, identified as Jane Doe in a suit filed in federal court in California’s Northern District, was “re-victimized” by what the suit described as an “unconstitutional” practice used by the police department’s crime lab.

As billionaires such as George Soros have garnered attention for bankrolling criminal justice reform efforts, one deep-pocketed donor has remained relatively obscure despite dropping massive sums into the arena. Texas billionaire John Arnold, a former Enron executive and hedge fund manager, has quietly poured more than $45 million into New York groups working on criminal justice issues in recent years, a Fox News Digital review of grants found.

The high-profile killings rattling Memphis this week have added fuel to calls by some politicians for stricter sentencing laws throughout the U.S., sparking alarm among criminal justice reform advocates who say that approach is outdated and ineffective. The political division has only deepened as many maintain that the deaths - of a jogger last week and a spate of shooting victims Wednesday - would have been avoided had the latest version of Tennessee's so-called “truth in sentencing” statute been in effect.

Twenty days before George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, a 37-year-old Black woman had a violent encounter with two police officers in her driveway on the other side of the country. In a civil suit filed in federal court last year, Teliah C. Perkins of Slidell, Louisiana, accused the officers, both white, of using excessive force during an arrest, causing her long-term injuries and psychological trauma to both her and her son.

Investigators with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department served a search warrant Wednesday morning at the Santa Monica home of Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, who has been a vocal critic of Sheriff Alex Villanueva and many of his policies. A description of what was being sought was not immediately available. LASD detectives also were seeking records or items from several other locations, including Kuehl’s office in downtown LA and offices at the MTA, the county’s transit agency, the officials confirmed.

Sheriff’s deputies raided the home of LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl on Wednesday morning. The department says the raid is tied to an investigation about county contracts awarded to Peace Over Violence, a nonprofit run by Patti Giggans, who is friends with Kuehl. Giggans is also a member of the Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission, which oversees the department and has clashed repeatedly with Sheriff Alex Villanueva over his refusal to comply with subpoenas.

It's a gas pump perk that many of us wish we had. A FOX 11 investigation found LA County employees racked up personal miles in their home-assigned cars. FOX 11 put in a Public Records Act request for county-home-assigned vehicles for the years 2020 and 2021. Those were both pandemic years, and there were months when the county was under a stay-at-home order. But even so, FOX 11's investigation found instances where the county seemed to ignore its own policy.

A retired Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department chief Monday sued the county and Sheriff Alex Villanueva, the latest of several department members to claim Villanueva directed a coverup of a video of a deputy with his knee on the head of a man in custody for three minutes. Plaintiff LaJuana Haselrig was often seen standing next to Villanueva during news conferences, but her Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit alleges whistleblower retaliation, racial discrimination, failure to take all steps to prevent discrimination, intentional infliction of emotional distress, defamation and violations of the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights.

There are few things Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva has boasted about more during his first term in office than his success in dramatically increasing the number of people who are permitted to carry guns in public. But Villanueva’s decision to supercharge the issuing of weapons permits has brought problems. A Times investigation found that among the thousands of people who have received permits under Villanueva are dozens of donors to his election campaigns and others with special links to the sheriff.

On June 22, 2021, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to implement the closure of the Men’s Central Jail. Supervisor Kathyrn Barger cast the single dissenting vote. She warned that the county doesn’t have enough treatment resources to adequately help inmates battling addiction or mental illness. Kate Cagle, filling in for “Inside the Issues” host Alex Cohen, spoke with LA County Supervisor Holly Mitchell about where things stand now.

Imagine a jail where inmates rule over guards who fight for survival daily among killers, carjackers, and vicious gang members. That's life every day inside Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall. "Our juvenile halls are on the verge of collapse. I really believe someone is going to get killed at some point," one official told the Washington Examiner. A series of state and local laws designed to clear California lockups have reached down to juvenile facilities where inmates learn now that they can get away with anything short of murder, officials said.

As part of its “Save Our SROs” advocacy campaign, Housing Is A Human Right has found more than 4,600 housing units in the Downtown Los Angeles area that are sitting vacant or are waiting to be built or have been converted from low-income housing to other uses. Ninety-one units at two single-room occupancy hotels have been demolished. With nearly 1,500 homeless residents dying on the streets in the L.A. area between 2020 and 2021, the L.A. City Council and Mayor Eric Garcetti must immediately utilize any vacant buildings that can provide low-income and homeless housing.

Officials with the Recall L.A. County District Attorney George Gascón campaign announced this week they had filed a countersuit against a contractor they say failed to fulfill its contract and failed to pay for the gathered signatures to be validated. The countersuit is in response to a lawsuit filed in July against the campaign by the contractor, Let the Voters Decide LLC, which says the campaign made numerous errors in its signature gathering strategy earlier this year and that the leadership team for the failed recall effort owes hundreds of thousands of dollars for unpaid labor and field bonuses.

It has been more than two months since the multimillion-dollar heist of jewelry from a Brink's big rig at a Grapevine truck stop, yet key facts about the high-profile crime remain in dispute. There's debate about the value of the pilfered goods, for example, with estimates ranging from less than $10 million to more than $100 million. And questions are now swirling around the timeline laid out in a Brink's legal filing and Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department documents, which suggest an almost impossibly swift journey for the tractor-trailer.

Security researchers say last week’s announcement that the Los Angeles Unified School District had been the target of a recent ransomware attack - was at least the second such incident in the last two years. In February, 2021 the cyber intelligence firm Hold Security notified LAUSD that intruders, likely associated with the so-called TrickBot ransomware gang, had obtained login credentials and were inside the school district’s networks.

When the cannabis dispensary Hierba opened on Cesar Chavez Avenue in October, customers had “sticker shock,” Guillermo Menjivar, the general manager, recalled. Even with a 30% opening week discount, shoppers still couldn’t understand why, for instance, a gram of First Class Funk cost $15. They could be forgiven: Until Hierba - the first legal dispensary in the city’s Boyle Heights neighborhood - opened its doors, the only options in the area were unlicensed storefronts that charge far less for cannabis products because they don’t abide by the raft of taxes and regulatory obligations that state and local officials impose on legitimate operations.

By 2013, illegal cannabis grows were such a destructive environmental force in California that state water regulators decided it time to go beyond their complaint-driven, piecemeal approach at enforcement. That required knowing how much cannabis there was statewide, and where. Nearly a decade later, the answer still eludes California. So the Los Angeles Times embarked on its own effort to map illegally grown cannabis, one that depended on a view from space.

In the San Gabriel Valley, a city councilman demanded bribes from businesses seeking cannabis licenses, according to a source cooperating with the FBI. In another small L.A. County city, a cannabis industry group offered $15,000 to council candidates who would pledge to support changes to city regulations that weed businesses wanted - an exchange one legal expert said "flirted at the edges" of the law.

Two people are in custody in connection with a break-in at Rep. Karen Bass' home, Los Angeles police confirmed Wednesday evening. Two firearms were stolen Friday from the Baldwin Vista area home of the L.A. mayoral candidate, authorities said. It's unclear if police recovered the guns. In the aftermath of the break-in, Bass said no cash or other valuables were stolen from the home. "Last night, I came home and discovered that my house had been broken into and burglarized," Bass said in a statement issued Saturday.

A Southern California task force that aims to protect children from internet predators recently made more than 140 arrests during a sting operation timed with the return of kids to school, officials said Wednesday. The task force covers five Southern California counties, with the Los Angeles Police Department taking the lead role. They targeted adults, many of them on parole or probation, who may have been attempting to prey on children for sexual abuse and exploitation through the internet.

Rapper PnB Rock was fatally shot during a robbery in Los Angeles Monday, Los Angeles Police Department Chief Michel Moore said Tuesday. Police responded to a possible robbery at Roscoe's House of Chicken 'N Waffles on West Manchester Avenue at 1:15 p.m., where they found a victim with multiple gunshot wounds, LAPD Cpt. Kelly Muniz said during a news conference Monday evening. Moore confirmed the victim was identified as Rakim Allen, also known as PnB Rock, during a Tuesday meeting with the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners.

A 19-year-old was arrested Thursday on suspicion of using a fake birth certificate to enroll at a California high school and play on the football team, according to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. Elijah Nathaniel Frisco is to believed to have used the name Eihly Cheung to enroll at Montclair (Calif.) High School. Chaffey Joint Union High School District Superintendent Mathew Holton said he has already graduated high school. The Tribune wrote that there were reports on social media began after Montclair’s win against Pomona (Calif.) High School on Sept. 2 that a player was ineligible.

Los Angeles authorities have arrested a 31-year-old Oakland resident who is accused of multiple robberies across California and was wanted for a parole violation. LAPD investigators said Eric Watt was identified as a suspect through DNA evidence, surveillance video and evidence that connected him to other crimes, including two robberies that that occurred along Melrose Avenue - one of which led to a shooting involving a police officer.

Sean Harrington has been surfing in Topanga for 40 years, but last week, he experienced something that's never happened to him before - and it didn't happen out in the water. "Parking my car in my usual spot and I hid my key in my usual spot. I've been doing it for years," he said. "My buddy put his key in the back of my car as well. We got back from surfing and I noticed my key was not there. My car was locked. I was able to borrow a phone and call my wife to bring a spare key not knowing I had been robbed."

San Francisco has long seen skirmishes among factions of its overwhelmingly Democratic electorate, but fissures are widening, positions are hardening and the public sees little hope of fixing the chronic problems that have plagued the city for decades, according to one of the most comprehensive surveys of city residents ever done. Even as San Francisco gradually recovers from the crushing blow of the COVID-19 pandemic, a majority of respondents expressed deep worry, frustration and continued pessimism about civic life in the city, The Chronicle’s SFNext poll of 1,653 residents found.

Gavin Newsom wants voters to reject a new tax on rich people that would pay for more electric vehicles in the nation's most populous state, warning in a new statewide TV ad that a measure on the ballot this November won't help the environment but is instead “one company's cynical scheme to grab a huge taxpayer subsidy.” Proposition 30 would raise taxes on people who make more than $2 million per year.

Counties across the U.S. are reducing the number of mentally ill inmates through data collection, partnerships with community health care providers and directing certain emergency calls to mental health experts, according to a panel convened by the Council of State Governments Justice Center. The online event Thursday reviewed the past seven years of the Stepping Up initiative, a national partnership among 550 counties to reduce over-incarceration of people with mental illnesses.

The ads on the Telegram messaging service’s White Shark Channel this summer had the matter-of-fact tone and clipped phrasing you might find on a Craigslist posting. But this Chinese-language forum, which had some 5,700 users, wasn’t selling used Pelotons or cleaning services. It was selling human beings - in particular, human beings in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, and other cities in southeast Asia. “Selling a Chinese man in Sihanoukville just smuggled from China. 22 years old with ID card, typing very slow,” one ad read, listing $10,000 as the price.

Federal prosecutors asked a judge to sentence California “super mom” Sherri Papini to eight months in prison, saying she continues to lie about faking her kidnapping six years ago, according to court records. Prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo filed this week that the 40-year-old woman continues to tell people that she actually was kidnapped in 2016 - even after pleading guilty to fraud and lying counts, according to the Sacramento Bee.

A repeat drunk driver who was driving with a blood alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit when he hit and killed a 6-year-old girl playing on the sidewalk was sentenced to 15 years to life for her murder, the Orange County District Attorney's Office announced Friday. Maximino Delgado Lagunas, 56, of Anaheim, was found guilty by a jury on June 22, 2022 of one felony count of second-degree murder.

A drunk driver who struck and killed a family of three in Long Beach while they were out on Halloween night in 2019 has been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Earlier this year, Carlo Adrian Navarro was found guilty of three counts each of murder and vehicular manslaughter. He received his sentence on Thursday and apologized to the family of the victims in court. "I wish I could bring them back but I can't," he said.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation may immediately resume shutting down a prison in Northern California, a judge ruled this week, dismissing a lawsuit by a rural town that sought to stop the closure. The state was supposed to close the California Correctional Center in Susanville by this June. But it has remained open because the town - where local officials say they face economic devastation if they lose more than 1,000 prison jobs - sued the state last year, and a Lassen County judge issued a preliminary injunction halting the closure while the case moved through the court.

John Haasjes was having a bad Christmas. It was 2020, and he thought his downstairs neighbor was spying on him. They exchanged words, and she called the cops. He was arrested on suspicion of making a verbal threat and booked into a Kern County jail. Haasjes has a developmental delay and schizoaffective disorder. The 58-year-old Tehachapi man has been in and out of mental health facilities most of his life. But he had never been convicted of a crime, and he said he didn't really understand the felony charge against him.

Despite a 2016 law requiring more transparency of court-martials, the U.S. Navy is refusing to release nearly all court documents in a high-profile case in which a sailor faces life in prison. Seaman Recruit Ryan Mays, 21, has been charged with aggravated arson and hazarding a vessel in the 2020 fire that destroyed the USS Bonhomme Richard. Mays has maintained his innocence. On July 12, 2020, a fire started on the amphibious assault ship as it was moored at Naval Base San Diego and raged for more than four days.

Cybersecurity failures at Twitter are endangering users' data and putting national security at risk, the company’s former security chief, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, told lawmakers at a hearing on Tuesday. Zatko appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify about allegations he made against the social media giant earlier this year. In reports to Congress and federal regulators, Zatko said Twitter was being dishonest about its cyber defenses and efforts to control fake accounts.

Naasón Joaquín García, the leader of La Luz del Mundo, is facing a new lawsuit filed by five women who allege he sexually abused them while other church members groomed them and used the religion as ammunition against them. The five women are identified as Jane Does in the civil lawsuit that was filed Thursday (Sept. 8) in Los Angeles Superior Court. The women, who range in age from 20 to 28, were also the Jane Does included in the criminal charges filed against García by the California Attorney General’s office, attorneys said.

A neighbourhood association in an upmarket New York City block hired armed security guards to patrol the streets and confront drug dealers and violent criminals. The West 4th Mac/6th Block Association in Greenwich Village spent $18,000 on guards from Black Tie Protection Services to deter crack smoking and public defecation over the month of August, resident Brian Maloney told the New York Post.

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