OPINION - - by Susan Estrich - The Washington Examiner - December 10, 2010

For weeks now, speculation has been rampant about who killed well-liked publicist to the stars Ronni Chasen and why.

A blonde in a black Mercedes found shot multiple times in her car on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills on her way home from a movie premiere.

A 60-something veteran who was in her fourth decade of walking clients down the red carpet, as she had been doing earlier that night.

Who?

A spurned lover? An angry client? No.

A crime wave of black men in Beverly Hills (a theory that had to be officially denied because it got so much attention)? No.

A professional hit by a trained sniper? No, or at least not necessarily.

Police have concluded that in all likelihood it was a crazy man, a longtime petty criminal desperate for money, a botched robbery by a guy on a bicycle -- his only means of transportation.

At issue is the purchase of service credits at reduced rates - by Craig Gustafson - Sign On San Diego - December 9, 2010

About 2,200 current and retired San Diego city workers find themselves in a financial bind because of a seven-year-old decision they made to pad their pensions through a special program that allowed them to buy additional years of service that they never actually worked.

Now each of those workers — including roughly 500 who have already retired and live on fixed incomes — may be forced to accept significantly reduced pensions or pay a lump sum of as much as $50,000 to keep their current pension.

An appeals court ruled in June that pension officials illegally allowed those workers to buy extra years in 2003 at a rate far below what they knew the program cost. The pension board delayed implementation of a new higher rate for nearly three months and workers proceeded to spend $144 million on extra years valued at $227 million.

That decision, which the court ruled the board had no authority to make, coupled with subsequent overpayments to pensioners, left taxpayers on the hook for an unfunded liability of $100 million, a portion of the city's overall $2.1 billion pension deficit. The court ordered the pension system to fix the error and prohibited it from charging the city for the mistake.

EDITORIAL - A legislative stalemate on the issue has contributed to California prisoners' illegal possession of at least 8,500 cellphones this year. - Los Angeles Times - December 7, 2010

How in the world did Charles Manson get hold of a cellphone? Apparently the same way thousands of other inmates have. Cellphones, it turns out, are ubiquitous in California's correctional facilities. Guards have confiscated 8,575 of them this year, according to the California Department of Corrections, up from 1,400 in 2007. Manson is perhaps the best-known inmate to flout the rules, but the easy access to the outside world, unmonitored by officials, is a serious problem that extends well beyond one infamous criminal. Hard-core gang leaders have been found directing drug deals, intimidating witnesses and planning escapes from their jail cells. Stiffer penalties are clearly in order for what is a genuine threat to public safety, not an infraction.

For one brief moment last summer, Democrats and Republicans united and made smuggling phones to inmates a misdemeanor punishable by fines of $5,000 to $15,000. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, however, vetoed the bill on the grounds that it did not go far enough. The practice should be a felony, he insisted, not a violation of less import than sneaking a prisoner a beer.

Now the gridlock that so infuriates voters has returned. Democrats are resisting measures that would increase the prison population — such as creating new categories of felonies — on the grounds that federal judges have ordered the state to reduce the population by more than 40,000 inmates. The number of prisoners per facility can't be reduced, however, because Republicans balk at building more prisons. So it's a stalemate on the cellphone issue for the moment.

EDITORIAL - Sara Kruzan's case shows why juveniles should not be sentenced to life without parole. - Los Angeles Times - December 8, 2010

Sara Kruzan was 16 when she lured her former pimp into a motel room, shot and killed him and took his money. The terrible crime was committed in Riverside County by a girl who had been sexually molested and physically abused since her earliest days, raised by an addicted mother, gang-raped at 13 and at the same age sent into the streets to make a living as a prostitute by the man she would eventually kill.

But teenagers change. Today, at 32, Kruzan is a model prisoner in the honor dorm at Valley State Prison for Women in Chowchilla. In January, she will receive her associate's degree from the nearby community college. She has volunteered for dozens of rehabilitation programs and won awards for her participation and attitude.

She also serves as an important reminder of why sentencing juvenile offenders to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is backward and counterproductive. Science and society have learned more in recent years about the still-immature and rapidly developing brains of adolescents.

Kruzan murdered in 1994. Since then, society also has learned more about human trafficking and the effects of long-term abuse and psychological imprisonment. If she were being sentenced today, it's far less likely that she would receive such a draconian prison term. Even at the time, an evaluation by the California Youth Authority noted her unusual tractability, her remorse and her willingness and desire for an education. The CYA felt that she should have been prosecuted as a juvenile rather than as an adult, which would have put her into a rehabilitation program from which she could have been freed by age 25 — seven years ago.

EDITORIAL - The Crime of Punishment - New York Times - December 6, 2010

In 2005, when a federal court took a snapshot of California's prisons, one inmate was dying each week because the state failed to provide adequate health care. Adequate does not mean state-of-the-art, or even tolerable. It means care meeting “the minimal civilized measure of life's necessities,” in the Supreme Court's words, so inmates do not die from rampant staph infections or commit suicide at nearly twice the national average.

These and other horrors have been documented in California's prisons for two decades, and last week they were before the Supreme Court in Schwarzenegger v. Plata. It is the most important case in years about prison conditions. The justices should uphold the lower court's remedy for addressing the horrors.

Four years ago, when the number of inmates in California reached more than 160,000, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a “state of emergency.” The state's prisons, he said, are places “of extreme peril.”

Last year, under a federal law focusing on prison conditions, the lower court found that overcrowding was the “primary cause” of gruesome inadequacies in medical and mental health care. The court concluded that the only relief under the law “capable of remedying these constitutional deficiencies” is a “prison release order.”

OPINION - Under consultant Don Novey's direction, the Los Angeles Police Protective League has become far more assertive in state and local politics — with decidedly mixed results. - by Tim Rutten - Los Angeles Times - December 4, 2010

Historically, the political influence of the Los Angeles Police Protective League — the union representing the city's rank-and-file officers — has been a force in local affairs more often assumed in conversation than evident at the polls.

Under its current leaders, however, the league has become far more assertive — with decidedly mixed, often confused, results, many of them flowing from the hiring of a high-priced political consultant who has unsuccessfully attempted to make the union a force in statewide politics. The consultant is Don Novey, a storied figure in California politics who, as president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., turned the prison guards union into Sacramento's most potent lobby. Under Novey's leadership, the union cemented a lucrative alliance with Indian gaming interests, backed a series of winning gubernatorial candidates and negotiated lucrative increases in wages and benefits. It also threw its money behind a laundry list of tough-on-crime measures, including the three-strikes initiative (for which it provided the seed money) that enlarged the prison population, increasing the need for dues-paying prison guards.

Since stepping down as the guards' labor leader, Novey has gone into the political consulting business. This year, the Los Angeles officers' union will pay him $245,850 for his services, though he has little experience in local politics, where the league has its most vital interests. If you want to do the math, the league is paying its consultant $20,487 a month or, according to Novey himself, $2,048 an hour. (His former union is suing him, alleging that his outside work violates an agreement to provide consulting services to it. In a recent deposition, Novey told the union's attorney that he spends about 10 hours a week on his contract with the Protective League. You can see a videotaped excerpt on YouTube at "thedarksideofdon.")

Nice work if you can get it. But what did the league receive in return?

OPINION - Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt - by Julis Zhou - New York Times - November 30, 2010

Palo Alto, Calif. - There you are, peacefully reading an article or watching a video on the Internet. You finish, find it thought-provoking, and scroll down to the comments section to see what other people thought. And there, lurking among dozens of well-intentioned opinions, is a troll.

“How much longer is the media going to milk this beyond tired story?” “These guys are frauds.” “Your idiocy is disturbing.” “We're just trying to make the world a better place one brainwashed, ignorant idiot at a time.” These are the trollish comments, all from anonymous sources, that you could have found after reading a CNN article on the rescue of the Chilean miners.

Trolling, defined as the act of posting inflammatory, derogatory or provocative messages in public forums, is a problem as old as the Internet itself, although its roots go much farther back. Even in the fourth century B.C., Plato touched upon the subject of anonymity and morality in his parable of the ring of Gyges.

That mythical ring gave its owner the power of invisibility, and Plato observed that even a habitually just man who possessed such a ring would become a thief, knowing that he couldn't be caught. Morality, Plato argues, comes from full disclosure; without accountability for our actions we would all behave unjustly.

This certainly seems to be true for the anonymous trolls today. After Alexis Pilkington, a 17-year-old Long Island girl, committed suicide earlier this year, trolls descended on her online tribute page to post pictures of nooses, references to hangings and other hateful comments. A better-known example involves Nicole Catsouras, an 18-year-old who died in a car crash in California in 2006. Photographs of her badly disfigured body were posted on the Internet, where anonymous trolls set up fake tribute pages and in some cases e-mailed the photos to her parents with subject lines like “Hey, Daddy, I'm still alive.”

Psychological research has proven again and again that anonymity increases unethical behavior. Road rage bubbles up in the relative anonymity of one's car. And in the online world, which can offer total anonymity, the effect is even more pronounced. People — even ordinary, good people — often change their behavior in radical ways. There's even a term for it: the online disinhibition effect.

OPINION - Broken Beyond Repair - by Bob Herbert - New York Times - November 30, 2010

You can only hope that you will be as sharp and intellectually focused as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens when you're 90 years old.

In a provocative essay in The New York Review of Books, the former justice, who once supported the death penalty, offers some welcome insight into why he now opposes this ultimate criminal sanction and believes it to be unconstitutional.

As Adam Liptak noted in The Times on Sunday, Justice Stevens had once thought the death penalty could be administered rationally and fairly but has come to the conclusion “that personnel changes on the court, coupled with ‘regrettable judicial activism,' had created a system of capital punishment that is shot through with racism, skewed toward conviction, infected with politics and tinged with hysteria.”

The egregious problems identified by Justice Stevens (and other prominent Americans who have changed their minds in recent years about capital punishment) have always been the case. The awful evidence has always been right there for all to see, but mostly it has been ignored. The death penalty in the United States has never been anything but an abomination — a grotesque, uncivilized, overwhelmingly racist affront to the very idea of justice.

Police and prosecutorial misconduct have been rampant, with evidence of innocence deliberately withheld from defendants being prominent among the abuses. Juries have systematically been shaped — rigged — to heighten the chances of conviction, and thus imposition of the ultimate punishment.

Prosecutors and judges in death penalty cases have been overwhelmingly white and male and their behavior has often — not always, but shockingly often — been unfair, bigoted and cruel. The Death Penalty Information Center has reams of meticulously documented horror stories.

Innocents have undoubtedly been executed. Executions have been upheld in cases in which defense lawyers slept through crucial proceedings. Alcoholic, drug-addicted and incompetent lawyers — as well as lawyers who had been suspended or otherwise disciplined for misconduct — have been assigned to indigent defendants. And it has always been the case that the death penalty machinery is fired up far more often when the victims are white.

Test results came too late to save Claude Jones from Texas' death chamber - EDITORIAL - Los Angeles Times - November 27, 2010

In 1990, a Texas jury convicted Claude Jones, a career criminal, of murdering Allen Hilzendager.

Jones and another ex-convict, Danny Dixon, had stopped their truck at Hilzendager's liquor store in Point Blank, Texas. One of the men got out, entered the store and shot Hilzendager. Jones blamed Dixon and Dixon blamed Jones, but Jones was eventually convicted of pulling the trigger on the basis of one person's testimony (subsequently recanted) and on one piece of physical evidence: a strand of hair found inside the store and identified as Jones' by a crime lab expert.

That hair tipped the balance between life and death, because Texas law requires corroborating physical evidence in a capital case. Dixon is serving a life sentence; Jones was put to death in 2000.

This month, however, a DNA test determined that the hair did not belong to Jones after all; it belonged to the victim. With no physical evidence, there is now no legal basis for Jones' death sentence.

Some may argue that this miscarriage of justice was an aberration. But Texas' rapid pace of executions, coupled with its abysmal standards for effective representation for defendants, have long made the likelihood of wrongful executions exceedingly high. The state offers a prime example of why the death penalty, which requires 100% accuracy, is so difficult to mete out fairly.

Thanks - Giving .. celebrate, and serve
- from Bill Murray - 10 things to do

As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving, let's remember that the holiday's name is a compound word - Thanks and Giving. Please take these few moments to consider my ideas for enhancing the celebration of Thanksgiving and the entire holiday season ahead.

First, each of us has much to be thankful for - our lives, families, friendships, and work. While there is no perfection in life, let's admit that the glass is more than half full for most of us most of the time. Thanking those whom we love, admire, depend upon, and have work relationships with is an important, but too infrequent an activity. Find the chance to say “Thank You” more than a few times in the next few weeks.

As for "Giving", please consider sharing these ten thoughts with your family members, friends and colleagues:

See what I recommend inside ..

Under law, sex offenders would have nowhere they could legally reside in areas like Los Angeles - by Ruben Vives - Los Angeles Times - November 18, 2010

A California appeals court Thursday ordered a temporary stay on a ruling by a Los Angeles County judge that blocked a major provision of Jessica's Law, which restricts how close sex offenders can live to schools or parks.

Los Angeles County Judge Peter Espinoza's ruling on Nov. 1 said that the measure was unconstitutional and that it left sex offenders in some areas with the choice of being homeless or going to jail because the law restricts them from living in large swaths of cities such as Los Angeles.

Following the ruling, the state Department of Corrections ordered parole agents to immediately suspend the portion of the law prohibiting sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school, park or play area. Additionally, parole agents were told to use global-positioning systems to track the movement of offenders and to continue enforcing local ordinances governing offenders.

Proposition 83, approved by state voters in 2006 and informally known as Jessica's Law, imposes strict residency requirements on sex offenders, including rules forbidding them from residing near locations where children gather.

Before the law passed, those residency requirements were imposed only on offenders whose victims were children.

OPINION - Getting Touchy at the Airport - by Tobin Harshaw - November 20, 2010

Ah, Thanksgiving is almost upon us. We can look forward to a full belly, good wine, bad football and the worst travel day of the year. And in 2010, apparently, it will be the worst travel day in the history of mankind: “In the three weeks since the Transportation Security Administration began more aggressive pat-downs of passengers at airport security checkpoints, traveler complaints have poured in,” reports The Times's Susan Stellin. “Some offer graphic accounts of genital contact, others tell of agents gawking or making inappropriate comments, and many express a general sense of powerlessness and humiliation …It remains to be seen whether travelers approve of the pat-downs, especially as millions more people experience them for the first time during the holiday travel season.”

Travelers are furious with the T.S.A. But are we safer in the air?

But we're an innovative people — if we're worried about inappropriate contact, we can find a technological alternative that makes everybody happy, right? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

There are plenty of horror stories (and one full-fledged martyr); they tend to get repetitive, although some stand out for their excellent documentation and others actually achieve humor. Piilots' unions are not pleased, some politicians want the T.S.A. removed from the scene, Ron Paul thinks there oughta be a law and some airports are even trying to opt out. (At least somebody's having a laugh.)

Replacing the Dept of Children and Family Services director won't be enough to resolve the deep-seated problems at LA County's foster care agency - EDITORIAL - Los Angeles Times - November 21, 2010

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is easing out Trish Ploehn from her post as director of the Department of Children and Family Services. That's a welcome development. Ploehn has too often confused the morale of her employees with the well-being of the children her agency exists to protect. She has resisted public inquiry into shocking deaths, and she has withheld information from those entitled to examine it. For months, she has treated allegations of sloppy social work with tragic consequences as a public relations matter rather than a danger to children. She should go.

Ploehn does have her strengths. A 30-year veteran of the department, she is by all accounts a devoted county employee who has worked hard at her job and who cares deeply about DCFS' mission, even if she does not always execute it well. Her failings are not for want of trying. As such, her impending departure raises questions about the agency's direction going forward. Does it need a broad overhaul, as some suggest, or will a new general manager be enough?

The answer falls somewhere in between. To begin with, the department is not starved for resources. DCFS has an annual budget of $1.8 billion and a staff of more than 7,000. A decade ago, fewer than 3,000 social workers managed about 50,000 foster children. Since then, the number of social workers has increased to about 3,900, while the number of children in the system has declined to about 32,000. (Of those, 18,900 are in foster homes.) And yet, over that same period, even by DCFS' calculations, the number of children who have died as a result of abuse or neglect has remained steady, at about 20 a year, a discouraging trend that suggests an agency that, if not in crisis, is not making headway toward fulfilling its most fundamental responsibility.

You're paying - by Dennis Romero - LA Weeky - November 10, 2010

Raves attract crime. That much is clear. So do football games, rock concerts and even some family fairs. But at last summer's Electric Daisy Carnival at the Los Angeles Coliseum, about 60 drug-related arrests were made, and more than 200 medical emergencies were reported.

In response, an extra 200 officers have been deployed to two recent raves at the nearby Sports Arena. So who's paying? You are.

"We're hoping if we showed a much larger presence with uniformed and non-uniformed officers, that we would discourage some of the blatant drug use," LAPD Deputy Chief Patrick Gannon tells the Weekly.

Gannon, in charge of the department's South Bureau, says maybe the events' promoters should pay, since they're the ones raking in the dough and attracting the ecstasy users to these publicly run venues.

"When I do that, rather than penalize the communities,the promoters should make some consideration," he said.

Promoters already foot the bill for some off-duty cops who patrol the inside of the venues, but all the outside policing is done on your dime.

In any case, Gannon says, the department has an obligation to police the parties and keep the public safe.

How much are 200 extra cops worth? By our rough calculations, using the $2.8 million it cost the city to deploy 3,200 officers to the Michael Jackson Memorial concert in June, 2009, about $400,000. Correction: City senior administrative analyst Matthew Crawford helped us with the numbers here. He noted that the Memorial deployment involved expensive overtime. For a normal, 10-hour shift of 200 extra, average-paid officers at a Sports Arena or Coliseum event, it would cost taxpayers about $92,000, he said.