Attorneys

Detectives investigating the shooting death of Jeffrey Tidus, a prominent L.A. lawyer, are examining a 2005 case in which the attorney obtained a restraining order against a litigant who allegedly had threatened him, according to sheriff's deputies. The case is one of several being looked at as detectives pore over Tidus' files seeking clues, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. Dave Dolson said. He stressed that the investigation is in its early stages and there is no evidence that Tidus' work was tied to his slaying.

Roman Polanski's attorneys helped provoke his arrest by complaining to an appellate court this summer that Los Angeles County prosecutors had made no real effort to capture the filmmaker in his three decades as a fugitive, two law enforcement sources familiar with the case told The Times. The accusation that the Los Angeles County district attorney's office was not serious about extraditing Polanski to facing sentencing in a child sex case he fled in 1978 was a minor point in two lengthy July court filings by the director's attorneys.

Michael Jackson's former personal physician hired a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney this week to help his existing legal team combat a potential manslaughter prosecution in the pop icon's fatal overdose last summer. Dr. Conrad Murray retained Glendale attorney J. Michael Flanagan on Tuesday, the physician's lead lawyer, Ed Chernoff, confirmed. Flanagan previously won a manslaughter acquittal for a nurse tried in what is believed to be the only other L.A. criminal case involving a death from propofol, the powerful anesthetic blamed in Jackson's June 25 death.

The tale of the rapper and the prosecutor is a twisted one now, bent into strange shapes by scandal, celebrity and murder music, but once it was a story of straight lines and simple roles. When they first met in 1994, the rapper, Anerae Brown, was one of four gang members on trial for a spasm of early-morning violence that had left a grandmother dead in her home.

When Aaron Swartz was 3, he taught himself to read. When he was 4 or 5, he could read the New York Times, his father says. When Aaron was 14, he invented the software behind RSS, the information distribution service. Five years later, he started a project that would turn into Web news and entertainment behemoth Reddit. And in an interview with the Los Angeles Times from Chicago on Thursday, Bob Swartz said his son "was hounded to his death by a system and a set of attorneys that still don't understand the nature of what they did. And they destroyed my son by their callousness and inflexibility.” Aaron Swartz, 26, committed suicide by hanging in his Brooklyn apartment last week as he faced a federal trial for what he saw as a political act: In 2010, he physically entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to set up a computer hack that would download millions of academic articles from JSTOR, a nonprofit database service.

Rutgers University officials had known for months that their basketball coach had harassed players in practice so severely that he could have been fired, according to a university report. Concerned by practice footage of Coach Mike Rice roughhousing Rutgers athletes and using gay slurs, outside attorneys hired by the university in November 2012 discreetly compiled a report that said Rice had broken university harassment and intimidation policies. Rice's contract included a stipulation that he not do anything to embarrass the university, which his behavior had clearly violated, the attorneys said.

Robert Blake's bodyguard and co-defendant, Earle S. Caldwell, changed attorneys Tuesday as he awaited trial on charges he and Blake conspired to kill the actor's wife. During a brief court hearing, the judge agreed to allow Caldwell to replace Arna H. Zlotnik with attorney Dana Cole. As Caldwell's lawyer for nearly two years, Zlotnik represented him during a preliminary hearing last month when he and Blake were ordered to stand trial in the fatal shooting of Bonny Lee Bakley in Studio City.

In a decision likely to fuel controversy in the federal judiciary, a federal appeals court Thursday unanimously overturned $6,200 in sanctions that a Los Angeles trial judge had imposed against two San Diego attorneys simply because they had not gone through the pro forma task of being admitted to practice in the U.S. District Court here--a task that takes about 10 minutes and costs $20. The appellate court in San Francisco said that U.S. District Judge Richard A. Gadbois Jr.

Attorneys for alleged Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson filed motions Tuesday seeking to be taken off the case or to have misdemeanor charges against them dismissed, a move several legal experts said makes sense. The attorneys, Tony Serra and Shawn Chapman, say they cannot represent Olson, accused of conspiring in 1975 to kill two Los Angeles police officers by placing bombs under two squad cars, while at the same time trying to defend themselves against misdemeanor charges.

Los Angeles Public Defender Michael P. Judge will be honored tonight as Lawyer of the Year by the John M. Langston Bar Assn., one of the largest associations of African American attorneys. The association cited Judge for recruiting and training a large and ethnically diverse work force, defending legal traditions and questioning the disproportionate impact of California's three-strikes law on African American defendants.