Convicts

After 38 years, Michael Robert Smith figured no one was still looking for him. He escaped from the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad, Calif., on June 7, 1968, after serving three years of a five-years-to-life sentence for robbery. He headed first to Nevada, then New Jersey and into a marriage that didn't work out, and finally five years ago to a tiny travel trailer in a heavily wooded area of Creek County, Okla.

After fatally shooting his unwanted houseguest in the head, Robert Charles Redd stuffed the man's body into a recycling bin and wheeled it into a room of his Pico Rivera home. When the stench of death grew too overpowering a couple of days later, Redd wheeled the bin out into the backyard and tipped Joseph Rubalcaba's corpse into a shallow grave that he topped with plants. Last month, a Norwalk jury convicted Redd, 53, of second-degree murder. But in an unusual move, a judge recently reduced Redd's conviction to voluntary manslaughter, finding that Redd feared for his life when he fired the fatal shot.

Thousands of ex-convicts have been hired by firms in Peking to keep them from reverting to crime, the New China News Agency said Tuesday. It said that in the last three years the firms had hired 12,500 former convicts, more than three-quarters of those released during that time from the capital's prison or labor camps.

LAS VEGAS - Over a day of often-vitriolic cross examination, O.J. Simpson's former defense attorney faced a barrage of pointed challenges that his representation was so shoddy and even duplicitous that the fallen football star deserves a new trial in a 2008 robbery and kidnapping conviction. Among the accusations hurled at Miami-based lawyer Yale Galanter: That he refused to hire experts to testify for Simpson in order to boost his own profits in the case and that he failed to adequately advise Simpson about a possible plea agreement offered by prosecutors.

Chihuahua state Atty. Gen. Jose Miller said authorities have located six more escaped convicts, and their arrest is expected soon, the Excelsior newspaper reported Friday. A total of 34 convicts escaped, four people were killed and eight others were injured during a jailbreak and riot Tuesday in Chihuahua, 225 miles south of El Paso, Tex. Twenty-six of the escapees were rounded up Tuesday and Wednesday, according to Gabriel Nahas, director of Chihuahua state's 14 prisons.

Editor's note: David Scott Milton taught writing in the prison where Kenneth Hartman, the author of "Mother California," is incarcerated. In this Sunday's book section, Carolyn Kellogg reviews "Mother California." When I first came into the system, I had no ax to grind over prison reform. I was not an activist, nor was I passionately pro-convict. My house in Tehachapi is on a mountain top overlooking the prison. From Max Yard 4B, the lights on my house were all the life the men could see at night.

As California begins shifting supervision of thousands of newly released state prisoners to local probation agencies, ex-convicts are arriving with incomplete medical records and more serious mental illnesses than anticipated. And mental health officials are scrambling to provide appropriate — and often costly — treatment. "At the start, every day ... there was a crisis," said Dr. Marvin Southard, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. "There was somebody we didn't know what to do with.

Jail inmates in England and Wales will be given more porridge as part of a health diet ordered by the government. The 47,000 prisoners will have a healthier, higher-fiber diet, emphasizing porridge and reducing saturated fats, meat and salt, following a survey of jail food. Scotland, home of porridge, was not covered by the survey.

Hundreds of inmates rioted at a prison in central Poland, setting fires and smashing doors and windows during a nine-hour uprising, government officials said today. The officials said order was restored early this morning. Government spokesman Jerzy Urban said he had no information on whether anyone was injured. The disturbance began Monday night at Potulice prison, 150 miles west of Warsaw, when inmates objected to the treatment of a prisoner whom guards considered arrogant, Urban said.

Re "Inmates' 'Do Not Pass Go' Card," by Alan Elsner, Commentary, Jan. 29: People with arrest records or misdemeanor convictions face a life of staying in the shadows. For some reason, no matter how much effort is applied to making a change in someone's life, our society chooses to dwell on the negative and document it accordingly. It is, in effect, a life sentence. What a crushing weight to bear. Take away hope from people and you get despair. People with nothing to lose or live for become more of a problem to society.

SAN FRANCISCO - A prison inmate whose triple-murder arson conviction was overturned after he demonstrated "actual innocence" will be retried rather than released, prosecutors said. U.S. District Judge Anthony W. Ishii ordered the state last month to release George Souliotes, 72, or retry him immediately. After finding that Souliotes had proved his innocence, the judge overturned his conviction on the grounds he had been incompetently represented by his lawyer. Souliotes has spent 16 years in prison for murder in the deaths of Michelle Jones, 31, and her two children, Daniel Jr., 8, and Amanda, 3. The three died when a fire erupted in the home the family was renting from Souliotes.

MASHANG VILLAGE, China - The last time they saw their father, Hong Yunke, he was leaving home, hauling his wooden medicine chest, on a frigid December morning in 1967. "I'm going to treat a patient and collect money," Hong told his son, 12, and his daughter, 9. "I'll be back soon. " Hong was what the Chinese call a barefoot doctor, a self-educated healer who treated the sprained ankles of farmers for 20 cents, enough in those days for two pork buns. His wife, unable to endure the poverty, had left him to raise the children on his own. No matter.

A jury has convicted a man in the 1987 murder of an Orange County strip club owner, a case that stymied investigators for more than 20 years. Richard Morris Jr., 59, was found guilty Tuesday in Orange County Superior Court of killing James Stockwell, who owned the Mustang Topless Theater in Santa Ana and went by the name Jimmy Casino. Casino, 48, a convicted felon who bragged that he had influence with organized crime figures, and his 22-year-old girlfriend were ambushed by two men at his Brea condo.

SACRAMENTO - The state will send dozens of new agents into California neighborhoods this summer to confiscate nearly 40,000 handguns and assault rifles from people barred by law from owning firearms, officials said Wednesday. The plan received the green light Wednesday, when Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation providing $24 million to clear the backlog of weapons known to be in the hands of about 20,000 people who acquired them legally. They were later disqualified because of criminal convictions, restraining orders or serious mental illness.

FRESNO - The Convicted Distracted Driver is sitting in a study carrel in the Cal State Fresno library, which, come to think of it, looks a little like a prison visiting room. "I don't relish that title," said Steven Spriggs. "But that's what I am. " His crime: looking at his iPhone's map application while driving. Spriggs, 58, is director of planned giving for the college. He is gentle and soft-spoken. Or maybe that's just because we are in the library. Still, in his soft-blue dress shirt and gray tie, he looks more like an insurance salesman than a firebrand who sparked what court documents call a "media frenzy.

CAMP PENDLETON - A female Marine was convicted Wednesday of "attempted adultery" and lying to investigators in a case involving allegations of sexual misconduct and alcohol abuse in the enlisted ranks. The Marine, a staff sergeant with 17 years' service, could receive a year in the brig and a bad-conduct discharge when the judge, Lt. Col. Leon Francis, announces the sentence Thursday. She was convicted of attempting "to have sexual intercourse with … a man not her husband," but she was acquitted of adultery.

A judge in Milan convicted 23 Americans today of the kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in 2003, culminating a landmark trial that gave a look into the secret world of CIA renditions of terror suspects. Judge Oscar Magi acquitted three Americans, including the former CIA station chief in Italy, because they had diplomatic immunity when a secret team abducted militant cleric Abu Omar in Milan and flew him to Egypt, where he underwent months of torture and abuse. The Americans were tried in absentia, and given that the U.S. government has long declined to cooperate with the prosecution, it seemed unlikely that any of those convicted would spend time in an Italian prison.

Six escaped convicts from Alabama were captured in Tennessee on Thursday, two days after they broke out of a maximum-security prison by using a broom handle to lift an electrified fence. Authorities stumbled onto the group along a country road about 50 miles west of Nashville and 165 miles from the prison. They scattered and were caught without violence over an eight-hour span.

Dr. Conrad Murray's trial was "fundamentally unfair" because of the publicity surrounding his manslaughter case and the fame of his patient, Michael Jackson, the physician's attorney wrote in papers filed Monday asking an appellate court to throw out his conviction. Murray's attorney contended that prosecutors had failed at trial to prove that the cardiologist was responsible for the pop icon's death. She also contended that the trial judge, Michael Pastor, "displayed a bias" against the doctor.

Los Angeles mayoral hopeful Wendy Greuel stepped up attacks on rival Eric Garcetti on Tuesday, repeating ethical accusations brought up at Monday night's televised debate and adding a new one - that Garcetti accepted thousands in donations at a fundraiser hosted by an ex-felon. Greuel, the city's controller, called the media to her Boyle Heights campaign office to reiterate recent attacks against Garcetti that she says call into question his ability to lead a city as large and complex as Los Angeles.