Courthouses

"It was a normal day of judicial proceedings," prosecutor Kellie Hill told the jury Monday. "A regular day of courtroom tranquillity -- until that man walked in a back door." She pointed across the courtroom to the sullen, powerfully built man in a tan suit accused of killing four people in a 2005 rampage that started at a courthouse just a few blocks from here.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed Friday to raise the price of parking tickets, traffic school, criminal convictions and civil court filings to pay for the repair and replacement of dozens of the state's decrepit, overcrowded courthouses. The court fee hikes will include a new $30 penalty imposed on misdemeanor and felony criminal convictions. The state fee for attending traffic school will rise $25, and $3 will be added to parking tickets.

As he entered the Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C., Thom Mayne sharpened his attack plan in his mind. The bad boy of American architecture was about to meet his new nemesis for the first time, and he wanted to set the tone early. His opponent that day in 2001 was U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan, a conservative jurist who stood for everything Mayne scorned.

The building has been reduced almost to rubble now. But for years, the former Junipero Serra state office building sat vacant and moribund at 1st and Broadway, a symbol of the more derelict aspects of downtown. The once-bustling building was abandoned a decade ago, amid fears that it was seismically unsound, and had become a favorite destination for squatters, taking on the ripe stench of urine and garbage.

A series of near-simultaneous bombings struck courthouse complexes in three north Indian cities, killing at least 13 lawyers and injuring at least 45 other people, officials said. Federal authorities blamed militants trying to spark unrest between India's Hindu majority and Muslim minority. "It is the handiwork of groups who are trying to spread terror in our country," junior Home Minister Sriprakash Jaiswal told reporters.

An early morning fire gutted a small courthouse in the far western part of the state, a county official said. No one was inside the Carlisle County Courthouse in Bardwell when the blaze started. The building was all but destroyed, with only the outer brick walls still standing, said John Roberts, the county's judge-executive. The structure was built in the early 1980s after the previous courthouse was burned by an arsonist.

San Diego County officials are notifying about 450 people that their personal information may have been stolen during the theft of more than $60,000 in cash, checks and credit card receipts from the courthouse here. The Sheriff's Department is searching for David Macias, 48, a longtime court employee who officials said had access to the area where the stolen items were stored. The cash, checks and credit card receipts come from traffic fines paid last week.

Los Angeles County authorities are investigating allegations that a group of juvenile inmates repeatedly sexually assaulted a 12-year-old inmate in a holding room at the Compton courthouse while Probation Department guards were supposed to be watching the boys.

A woman described as severely mentally ill and with a history of suicide attempts jumped to her death Thursday from the 19th floor of the main criminal courthouse downtown, authorities said. The death, at the corner where three courthouses and City Hall meet, caused a two-hour closure of Spring and Temple streets in the early afternoon as police investigated.

There haven't been many arranged marriages in architectural history more intriguing than the one set up seven years ago between Thom Mayne, who runs the Santa Monica firm Morphosis, and Michael Hogan, who has been a federal judge in this college town since the 1970s. Though similarly headstrong, the two men are polar opposites philosophically. Mayne is an unapologetic leftist, Hogan a religious and political conservative.