Crimes

An ex-Marine accused of committing a hate crime outside a gay bar in Long Beach will be extradited from Illinois to face prosecution in L.A. County, officials aid. John Kelly O'Leary, 21, was arrested Monday night in the Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, police said. O'Leary allegedly beat two men outside the Silver Fox Bar near 4 th Street and Redondo Avenue in September while yelling anti-gay slurs, police said. L.A. County prosecutors tacked on a hate-crime charge in their complaint.

It's the kind of audacious but small-stakes insider trading that normally wouldn't have merited much attention. Golfing buddies Scott London and Bryan Shaw netted just $1.3 million, a blip in a world where Wall Street kingpins pocket hundreds of millions in ill-gotten gains. The two men made one misstep after another. Their haplessness virtually guaranteed they'd get nailed, experts said. The scope of their ill-fated caper was made clear Thursday when federal prosecutors in Los Angeles filed a criminal charge against London, alleging that he passed insider tips to Shaw from 2010 to 2013.

Direction-impaired drivers, prepare to meet your doom. A California appellate court has ruled that it's illegal to hold your phone while driving to use it for anything -- like checking Google maps, or even looking at an email or text. The case was brought by Steven R. Spriggs, a 58-year-old professional development officer at Fresno State University. On Jan. 5, 2012, Spriggs found himself in stop-and-go traffic caused by road construction on California 41 near the California 180 interchange.

Crime reports are up significantly for the latest week in 10 L.A. neighborhoods, according to an analysis of LAPD data by the Los Angeles Times' Crime L.A. database . Eight neighborhoods reported a significant increase in violent crime. Harbor City (A) was the most unusual, recording three reports compared with a weekly average of 1.0 over the last three months. Westwood (I) topped the list of two neighborhoods with property crime alerts. It recorded 17 property crimes compared with its weekly average of 10.2 over the last three months.

California already had what were arguably the nation's toughest sex offender laws in 2006 when voters, spurred on nightly by fear-mongering television hosts such as Nancy Grace and Bill O'Reilly, adopted this state's version of Jessica's Law . Proposition 83 required all convicted sex felons, whether violent or not, whether still on parole or not, and whether at high or low risk of reoffending, to wear electronic monitoring devices for the rest...

With the first quarter of 2013 in the books, crime in Los Angeles has so far continued its decade-long decline, according to statistics released Friday. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief Charlie Beck announced the early but notable improvement at a press conference that served as a swan song for the mayor, who will leave office this summer after being termed out. Throughout what is widely considered an otherwise uneven eight years in office, the steady drop in crime is a triumph that Villaraigosa has repeatedly touted.

A 59-year-old man serving a federal prison sentence in Arizona for making bomb threats to Disneyland faces multiple counts of sexual assault involving two Orange County women he met through Pennysaver ads in the 1980s. James Michael Camp, 59, of Anaheim, was scheduled to be arraigned Friday on two felony counts of residential burglary, two counts of forcible rape, two counts of forcible oral copulation, one count of grand theft and one count of robbery with a sentencing enhancement for the personal use of a knife.

With the first quarter of 2013 in the books, crime in Los Angeles is continuing its decade-long decline, according to statistics released Friday. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief Charlie Beck announced the notable gains at a press conference that served as a swan song for the mayor, who will leave office this summer after being termed out. More than anything else, the continued drop in crime has been a reliable, powerful success for the mayor to trumpet throughout his time in office.

Rather than concentrate on the execution of the crime, this week's DVDs focus on what comes afterward: first the trial, then, for the unlucky, time behind bars. Nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best picture, 1959's “Anatomy of a Murder” is one of the great American courtroom dramas. Directed by Otto Preminger, it features Jimmy Stewart as a small-town lawyer defending Ben Gazzara against a murder charge brought by George C. Scott's hard-driving prosecutor. Archetypes don't get more archetypal than this, with a great Duke Ellington score thrown in for good measure.

When Keeairra Dashiell graduated with honors from Crenshaw High School seven years ago, she seemed headed for success. Offered admission into several top colleges, she accepted a scholarship to UC San Diego, leaving behind the often rough, inner-city world of South Los Angeles. But on Thursday, Dashiell's talent and promise were a distant, squandered memory as the 24-year-old sat handcuffed in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom. After years of lying, she fully confessed to her role in a 2007 murder and, in a deal with prosecutors, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and attempted robbery.