Evidence

Out of cash and understaffed, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has suspended its faltering effort to analyze DNA evidence from thousands of rape and sexual assault cases. The department halted shipments of the genetic evidence to private crime laboratories at the end of May after funds allotted for the testing ran dry, according to a report submitted by Sheriff Lee Baca to the county Board of Supervisors late last week.

Until last month, the strongest evidence in drug and drunk driving cases in courtrooms across the nation often was a piece of paper. A crime lab or Breathalyzer report would confirm that the defendant indeed had illegal drugs or a high level of alcohol in his or her system. But a Supreme Court decision has sent a jolt through that procedure. Now the prosecution must make a lab technician available to testify in person if the defendant demands it.

Attorneys for three men convicted in Orange County 4 1/2 years ago of sexually assaulting an apparently unconscious 16-year-old girl while videotaping the incident asked a state appeals court Wednesday to toss out the convictions. Two of the attorneys said evidence excluded from the trial might have given jurors a different view of whether the defendants, all of them 17 when the assault occurred in 2002, had reason to believe the girl would have consented to the sexual acts. It also could have given jurors a different picture of the victim and her credibility, attorneys Dennis Fischer and Brett Harding Duxbury said.

For 34 years, the rape and murder of 80-year-old Alice Lewis remained a mystery. There wasn't even a suspect. But five months ago, a routine traffic stop in Los Angeles yielded DNA evidence that police said opened the door for solving the cold case and arresting the alleged killer. This week, Dennis Vasquez, 50, was arrested in the 1975 strangulation of the woman at her Meier Street home in Mar Vista. Because he would have been only 16 at the time of the crime, Vasquez appeared Friday in Juvenile Court in Inglewood.

The Supreme Court announced Thursday a potentially significant change in how crime lab reports are used in trials, ruling that a defendant has the right to cross-examine in front of the jury the experts who prepared these reports. Crime labs have been subjected to criticism in the last decade, much of it because of DNA evidence that has shown at least 240 prisoners were in fact not guilty.

The U.S. District Court judge who will preside over Barry Bonds' perjury trial next month said Thursday her "preliminary thoughts" were to exclude evidence that Bonds tested positive for steroids three times in the months before his record-breaking 73-homer season of 2001.

In their rough South Los Angeles neighborhood, Mary Romer and Alma Harvey watched over each other. So back in February 1990, Romer didn't think twice about walking across the street to Harvey's home when another friend called. They were concerned because they had not heard from the 82-year-old, who had trouble walking and was mostly housebound. Romer used a spare key to enter the house. As she crept inside, she called for her friend, but there was no answer.

A rusted old gun found last month in a Modesto field has been identified as the same kind of weapon a hit man alleged he used to kill a man 19 years ago. The identification by a state Department of Justice laboratory could help prove the innocence of Dennis Lawley, who has spent almost two decades on death row for the 1989 murder of Kenneth Lawton Stewart.

A stocky man in a dusty dishdasha and red-checked scarf squatted under a tree as U.S. soldiers dug up his yard looking for weapons or other incriminating evidence. Staff Sgt. Mario Cavazos knelt in front of him in the finger-numbing cold. "The reason we are here is because we have heard from townspeople that you have been kidnapping people. Is that true?" he asked through an interpreter. "No, I swear," the suspect said, shaking his head vigorously.

Stepping up their defense of former Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona, attorneys on Friday asked a federal judge to exclude as evidence secret recordings of conversations between a top aide and Carona in the weeks before he was indicted on corruption charges. One of the seven charges against Carona alleges that he tried to persuade Donald Haidl, his former assistant sheriff and close friend, to withhold information from a federal grand jury.