Exconvicts

Dawn Cordy always knew her neighborhood was an easy place to hide -- a semirural San Francisco suburb where housing is cheap, sheriff's cruisers rarely appear, residents don't snoop and registered sex offenders have found a refuge. It's a small, scruffy, unincorporated island largely surrounded by the hard-knock city of Antioch, a region synonymous with the foreclosure crisis in the Bay Area but now linked to yet another outrage. This is where Phillip Garrido, who was charged last week with rape and kidnapping, allegedly held Jaycee Lee Dugard for 18 years and fathered her two children in a warren of tents and soundproofed outbuildings behind his gray cinder-block house on Walnut Avenue.

His style is a mix of Socrates and Don Rickles. His goal is to coax, bully, tease, demand and manipulate ex-convicts into getting ready to find a job. One of the first chores is to get them to drop the habits they picked up behind bars: lying, faking, refusing to make eye contact, getting verbally aggressive when disrespected, thinking of the whole world as just another overbearing prison guard. Scott Silverman is relentless. "You're doing that thing again, something between a smirk and what you call a smile," he tells one student.

It is a rare piece of gun legislation that finds the National Rifle Assn. and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence on the same side, but President Bush signed such a bill Tuesday. The measure, Congress' response to last year's Virginia Tech shootings, is the first significant federal attempt to tighten gun laws.

A Santa Ana man who was freed from prison after more than a dozen Los Angeles Times columns raised doubts about the evidence was killed early Sunday after a fight erupted at a party and an unknown assailant ran him down with a car, police said. Arthur Paul Carmona, 26, served more than two years in custody after being convicted of two armed robberies on the basis of eyewitness testimony. A key witness later recanted her identification of him, and two jurors said they had doubts about his guilt.

It happened again at a Taco Bell. The old way of thinking, the criminal voice, wouldn't shut up inside the head of Ken Layton. Yeah, take out that punk kid, beat the crap out of him, show that pimply faced idiot he ain't nothin' and you're still Folsom Kenny Layton. He was standing in line at the fast-food joint, behind an overwhelmed woman with an unruly child. She was complaining about her order, and the kid behind the counter kept putting her down. "He was rude," Layton said. "Sarcastic."

The state social services agency Wednesday was moving to shut down nine homes used for child day care and foster care after an audit found registered sex offenders in them in violation of state law. The revelation came after state auditors compared the addresses of 75,000 licensed facilities, including foster family homes and in-home day-care centers, with the state's database of registered sex offenders.

Under pressure to meet combat needs, the Army and Marine Corps brought in significantly more recruits with felony convictions last year than in 2006, including some with manslaughter and sex-crime convictions. Data released by a congressional committee shows the number of soldiers admitted to the Army with felony records jumped from 249 in 2006 to 511 in 2007. And the number of Marines with felonies rose from 208 to 350.

The most disturbing Halloween accessory this year may not be the spider webs hanging off the shrubbery or the door sensor that emits ghostly screams, but a lone jack-o'-lantern displaying the words: "No candy at this residence." About 1,200 violent or child sex offenders on probation or parole in Maryland have been ordered to hang these orange pumpkin signs -- or plain ones reading, "No candy" -- at their residences today. If they don't, the knock at the door will be from an officer of the law.

During their first two weeks out of prison, ex-convicts face nearly 13 times greater risk of death than the general population, according to a study of more than 30,000 former inmates published today. The leading cause was overdose of illegal narcotics, the researchers found.

Offering his first legal appraisal of California's voter-approved crackdown on sex offenders, Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown said Tuesday that the new law bars all offenders from moving near a park or school regardless of when they committed their crime. The argument was outlined by deputies for the newly elected Brown in papers filed with U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White. The judge is considering a constitutional challenge to the law, Proposition 83, and has set a hearing for Feb. 23.