Identification

Compelled by Congress to craft a plan to try to keep guns out of the hands of felons, a Justice Department task force published an options study in the Federal Register that outlines dozens of variations on two major approaches, the Washington Post reported. One would target potential gun owners by requiring pre-sale certification that they have no criminal record. The other would target gun dealers, requiring them to check with police agencies that would be equipped to search criminal records quickly.

Three days after listing a house for sale, real estate agents Richard and Jean Murphy of Portland, Maine, began receiving a surprising number of calls — not from buyers but from would-be tenants. It turns out the callers were answering an ad that said the place was for rent, "and at a really low price," the agents for Harborview Properties recall. Worse, the "owner" was not the Murphys' client. It was someone living in another state who told callers that if they sent $1,500, the place would be theirs.

Remember the days when acquiring fake ID meant scissors, glue and a good typewriter? These days fake IDs have gone high-tech. And the stakes are high as well. Gone is the time of the lumpy driver's license with a 17-year-old's face pasted to a 28-year-old's driving vitae. The state made things harder in 1991 by adding holograms and magnetic strips to licenses. But enterprising teen-agers eager for beer are never far behind.

The Los Angeles County Probation Department has not fulfilled seven federally ordered reforms at its youth camps. A report released late last week by federal monitors found that the agency still needs to improve staffing levels at some of its 14 camps, improve how it identifies youths who have mental problems and do a better job of evaluating and treating youths with medical problems, among other issues. The probation department, which houses and works to rehabilitate about 2,200 of the area's most troubled youths, has been under federal oversight for almost a decade.

The federal government's E-Verify program, which seeks to reduce the hiring of illegal immigrants, is becoming increasingly popular, with 1,000 new businesses signing up each week despite concerns about its reliability. More than 124,000 businesses, including nearly 10,000 in California, are signed up for the Web-based identification program that enables employers to check whether an employee is authorized to work, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Like so many other multi-tasking Californians, James Joseph Lizotte bides his time in line at the bank by chatting on his cell phone. What makes Lizotte unusual, FBI officials alleged Tuesday, is that he robs the bank once he gets to the front of the line. Sometimes, authorities said, Lizotte hits up more than one teller at once, slamming his gun on the counter to show he means business.

When the body was found along a lonely stretch of Coast Highway last May, sheriff's investigators were sure that someone would eventually identify the victim. She had an unmistakable look: bleached-blond hair, a curved spine and a gaping hole in her mouth where four front teeth were missing. "It just seems like someone should be able to identify her," said Lt. Richard Olson of the Orange County Sheriff's Department. More than six months later, nobody has.

A 23-year-old man who apparently drowned near the Newport Pier was identified by deputy coroners Friday as Santa Ana resident Edgar Estrada, who went for a swim after a prayer meeting and was seen later floating face down in the water. Estrada was at the pier near McFadden Place and West Ocean Front with a Victory Outreach group in a prayer meeting on the beach about 7 a.m. Thursday, when he decided to cool off, a police spokesman said.

The County coroner's office is asking the public's help in identifying a man who killed himself with a gun at a park in July. The man was found dead on a park bench at the Granada Hills Recreation Center, 16730 Chatsworth St., shortly after 7 a.m. July 19, coroner's spokesman Scott Carrier said. The man was white or Latino, about 30 years old, and 6 feet tall and 246 pounds, Carrier said. He had brown eyes and black hair, balding on the front, and also a scar in the upper left area of his chest.

A criminal conviction can be based solely on a witness' out-of-court identification of the defendant, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday, overturning a 35-year-old decision. The court, then with a more liberal majority, ruled unanimously in 1960 that a pretrial identification of the defendant was not enough for a conviction, unless the defendant also was identified during the trial or was connected to the crime by other evidence.

The Obama administration's civil rights office is stepping up its fight with the Southern states over voting rights, announcing it will block a new South Carolina law that would require voters to show a government-issued photo identification before casting a ballot. The Justice Department invoked the Voting Rights Act on Friday and said the new photo-identification rule could deny the right to vote for tens of thousands of blacks and other minorities. "According to the state's statistics, there are 81,938 minority citizens who are already registered to vote and who lack DMV-issued identification," Thomas E. Perez, the chief of the department's civil rights division, said in a letter to South Carolina officials.

A man who spent nearly 25 years behind bars for a murder he insists he did not commit lost a civil rights lawsuit this week that accused a former detective of misconduct in his criminal case. A federal jury on Monday unanimously rejected Willie Earl Green's claim that an LAPD detective violated his civil rights during an investigation that led to Green's conviction for the 1983 slaying of a woman at a crack house in South Los Angeles. "I feel like the system let me down again," Green said in response to the verdict.

To many Americans — including many jurors — eyewitness testimony is the gold standard when it comes to evidence. But studies demonstrate that a variety of factors can lead to the misidentification of criminals. Nationally, more than 75% of convictions that have been overturned because of DNA evidence involved erroneous eyewitness testimony. Now the influential New Jersey Supreme Court has instructed police and judges to take into account an array of responses that might prevent mistaken identifications.

When thousands of American youths dropped out of mainstream society and descended on San Francisco in the mid-1960s convulsion known as the counterculture, Peter Berg and a small band of like-minded subversives were there to greet them. Calling themselves the Diggers, they dished out free food in Golden Gate Park, opened a free store in Haight-Ashbury and staged free street performances — guerrilla theater, as Berg named the impromptu events. Through such provocative actions the Diggers sought to create a sense of community in the middle of a cultural maelstrom.

In a pointed keynote address Monday, NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous urged members of the civil rights organization to stand up against restrictive state voting laws, which he compared to Jim Crow laws of decades past. "Let us be clear, the right to vote is the right upon which all of our rights are leveraged and without which … none can be protected," Jealous said at the annual convention of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, being held in downtown Los Angeles through Thursday.

In the three weeks since the arrest of a man accused of beating a baseball fan outside Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles police have scoured thousands of stadium surveillance photographs, run DNA tests and reviewed mobile phone records and financial transactions in search of hard evidence to bolster a case that authorities concede is largely based on eyewitness identifications. The public celebration that began when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and LAPD Chief Charlie Beck announced the arrest has faded.

Pet identification in the city of Los Angeles went high-tech Wednesday, as the City Council approved a program that would electronically tag pets to better reunite them with their owners. By implanting an electronic device the size of a rice kernel into the scruff of a pet's neck, animal regulation officials are hoping to reduce the number of dogs and cats euthanized because shelters are unable to find their owners.

In an effort to improve security at some county regional parks, the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday adopted a law requiring adults seeking overnight camping permits to show valid identification, such as a driver's license. The ordinance, adopted 5 to 0, applies to Featherly Regional Park in Anaheim, O'Neill Regional Park in Trabuco Canyon and the Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park near San Juan Capistrano.

Nothing gives people the creeps more than the sense that some hidden force is watching them. In George Orwell's telling of this story, that force was a totalitarian government surveilling the public to suppress dissent. In the contemporary version, it's a seemingly ubiquitous Internet company vacuuming up personal information to build profits. Like, say, Facebook. In its latest privacy intrusion, the Silicon Valley powerhouse has built a gargantuan photo collection of the faces of Facebook users — and non-users.

Missouri officials announced Thursday that more than 200 residents of Joplin remain unaccounted for in the wake of the massive tornado that swept through the city. Mark Lindquist, however, is not among them. For agonizing hours in the wake of Sunday's storm, Lindquist's sister, Linda Lindquist-Baldwin, and other family members combed the area around the group home for the disabled where the 51-year-old Joplin resident had been working when the twister struck. Most of the people in the building had been found dead.