Jurors

Lawrence Singleton, who raped a California teenager and chopped off her hands 20 years ago, should be executed for stabbing a prostitute to death last year, a jury recommended Wednesday. Singleton, 70, showed no emotion as the verdict was read after an hour of deliberations. He was convicted last week of murdering Roxanne Hayes, a 31-year-old prostitute and mother of three.

A jobless man walks into the Goodwill Thrift Shop in Santa Ana and walks out wearing a pair of pants he didn't pay for. The price of the pants: $4.99. The upshot: a months-long journey through the criminal justice system that ended with a three-day trial that cost an estimated $3,600 and left everyone from the prosecutor to the defense attorney to jurors asking themselves if there was a better way. All parties seem to agree that the system worked--sort of--in the case of People v.

Kalamo Dunzo makes no apology for taking a stand. More than a year ago, he was one of two jurors who refused to vote in favor of the death penalty for Jonathan D'Arcy, who had doused a Tustin woman with gasoline and ignited it. After five days of tense deliberations filled with tears and bitterness, a mistrial was declared, and Dunzo left the courthouse feeling ostracized. "I remember one guy kept saying, 'Why don't you vote with us? What is your problem?' " Dunzo said.

It's a standard classroom essay question: How did you spend your spring break? Ask Los Angeles teachers the same question when they return to class next week and many will probably say they were on jury duty. Although most government agencies give their employees unlimited paid time off to serve on juries, the Los Angeles Unified School District has a long-standing policy of requiring teachers to perform their civic duty on their own time.

It's a standard classroom essay question: How did you spend your spring break? Ask Los Angeles teachers the same question when they return to class next week and some will probably say they were on jury duty. Although most government agencies give their employees unlimited paid time off to serve on juries, the Los Angeles Unified School District has a long-standing policy of requiring teachers to perform their civic duty on their own time.

A mammoth government effort to prove tourist muggers in Miami were running an organized crime syndicate ended in failure Tuesday when a federal jury failed to convict 12 defendants on any conspiracy charge. Prosecutors flew in dozens of people from Europe and South America to testify about crimes allegedly committed against them by members of the group, nicknamed "the dirty dozen," during visits to Miami in the early 1990s.

Timothy J. McVeigh's lawyers told a federal appeals court Tuesday that McVeigh deserves a new trial in the Oklahoma City bombing because of juror misconduct and media reports of a purported confession just before the case began. The lawyers also argued in front of a three-judge panel of the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals that the judge at the trial, Richard P. Matsch, unfairly restricted questioning of prospective jurors about the death penalty.

A big "what if" hangs over the sanity trial of condemned triple murderer Horace Edward Kelly Jr.: What if the jury charged with deciding whether the San Quentin inmate is sane enough to be executed concludes that he is not? The short but fuzzy answer, by a state that has not faced this issue in nearly half a century, is that the 38-year-old inmate would probably be sent to a mental institution, treated for his psychosis and then executed after doctors brought him back to mental health.

The jury weighing the fate of convicted killer Michael Dally declared itself hopelessly deadlocked Friday, prompting a Ventura County Superior Court judge to declare a mistrial in the penalty phase of the high-profile case. After three days of deliberations, jurors remained divided 7 to 5 on whether Dally should be executed for plotting with his former lover to kidnap and kill his wife, Sherri. The majority wanted the death penalty for the 37-year-old grocery manager.

The Supreme Court on Monday again rebuked federal judges in California for using minor procedural errors to overturn death sentences. Rather than simply cite flaws in instructions given to a jury, the judges must show that those errors had a clear impact on the verdict, the high court said. On a 5-4 vote, the justices reversed a July ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that threw out a death sentence handed down for a 1979 murder in San Francisco.