Jury

At the headquarters of Boston Medical Group in Costa Mesa, six salesmen were working the toll-free appointment line on a recent afternoon, fielding calls from men around the country enticed by newspaper and radio ads promising a "proven" solution to erectile dysfunction in "one office visit. " The results are visible "right there in the office," one sales representative told a caller. "It's amazing. " Following a script, he answered a few questions and offered to schedule a $195 consultation at one of the company's 21 U.S. clinics.

He is not in court. He is not even charged with a crime. But looming over the murder trial of a woman accused of strangling an aspiring model and actress in her Santa Monica apartment five years ago is a doctor who once dated the victim. A prosecutor told a downtown jury Wednesday that Juliana Redding was killed five days after her father broke off business negotiations with her ex-boyfriend Dr. Munir Uwaydah. Deputy Dist. Atty. Stacy Okun-Wiese said that Redding, 21, was killed by one of the doctor's associates, Kelly Soo Park, whose DNA was discovered on the victim's neck, tank top and areas of her apartment.

As detectives pieced together the 2008 slaying of a young Santa Monica woman, they came to a chilling conclusion: She had been calling police for help when the killer snatched the phone from her hands and hung up. Prosecutors unveiled the eerie account of the 911 call and other details from the March 2008 killing that has attracted national attention during secret grand jury proceedings against Kelly Soo Park, the woman arrested in June this year...

A 16-year-old girl was found guilty Friday of murdering her mother and stepfather, capping a two-week trial in which the teen admitted driving to buy party supplies while her mother's decomposing body was in the back of her vehicle. Jurors quickly rejected defense arguments that Cynthia Alvarez was an innocent victim of horrific abuse who had been helpless as her violent teenage boyfriend killed her parents in her Compton mobile home in October 2011. After deliberating about three hours, the jurors found her guilty of first-degree murder in both killings, with some members of the panel saying outside court in Compton that they believed Alvarez plotted and actively participated in the slayings.

Marc Christian MacGinnis, who won a multimillion-dollar settlement in 1991 from the estate of his ex-lover, actor Rock Hudson, after convincing a jury Hudson had knowingly exposed him to AIDS, has died. He was 56. Known as Marc Christian, he died of pulmonary problems June 2 at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank. The details were confirmed Friday by his sister, Susan Dahl, who said she did not publicly announce his death earlier because of her brother's wish for privacy.

Investigators served a search warrant Monday night on the Lakewood home of Bruce Koklich, who faces a second trial next month on charges that he murdered his wife, the daughter of the late state Sen. Paul Carpenter. Koklich, 44, who is free on $1-million bail, allowed sheriff's homicide and crime-scene investigators inside the home on Fairway Drive, Lt. Ray Peavy said. They planned to look for potential evidence in the case, Peavy said, but he did not specify what.

In a rare case, a Los Angeles jury awarded $3.8 million in compensatory damages to a Porter Ranch doctor who contended insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross retaliated against him for being a strong patient advocate. The jury ruled late Monday in favor of Jeffrey Nordella, 58, an urgent-care and family-practice doctor who alleged that Anthem barred him from its network in 2010, when he applied to be a preferred provider. The damages could climb higher Friday, when the 12-person panel reconvenes and considers punitive damages against Anthem, a unit of insurance giant WellPoint Inc. The jury found that Anthem, the state's largest for-profit health insurer, violated Nordella's right to "fair procedure," and the company did so with "malice, oppression or fraud.

The family of a 35-year-old man shot to death by Long Beach police after they mistook a water hose nozzle he was holding for a handgun was awarded $6.5 million in damages by a federal jury Thursday. After a day of deliberations, jurors found that two officers violated Doug Zerby's constitutional rights, were negligent and acted with malice or reckless disregard for his life in the December 2010 fatal shooting outside a Belmont Shore apartment. Zerby was shot by the two officers -- one with a shotgun and other with a handgun -- after they responded to the scene because someone reported seeing a man with a handgun.

He is not in court. He is not even charged with a crime. But looming over the murder trial of a woman accused of strangling an aspiring model and actress in her Santa Monica apartment five years ago is a doctor who once dated the victim. A prosecutor told a downtown jury Wednesday that Juliana Redding was killed five days after her father broke off business negotiations with her ex-boyfriend Dr. Munir Uwaydah. Deputy Dist. Atty. Stacy Okun-Wiese said that Redding, 21, was killed by one of the doctor's associates, Kelly Soo Park, whose DNA was discovered on the victim's neck, tank top and areas of her apartment.

NEW YORK (AP) - A New York City police officer was convicted Tuesday of charges he plotted to kidnap and cook women to dine on their "girl meat" - a macabre case that subjected jurors to often gory evidence and asked them to separate fantasy from reality. The jury reached the verdict in federal court at the kidnapping conspiracy trial of Officer Gilberto Valle, a 28-year-old father with an admitted fetish for talking on the Internet about cannibalism. Valle's lawyers at what the tabloids dubbed the "Cannibal Cop" trial chose not to hide what they called his "weird proclivities.

A teenage girl plotted the murder of her parents and assisted her boyfriend in the killings, giving him a hand signal when her mother was heading to bed and helping him ambush her stepfather, a prosecutor told jurors Thursday. Deputy Dist. Atty. Kristin Trutanich urged the Compton jury not to feel sympathy for the girl, who testified that she suffered years of abuse at the hands of the victims and watched helplessly as a controlling boyfriend carried out the October 2011 slayings in the family's mobile home.

A 16-year-old girl charged with murdering her mother and stepfather tearfully told a Compton jury on Monday that she did not kill them but admitted writing incriminating notes to her boyfriend and handing him a knife during one of the slayings. Cynthia Alvarez testified that she kicked away a folding knife that her stepfather carried while her boyfriend, Giovanni Gallardo, attacked him with a baseball bat in her family's Compton mobile home on Oct. 12, 2011. She said Gallardo used another knife she gave him to stab the victim multiple times.

A jury has convicted a man in the 1987 murder of an Orange County strip club owner, a case that stymied investigators for more than 20 years. Richard Morris Jr., 59, was found guilty Tuesday in Orange County Superior Court of killing James Stockwell, who owned the Mustang Topless Theater in Santa Ana and went by the name Jimmy Casino. Casino, 48, a convicted felon who bragged that he had influence with organized crime figures, and his 22-year-old girlfriend were ambushed by two men at his Brea condo.

Assembly Democrats may have hit on an ingenious way to make citizens take their jury summonses more seriously: Last week they passed a bill that would allow noncitizens to serve on juries. Suddenly, outraged commentators and bloggers who feared the loss of a key measure of citizenship were referring to "jury service" instead of "jury duty. " Although the news was generally reported accurately, some went overboard; at foxnews.com, for example, the headline said: "California bill would let illegal immigrants serve on juries.

Leo Branton Jr., a civil rights and entertainment lawyer whose stirring defense of '60s radical Angela Davis brought him his most celebrated victory in a six-decade career often spent championing unpopular cases, died of natural causes Friday in Los Angeles. He was 91. His death was confirmed by his son Tony Nicholas. Branton, the only African American graduate of Northwestern University's law school in 1948, helped singer Nat King Cole integrate an exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood, defended Communists in McCarthy-era Los Angeles and won misconduct cases against the Los Angeles Police Department decades before Rodney King became a household name.

SACRAMENTO - California would allow noncitizens to serve on juries under a proposal being considered by state lawmakers, potentially expanding a fundamental obligation of American life to millions more people. The measure, which would apply only to legal residents, would make California the only state to open the jury box to noncitizens who meet all other requirements of service, according to legal experts. The proposal raises the question of what it means to be judged by peers in a state where more than one in seven residents is not a citizen.

First De Niro, now Gondry. The Cannes Film Festival has named Michel Gondry to head the shorts jury at this year's gathering. The director will also head the jury for Cinefondation, the Cannes-run organization that hands out a trio of prizes to emerging filmmakers. Gondry joins Robert De Niro, who will head the features jury, in the south of France. Gondry is one of the few French-born directors who has also crossed over to Hollywood. The "Green Hornet" director has been to the festival several times before, premiering his surrealist feature "Human Nature" on the Croisette in 2001 and most recently bringing his documentary "The Thorn in the Heart" there in 2009.

Insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross has reached a confidential settlement with a Porter Ranch doctor who had already won $3.8 million in compensatory damages from the company at a trial this week. The agreement reached late Thursday keeps a Los Angeles jury from levying additional punitive damages against the company Friday, when the trial was scheduled to resume. The 12-person panel ruled Monday that Anthem had improperly barred Jeffrey Nordella, an urgent-care and family-practice doctor, from the company's preferred-provider network in 2010.

Los Angeles County prosecutors failed to present grand jurors with evidence favorable to Irwindale officials before seeking an indictment in connection with lavish business trips that city officials took to New York, a panel of state appellate justices said Thursday. The appeals court panel threw out the embezzlement counts against four Irwindale officials, who prosecutors said enjoyed meals at pricey restaurants, attended Broadway shows and saw baseball games paid for by the city during trips to meet with bond raters in an effort to obtain better bond ratings.

SAN DIEGO - After deliberating for several hours, a federal jury Friday acquitted a Border Patrol agent of choking an illegal immigrant during an arrest interview at the Imperial Beach station. The case against Agent Luis Fonseca, a six-year veteran, rested largely on a grainy video without audio.  Video of the July 2011 incident appears to show Adolfo Ceja Escobar falling to the floor, his body convulsing. Prosecutors alleged that Fonseca had placed his hands around Escobar's neck and choked him. But the defense attorney told jurors that Escobar was faking.