Mistakes

A few weeks after launching the first wide-scale layoffs in its history, Microsoft Corp. acknowledged that it botched a key part of the plan. First, Microsoft realized that an administrative glitch caused it to pay more severance than intended to some laid-off employees. The company's response: It asked the former workers for the money back. But when one of Microsoft's letters seeking repayment surfaced on the Web on Saturday, the situation turned embarrassing. The company reversed course and said the laid-off workers could keep the extra payouts.

A parolee accused of killing 17-year-old Lily Burk last month could have been serving a lengthy prison sentence instead of roaming the streets of Los Angeles but for a clerical error that misstated his criminal record, according to interviews and court documents reviewed by The Times. Because of the error, authorities did not know that Charles Samuel was eligible to be prosecuted under the state's tough three-strikes law when he was arrested for and convicted of burglary in San Bernardino County in 1997.

Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now it says its math was wrong. In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Assn. of America claimed that 44% of the industry's domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus.

Charter Communications Inc. executives believe a software error during routine maintenance caused the company to delete the contents of 14,000 customer e-mail accounts. There is no way to retrieve the messages, photos and other attachments that were erased from in-boxes and archive folders across the nation Monday, said Anita Lamont, a spokeswoman for the suburban St. Louis company.

Super Tuesday may have lacked a runaway winner in either party, but when it came to anticipating the outcome of both primaries in California, there was one clear loser -- the Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll. "We blew it," pollster John Zogby said. He pointed out that the polls he supervised got the victors right in six other races Tuesday (impressively, his had Barack Obama winning narrowly in Missouri, unlike other last-minute surveys).

In the weeks leading up to the launch of a new payroll system, Los Angeles Unified School District officials had plenty of warning that the $95-million technology project would have serious problems. Critical hardware had failed numerous times. Flawed data collected over decades proved difficult to clean up and input into the new system. Payroll clerks complained that training had fallen far short -- more than 60 schools didn't have a single staff member who'd received any training.

Michael Nola, a poll worker in Claremont, went to two training sessions before election day and was instructed that nonpartisan voters were entitled to cast ballots in the Democratic Party or American Independent Party primaries. What he never learned in class was that in addition to selecting a candidate, these voters were required to mark a bubble on their ballots indicating which party primary they were voting in. . . .

An estimated 49,500 votes were cast incorrectly in Los Angeles County by nonpartisan voters in the presidential primaries and cannot be counted because the voters' intentions are unclear, acting Registrar Dean Logan said Monday. The mismarked ballots were the result of a confusing ballot design and poor education of poll workers and the public, Logan said.

The counselor at Salinas Valley State Prison paid a surprise visit to Nicholas Shearin's cell with good news: He would go home in two days, after a decade behind bars. She did not mention that he should have been freed eight months earlier. Shearin was among as many as 33,000 state inmates whose sentences may have been wrong because they were not given all the time off they earned for good behavior and for working in prison.

California does a bad job of compensating people wrongfully convicted in its courts, a blue ribbon commission said Friday. Men and women imprisoned for years, even decades, for crimes they didn't commit are offered fewer benefits than convicts released on parole, the commission said.