Prisoners

White supremacist gang hit man Billy Joe Johnson got what he asked for from the Orange County jury that convicted him of first-degree murder last month: a death sentence. It wasn't remorse for his crimes or a desire for atonement that drove him to ask for execution; it was the expectation that conditions on death row would be more comfortable than in other maximum-security prisons and that any date with the executioner would be decades away if it came at all. Although executions are carried out with comparative speed in states such as Virginia, where Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad was put to death Tuesday night, capital punishment in California has become so bogged down by legal challenges as to be a nearly empty threat, say experts on both sides of the issue.

Gov. Jerry Brown's administration disputes complaints that the governor's vocal legal challenges to orders to improve prison conditions has brought progress to a halt. The federal court-appointed medical receiver in charge of prison healthcare filed a progress report Wednesday that said the result of remarks by top state officials that California has spent "too many resources and too much money" on prisons "has been to freeze and ossify" his own progress with the state. Corrections officials responded late Wednesday with their own public statement.

Alone in a jail in a foreign country, frightened and confused, unable to understand the language, culture or complicated court system, distrustful of their attorneys and kept from their family--so run the emotions of hundreds of immigrants detained in the U.S. dragnet since the Sept. 11 attacks. So it also has gone for thousands of Americans.

In a report Wednesday to federal judges, the official overseeing prison medical care said Gov. Jerry Brown's public opposition to crowding reductions, and his corrections officials' refusal to move inmates at risk of a deadly disease, show California is unready to run its own prisons. The immediate focus of J. Clark Kelso's ire is California's refusal to implement his May 1 directive requiring the state to move nearly half the inmates from two Central Valley prisons afflicted with valley fever.

Michael Abraham fidgets on a steel bunk, unable to sleep because of the chain-saw snoring and suffocating flatulence of three fellow inmates sharing a tiny cubicle with him in federal prison. His wife and two small children are biding time at his parents' home 80 miles away in Portland. His once-promising career as a women's college basketball coach is in ruins. But Abraham, 41, knows it could be much worse.

Skylar Deleon, charged with murdering an Arizona couple at sea, tried to cut off his penis with a razor blade while in Orange County Men's Central Jail awaiting trial, sheriff's officials said Friday. Deleon, 29, was hospitalized after the March 13 incident. His penis was reattached and he was returned to jail the next day, said Damon Micalizzi, a spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff's Department.

Death row inmate Richard Allen Davis, whose 1993 kidnap and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas led to California's three-strikes law, overdosed on opiates in his San Quentin Prison cell but was revived, officials said Monday. San Quentin Prison spokesman Vernell Crittendon said Davis was found unconscious in his cell at 5:13 p.m. Sunday.

Consider two takes on Christopher Hubbart, serial rapist. State psychologist No. 1: He is a bright, shy 43-year-old man who is trying to control his sexual urges, and is truly sorry for his 34 victims. State psychologist No. 2: He is dangerous, unable to control his sexual urges and can be counted on to rape again.

It was a joyous, tearful family reunion as Kevin Lee Green returned home Saturday after spending 17 years in custody for an Orange County murder that police now say he didn't commit. "I knew I wasn't guilty, and I tried to tell everyone that would listen I wasn't, and it didn't work," Green told television reporters. Vindication came Thursday, when a horrified legal system realized its error and granted freedom to the former Marine, who promptly flew to St.

One of the state's largest bail-bond companies has been indicted on 42 felony charges as part of a major statewide investigation of alleged corruption in the industry, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said Tuesday. The charges handed down in November by the Los Angeles County Grand Jury against San Jose-based Bad Boys Bail Bonds include perjury, forgery and offering false evidence.

Los Angeles County supervisors unanimously approved a plan Tuesday to study tearing down part of the Men's Central Jail and replacing it with a facility designed for mentally ill and drug-addicted prisoners. The new facility could save the county millions of dollars and offer inmates a better chance of rehabilitation, according to Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who proposed the idea. Yaroslavsky has opposed earlier plans to spend up to $1.4 billion to renovate or replace the Men's Central Jail and the adjacent Twin Towers Jail.

Immigration-related offenses are now the leading type of federal prosecution, constituting more than 40% of cases compared with 22% for drug crimes, according to federal crime data. Many immigrants are now prosecuted because they try to cross the border again after being deported, according to a report released Tuesday by Human Rights Watch. Often, they are so desperate to get back to their families in the United States that prison time is not a deterrent, the report said.

NEW DELHI - Myanmar President Thein Sein released some 20 political prisoners Friday, days before a historic summit with President Obama in Washington early next week, according to officials and prisoner rights groups. The ex-general's government denied that the releases were linked to the visit, and activist groups said the nation's leadership had not gone far enough. But the release follows last month's pardon of dozens of political prisoners - one day after the European Union agreed to end most economic sanctions against the former pariah state.

As if you didn't know this already, we're coddling criminals in America. By that I don't mean the petty drug dealers, three-strikes necklace-snatchers and other mooks filling up our state prisons; many of them are doing hard time. I'm talking about people like Jeff Skilling. Skilling, you may recall, was a key architect of the rise and fall of the energy and commodities trading firm Enron, which around the beginning of the last decade claimed the trophy for the biggest securities fraud of all time.

Felons released from prison are committing new crimes at roughly the same rate they did before Gov. Jerry Brown switched their supervision to county probation, but a new report says repeat offenses are up. The study, released by the state corrections department Thursday, holds that there is "very little difference between the one-year arrest and conviction rates of offenders released pre- and post-Realignment. " That was the message highlighted in a press statement from the corrections department.

Behind an unassuming storefront in Orange County's Little Saigon, prosecutors say, was the driving force behind an illicit international trade in rhinoceros horns. Vinh Chuong "Jimmy" Kha and Felix Kha may never have journeyed to the savannas of Africa, but by trafficking in hundreds of pounds of the prized horns that some Vietnamese and Chinese believe can cure cancer, the father and son were responsible for the hundreds of rhinos targeted by poachers, prosecutors said. "Their fingers might as well have been on the triggers of poachers' guns," Assistant U.S. Atty.

Kenneth Bianchi, one of the two Hillside Stranglers who terrorized Los Angeles in the late 1970s, has married his Louisiana pen pal after meeting her for the first time this week, prison officials said Friday in Walla Walla, Wash. Bianchi, 38, wore a black tuxedo and Shirlee Joyce Book, 36, of Monterey, La., wore a white wedding dress with a small veil during the 15-minute ceremony in the prison chapel Thursday morning, Washington State Penitentiary spokesman Richard Bauer said.

San Bernardino County officials have agreed to pay $25.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that said jailers conducted illegal strip searches, sometimes in front of inmates and deputies of the opposite sex. As many as 160,000 inmates may have been subjected to the searches over three years, attorneys for the plaintiffs said, and each could get several hundred dollars, depending on how many apply for the award.

Abel Maldonado, in his first public move since announcing that he was considering a run for governor, on Wednesday attacked Gov. Jerry Brown's prison policy, arguing that Brown has made Californians unsafe by allowing certain criminals serve their sentences in county jails instead of state prison. Maldonado, the state's former lieutenant governor, will announce Wednesday morning that he is spearheading an effort to put an initiative on the 2014 ballot that would roll back a 2011 bill - AB 109, known as “public-safety realignment” -- which was designed to reduce overcrowding in state prisons.

Gov. Jerry Brown has made it clear how unhappy he is about having to produce a plan to reduce the inmate population of California's prisons by another 9,000. Under the 2011 realignment law, the state has already lowered the prisoner count by 43,000 by diverting many would-be new prisoners to county jails and many would-be parole violators to county supervision. Besides, the governor has argued, the whole point of the court-imposed population cap - 137.5% of capacity - is to resolve serious problems with inmate medical and mental health care, and hasn't that already been done with an enormous new commitment of resources and treatment?