Prosecution

The husband of a woman whose burning body was found this week in a backyard near Compton will not be prosecuted, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said Friday. Ted Perez, 30, of Rowland Heights was arrested Wednesday after the body of his wife, Rachel Perez, 29, was found. The victim's daughter, Quiana Marie Cortinez, had been set afire. She remains in critical condition at County-USC Medical Center.

After weeks of being comatose and near death, Keon Ja Lee is slowly improving. She is awake, can communicate a little with doctors and is able to follow simple commands. What she is not capable of doing is standing trial--or paying her medical bills. Lee's brain damage was caused when she tried to hang herself in the County Jail, and the severity of her condition has created a strange inversion of the criminal justice system. County prosecutors have considered dropping charges that the Rancho Penasquitos woman attempted to murder her son, a decision that would relieve the Sheriff's Department of the cost of her custody.

Without even hinting at a motive after four days of testimony, the prosecution closed its case Thursday against the Vietnamese student charged with murder in the death of Cal State Fullerton physicist Edward Lee Cooperman. Deputy Dist. Atty. Mel Jensen's final witness Thursday morning was Klaaske Cooperman, the professor's widow, who said her husband had been worried he might be the victim of a political assassination.

Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old Internet genius, was eulogized on Tuesday as a person who wanted to make the world better but was hounded into killing himself by harsh government policies. Swartz was “killed by the government,” his father, Robert Swartz, said at the service at Central Avenue Synagogue in Highland Park, Ill., according to the Chicago Sun-Times . “He was killed by the government, and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles,” he said. Facing the possibility of a long prison sentence if convicted of charges that he illegally downloaded millions of academic journal articles, Swartz hanged himself in his New York apartment Friday.

The California Supreme Court, strongly reaffirming a state law designed to aid prosecution of rape cases, ruled Thursday that a victim does not need to show she resisted her assailant. The justices unanimously reversed a controversial appellate court decision that, they said, erroneously relied on the victim's lack of resistance in overturning a rape conviction. The high court said that in amending rape laws in 1980, the Legislature had clearly intended to remove the requirement of resistance.

Legal advocates for the poor, elderly and disabled secured a $500-million class-action settlement Tuesday for as many as 200,000 people whose Social Security benefits were suspended on unfounded suspicions that they were fleeing prosecution. The suspensions, dating back nearly a decade in some instances, were ordered in cases of mistaken identity or outstanding warrants for offenses such as bounced checks or traffic violations. "Virtually none" of the Social Security recipients who were cut off after their names were matched with those in a computerized warrant database were felons using their government benefits to evade law enforcement or prosecution, said Gerald McIntyre, an attorney for the National Senior Citizens Law Center.

Aaron Swartz may change the Internet yet again, even in death, with the help of lawmakers who have expressed a fondness for breaking the law. At a Washington, D.C., memorial Monday night, members of Congress and loved ones gathered to remember Swartz, who committed suicide on Jan. 11 while facing years in prison for mass-downloading scholarly articles. Swartz had already reshaped the Web experiences of millions by co-creating Reddit and the information-distribution service RSS. By turns, speakers at the Cannon House Office Building compared Swartz to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Apple founder Steve Jobs, and 20th century British programmer Alan Turing -- with Swartz as yet another cybergenius whose ambitions carried him to the law's edge.

The portrait of Michael Jackson's doctor that emerged from the first week of his manslaughter trial in the King of Pop's death had many faces. Was Conrad Murray the doctor who called patients "friends" and returned their calls no matter the hour? Or was he the doctor who talked on the phone while one of them died? Was he the one who cared for the poor when they couldn't pay? Or the one who demanded $5 million for his services? Was he the man who saved lives or the one who took the most prominent life entrusted to him?

George Damaa awoke after a seven-day coma in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in 1995, his body shattered for reasons he couldn't remember. The last thing he recalled was driving up Pacific Coast Highway on a warm Saturday in February with the top down on his sports car and his girlfriend, Lisa Bucher, in the passenger seat. They were headed to the former PierView Cafe & Cantina in Malibu, one of Damaa's favorite restaurants. As he lay in the hospital, he learned that his pelvis was broken.

An Orange County Superior Court jury will begin deliberations Wednesday in the case of 10 Muslim students accused of illegally disrupting a speech by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren last year at UC Irvine. Jurors listened to two days of closing statements before being given the so-called Irvine 11 case late Tuesday. Those deliberations are expected to last one to two days. Each of the 10 defendants — seven from UC Irvine and three from UC Riverside — are charged with a misdemeanor for conspiring to disrupt Oren's speech on Feb. 8, 2010, and a misdemeanor for disrupting it. Charges against an 11th student were dropped pending completion of community service.