Raping

A Midway City man was sentenced Friday to 30 years to life in prison for sexually assaulting two teenage girls; one at a youth camp, the other in his printing office. Huy Ngoc Nguyen, believed to be 41, was convicted earlier this year of forcibly raping a 17-year-old and performing a lewd act on a 13-year-old. Nguyen had asked the older girl out on a date after meeting her through a mutual friend in 2004, prosecutors said. Instead, they said, he took her to his Midway City office where he raped her in a locked room.

A Contra Costa County jury says a serial rapist should get a second death sentence, this time for the 1978 slaying of a Lafayette woman. Darryl Kemp was convicted earlier this month of raping and murdering 40-year-old Armida Wiltsey, who never returned from a jog at the Lafayette Reservoir. The case went cold for decades, until DNA linked Kemp to the murder in 2005. At the time, he was serving a life sentence for three Texas rapes. The 72-year-old Kemp previously was sentenced to death for the 1959 murder of a Los Angeles woman, but that sentence was commuted to life in prison when California suspended the death penalty in 1972.

Beverly Hills fashion designer Anand Jon Alexander dropped his high-powered team of defense lawyers on Monday and began acting as his own attorney in the run-up to his sentencing next month on sexual assault charges. Alexander told Superior Court Judge David S. Wesley that he is seeking more materials from prosecutors before his Aug. 31 sentencing. The Indian-born designer, who goes by the professional name Anand Jon, was convicted last year of raping one woman and sexually assaulting six other girls and young women.

I found the attempt of death metal music group Slayer and Sony Music to use the 1st Amendment to shield themselves from liability to a murder victim's family both disingenuous and disgusting ["Murder Case Spotlights Marketing of Violent Lyrics," Jan. 21]. What Sony's attorneys refuse to recognize is that freedom of speech has limits and that there is no absolute right to market obscenity to minors. Our founding fathers certainly did not intend to protect immature, irresponsible freaks who sing about killing a virgin and raping her corpse and market their "art" to drugged-out, disillusioned teenage boys--who then emulate those lyrics at the expense of an innocent young girl's life--and laugh all the way to the bank.

Reporting from San Francisco -- There are graphic details of her years as a sex slave, descriptions so unsettling that a judge has refused to make much of Jaycee Lee Dugard's grand jury testimony public. There are chapters dedicated to her life today — a mix of intensive therapy and simple pleasures, of healing from 18 years as a captive and seeing her teenage daughters blossom, finally, in freedom. But while Dugard's memoir "A Stolen Life" chronicles her growth from victim to survivor, from terror to strength, it also is an indictment of the parole system and a meditation on loneliness.

SAN DIEGO - Musicals are supposed to raise your spirits and warm your heart, right? Not necessarily. And certainly not in the case of "The Scottsboro Boys," the fearlessly inventive show about one of the most notorious episodes of racial injustice in America. It disturbs audiences as much as it entertains them. Who else but Kander & Ebb could pull off such a daring combination? Best known for "Cabaret" and "Chicago," John Kander and Fred Ebb were masters of "the concept musical," and "The Scottsboro Boys," created with book writer David Thompson and completed after the death of Ebb in 2004, is arguably the duo's most audacious crack at the form.

As 14-year-old Jaycee Dugard struggled in a crude backyard shed to deliver her baby daughter, the serial predator who had abducted and raped her stepped in to unwrap the umbilical cord that trapped the infant. "She was beautiful," Dugard said of the child she birthed three years into her captivity in Northern California. "I felt like I wasn't alone anymore. I knew I could never let anything happen to her. " In an exclusive interview with Diane Sawyer broadcast Sunday on ABC, Dugard, displaying remarkable poise and smiling often, provided chilling details about the 18-year ordeal she endured at the hands of her captors, an increasingly deranged parolee named Phillip Garrido and his wife, Nancy, who aided the abduction and condoned his rapes.