Self Representation

Tossing a legal hand grenade into an already-contentious case, celebrity sleuth Anthony Pellicano on Friday demanded and won the right to act as his own lawyer in his upcoming trial on wiretapping and racketeering charges. U.S. District Judge Dale S. Fischer tried to talk Pellicano out of his plan, but he would not relent. "I urge you to let me appoint counsel for you," Fischer implored in federal court in downtown Los Angeles. "You're very kind, your honor, but no, thank you," Pellicano said.

Days after persuading a judge to let him represent himself at trial, indicted private investigator Anthony Pellicano is again poised to use private lawyers in his defense against federal charges of racketeering and wiretapping. San Francisco attorney Steven F. Gruel said Tuesday that he and Los Angeles lawyer Michael Artan hoped to be named Pellicano's counsel. A judge granted Pellicano permission to represent himself 12 days ago.

Roxanne Velasquez said she was feeding her 1-year-old son, Evan, and chuckling at the little dabs of food smeared across his face when a knock on the door interrupted dinner. It was a man from the court with an eviction notice. The next day, she and her boyfriend, Edgar Rodriguez, walked into the Van Nuys Self-Help Legal Access Center. If they had any hope of staying in their apartment, they would have to file a response to their landlord within days.

Iraqi legislators have changed the rules for the forthcoming trial of Saddam Hussein, preventing the deposed president from representing himself, according to documents provided to the Los Angeles Times. Under the original rules for the trial, adopted in December 2003 when U.S. officials were running the country, Hussein was permitted "to defend himself in person or through legal assistance of his own choosing."

A Los Angeles man who was sentenced to death after confessing to murder and other crimes won a rare reprieve Thursday from the California Supreme Court, which held that he was wrongly denied the right to represent himself during his trial. The state high court ruled unanimously that a Los Angeles judge erred when he summarily denied Omar Dent III's request to act as his own lawyer during his trial on charges of murder, attempted murder, robbery and kidnapping.

Corsicans narrowly rejected a referendum to grant the island more autonomy from France -- a change the national government had hoped would quell decades of separatist violence. Successive governments have struggled to end a campaign by Corsican separatists for more autonomy from the mainland. The violence started in the 1970s and has mainly taken the form of bombings in empty buildings. The hilly Mediterranean island -- Napoleon's birthplace -- has been part of France since 1768.

President Clinton today went further than any president has gone before in publicly opposing the independence of Taiwan, giving Beijing the visible commitment it has long sought that America will not support Taiwan's quest for international recognition or its readmission to the United Nations.

A new president for postwar Chechnya was sworn in Wednesday, in a ceremony that marked a formal end to two years of war with Russia's armies in the separatist southern republic but that a grumpy Moscow still treated with scant grace. In the Chechen capital of Grozny, Aslan Maskhadov, a moderate whom Russia has grudgingly accepted as the least objectionable of the military leaders who defeated Moscow's troops, swore his presidential oath on the Koran.

East Walnut Street in Pasadena is a long way from the downtown nerve center of Los Angeles County's criminal justice system. And 36-year-old Louis Francis, a three-time convicted robber, is neither a celebrity who draws television cameras nor a poster boy of the civil liberties crowd. But when he arrived in Department J of Pasadena's Superior Court on Thursday morning, mounting a prickly defense on his own behalf, the case of the People vs. Francis offered both theater and consequence.

A routine court hearing erupted into a verbal duel Wednesday between Montana "freemen" disciple M. Elizabeth Broderick of Palmdale and the federal judge who will preside over her trial on fraud and conspiracy charges. "I'm putting you on notice that you are proceeding without jurisdiction or venue," said Broderick, who claims she has renounced her U.S. citizenship and need not answer to the federal government.