Sentencing

Rachael Mullenix, the Huntington Beach teenager who conspired with her love-struck boyfriend to murder her mother and dump the slashed body into Newport Harbor, expressed only grudging and limited remorse Friday as a judge sentenced her to 25 years to life in prison. "I don't care what the jury thought. I did not do that to my mother," Mullenix, 19, told Orange County Superior Court Judge David Thompson. "I can't even believe this is happening to me."

There will be no stops at the Barnes and Noble in Old Pasadena on this book tour. No lines of adoring fans will snake out of Book Soup to clog the sidewalks of the Sunset Strip. But people have been showing up in droves at Los Angeles' tiniest bookstores to see first-time author Melvin Farmer, one of the few people in California to get a three-strikes conviction overturned.

The crime: Another violent, small-change urban robbery. The criminals: Two rural teen-age Alaska Indians. The punishment: Banishment for one year on uninhabited islands with only hand tools and a little food. And for the victim: A new house. This experiment in cross-cultural jurisprudence was set in motion in a Washington state courtroom this week when a judge agreed to give old-fashioned tribal justice a chance to make right for all those involved.

An Orange lawyer convicted of stealing from his clients to pay his gambling debts was sentenced Friday to eight years in state prison and ordered to repay more than $300,000 to his victims. After asking unsuccessfully to delay sentencing for two weeks so he could care for his ailing wife, who was also convicted in the thefts, attorney Leonard Basinger, 56, was taken into custody in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana.

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist was sentenced to up to a year in jail for molesting a 16-year-old boy, one of dozens of children he had brought to live with him from the Pacific islands. Dr. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, 73, pleaded guilty in Frederick, Md., to two counts of child abuse. The young man, now 24, came from Micronesia in 1987. Gajdusek won the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on "slow viruses" that lie dormant before attacking the body.

It's fast becoming the money-laundering method of choice for Mexican drug traffickers, U.S. and Mexican officials say, and it involves truckloads not of cash, but of fruit and fabric. Faced with new restrictions on the use of U.S. cash in Mexico, drug cartels are using an ingenious scheme to move their ill-gotten dollars south under the guise of legitimate cross-border commerce. U.S. and Mexican authorities say trade-based money-laundering may be the most clever — and hardest to detect — way in which traffickers are washing and distributing their billion-dollar profits.

A local man was sentenced this week to nine months in jail for abusing his girlfriend's two daughters in a case that a social worker described as the worst mental suffering by children she has seen in 10 years. A jury last month found 39-year-old Josef Burnett Cannon guilty of four counts of inflicting physical pain or mental suffering on a child and two counts of inflicting cruel or inhuman corporal punishment on a child.

A former Brentwood doctor was sentenced to 13 years in prison Monday for sexually assaulting four female patients, including two women who were patients at a Panorama City clinic. Superior Court Judge Charles Horan imposed the sentence on Yahya Lavi, 56, during a hearing in Downtown Los Angeles, despite pleas by prosecutors to impose a tougher 37-year prison term. Deputy Dist. Atty.

A Newport Beach woman who arranged for a former NFL player to kill her wealthy boyfriend in a 1994 plot to collect $1 million in insurance money was sentenced Friday to life in prison. But sentencing for onetime New England Patriot linebacker Eric Naposki was continued to Aug. 10 after he refused to leave his courthouse holding cell. The prosecutor called Naposki's actions "a final blaze of no class and cowardice" by the man who fired six gunshots into the chest of Bill McLaughlin, who died in his Balboa Coves home.

An identical twin whose plot to kill her sister made headlines around the world proclaimed her innocence and then sobbed uncontrollably Friday as a judge sentenced her to 26 years to life in prison. Despite an emotional, last-minute plea for leniency, Jeen "Gina" Han, whom police had dubbed "the evil twin," received the maximum sentence in a bizarre case that many have likened to a television movie of the week. Orange County Superior Court Judge Eileen C.