Testimony

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

It was the end of a long day in a stuffy Simi Valley office building. Ann Romney had been under oath for more than four hours, testifying in a sometimes contentious deposition about a pricey horse she sold that may or may not have been afflicted with a condition that made him unrideable. In the airless room, Romney was getting annoyed. "That really is - that really is irritating," she said when the opposing attorney implied she didn't know who looked after her horse in Moorpark when she was at her home in Boston.

During testimony regarding development of oil and gas reserves at the Point Thomson field, lawmakers questioned the accuracy of geologic studies presented by the state. Most of the data on which the studies are based are incomplete and come directly from Exxon Mobil Corp. The oil company gathered the data more than 20 years ago but has not drilled a new well since 1982, according to testimony. "How can we make a good decision about Point Thomson if the data is not good?" said state Sen. Bill Wielechowski (D-Anchorage)

Los Angeles County Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey gave conflicting testimony under oath during two union grievance hearings, attributing the contradiction to being confused and having problems with her blood sugar level, according to transcripts reviewed by The Times. Lacey, who is running for district attorney and has won major endorsements from newspapers, including The Times, testified under oath in 2009 and 2010 as part of a county employment dispute in which the union representing prosecutors accused the district attorney's office of retaliating against its officers.

An immigration raid in which nearly 400 people were arrested scarred a small town and tore families apart, residents told a visiting congressional delegation. The May raid in Postville -- at Agriprocessors, the nation's largest kosher meatpacking plant, by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials -- was the largest of its kind in U.S. history. Reps. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), Albio Sires (D-N.J.) and Joe Baca (D-Rialto), members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, heard three hours of often emotional testimony.

Randall Dale Adams, a former death row inmate who gained freedom after flaws in his conviction for the murder of a Dallas policeman were exposed in a critically acclaimed documentary, has died. He was 61. Adams died Oct. 30, 2010, of a brain tumor, according to his attorney Randy Schaffer, who said he was told by Adams' relatives. Adams had been living quietly in the Ohio city of Washington Court House. His death did not become widely known until Friday, when it was reported by The Dallas Morning News.

Until last month, the strongest evidence in drug and drunk driving cases in courtrooms across the nation often was a piece of paper. A crime lab or Breathalyzer report would confirm that the defendant indeed had illegal drugs or a high level of alcohol in his or her system. But a Supreme Court decision has sent a jolt through that procedure. Now the prosecution must make a lab technician available to testify in person if the defendant demands it.

After a jury favoring acquittal failed to reach a unanimous verdict, a judge declared a mistrial Wednesday for Gregory Diles, a former bodyguard accused of participating in the 1981 Laurel Canyon murders. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Curtis Rappe "reluctantly" excused the panel after each agreed with the foreman that further deliberations would not be fruitful. The jury had deadlocked 10 to 2 in favor of acquittal.

The star witness of Georgia's sheriff-killing-sheriff trial took the stand Wednesday and offered a chilling picture of what happened the night Derwin Brown was assassinated. Patrick Cuffy, who was a hit man turned informant, said that two gunmen were hiding in the bushes, he was in a car and another accomplice was down the street -- all ready to spring -- when recently elected Sheriff Brown came trotting up his driveway, arms full of presents and red roses for his wife.

Vicki Rock remembers how the fight started. When she wanted to go out for a hamburger on a hot July Arkansas night, her husband blocked the door and bounced her off a wall. She also remembers picking up his loaded gun lying next to a beer can on the kitchen table. What happened next, she told police, was a blank. The next thing she remembered was calling for an ambulance as her husband lay dying on the floor, a bullet wound in his chest. To refresh her memory, her lawyer had her hypnotized.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - The jurors who will decide the fate of former presidential candidate John Edwards deliberated for more than four hours Friday before breaking for the weekend in a trial focused on complex campaign finance laws and lurid details of Edwards' extramarital affair. The jury of eight men and four women must decide whether Edwards knowingly conspired to violate federal election laws as part of a scheme to cover up his affair with videographer Rielle Hunter during his campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - Lawyers for John Edwards spent their second day of defense testimony Tuesday trying to discredit the chief witness against him while also seeking to prove that money paid to support Edwards' mistress constituted private gifts and not illegal campaign contributions. A former FBI agent hired by Edwards' lawyers to investigate money spent by the witness, former aide Andrew Young, testified that Young and his wife claimed they had spent money to support the mistress when in fact they spent much of it on themselves.

Dr. David Heimbach knows how to tell a story. Before California lawmakers last year, the noted burn surgeon drew gasps from the crowd as he described a 7-week-old baby girl who was burned in a fire started by a candle while she lay on a pillow that lacked flame retardant chemicals. "Now this is a tiny little person, no bigger than my Italian greyhound at home," said Heimbach, gesturing to approximate the baby's size. "Half of her body was severely burned. She ultimately died after about three weeks of pain and misery in the hospital.

Jon Fitzgerald's documentary "The Highest Pass" ventures from Rishikesh in northern India up and up into the Himalayas to track six men and one woman - all Westerners - as they follow a 27-year-old yogi in a motorcycle caravan to the highest drivable road in the world. For the team, one of whom (narrator-writer Adam Schomer) has just learned how to ride a motorcycle in the weeks prior, the excursion seems a little more daring than usual since Anand Mehrotra, their handsome guide, has never made the pilgrimage himself.

When filmmaker Sofia Coppola set out to tell the story of the "bling ring," she wanted the movie to have an authentic, docudrama sensibility. So the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola reached out to the Los Angeles Police Department investigator who cracked the case of the starry-eyed youths from the San Fernando Valley. Four years ago, their lust for stardom and money led them to raid the homes of young Hollywood, making off with Paris Hilton's designer clothes and Lindsay Lohan's artwork.

SAN FRANCISCO - Larry Page, the co-founder of Google Inc. who returned as its chief executive one year ago, has commanded respect for making decisive, bold moves to recharge the search giant. But the usually self-assured Page appeared uncomfortable on the witness stand Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. He was there to dispute allegations that his company infringed Oracle Corp.'s patents and copyrights to build its Android mobile software, which now powers more than 300 million mobile devices.

Sen. Robert Krueger (D-Tex.) and his wife, Kathleen, have lived in fear for eight years. They have picked up the phone to hear a former campaign worker screaming obscenities or making death threats. They have heard the man pounding at the family door or endlessly ringing the doorbell. And they have found terrifying notes in their mailbox. The former worker is now in jail for the third time.

Revealing for jurors the secrets he first heard nearly four years ago, Beverly Hills psychologist L. Jerome Oziel testified Wednesday that Lyle and Erik Menendez confessed to killing their parents out of hatred and considered it the "perfect crime." Oziel said the brothers told him they decided the week before to kill Jose and Kitty Menendez and that it was Erik Menendez who burst first into the TV room of the family's $4-million Beverly Hills mansion and shot his father.

He joined the Marines to become a killer, police said, and studied anatomy to be swift and effective. And he set a goal — 16 slayings, if possible — of becoming one of America's prolific killers. "I knew that I had the killer gene," Itzcoatl Ocampo told detectives. The chilling portrait of the accused Orange County serial killer emerges in a grand jury transcript that offers the most detailed look yet at the prosecution's case against the 23-year-old Yorba Linda man and his alleged "serial thrill-kill" rampage that left six people dead, including four homeless men. Anaheim Police Det. Daron Wyatt told grand jurors that Ocampo's "demeanor would change, and he seemed to get excited" as he described the attacks to police after his arrest in January.

"America's toughest sheriff" is facing a new threat of punishment in the death of a mentally ill jail inmate forced to don pink underwear. The jail dress code imposed by Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., so traumatized schizophrenic detainee Eric Vogel that it may have caused his death from heart failure, two coroner's officials concluded, and their testimony should have been presented to a jury that rejected a wrongful death claim in...