Div. Three of the Fourth District Court of Appeal has imposed a $5,000 sanction on a lawyer who sought a writ aimed at postponing a trial based on a supposed conflict with the starting date of another proceeding without telling the justices that problem had been remedied.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has scored two victories in the Third District Court of Appeal, with the justices holding, as they have in the past, that ballot proposition descriptions need only be non-misleading, not precise.

A divided California Supreme Court yesterday upheld the judgment of death and conviction of a man accused of hiring a friend to kill an elderly couple while they slept because he wanted to gain control of the husband’s aerospace hardware business, rejecting the assertion that the prosecutor violated the state and federal Constitutions by exercising peremptory challenges against Black potential jurors.

A new California Supreme Court ruling changes what happens when a court reporter is unavailable, allowing courts to use electronic recordings to ensure some low-income civil litigants can obtain a verbatim record for an appeal.