Div. Eight of this district’s Court of Appeal has affirmed the conviction of a man who was accused of committing a carjacking that occurred just after he crashed his own vehicle into a freeway barrier, rejecting his contention that a judge erred in failing to instruct on an “unconsciousness” defense based on witness testimony indicating that the suspect had a gash to his head, was repeating himself, and had insisted the victim’s car was his own.

The Legislature last week passed a bill that would prohibit law enforcement agencies from targeting certain people under age 26 in so-called Perkins operations, which involve undercover agents posing as incarcerated people to elicit incriminating information from suspects. Ten cases are lined up at the California Supreme Court in which people targeted in Perkins operations are challenging their convictions.

A first-of-its-kind law­suit chal­leng­ing California’s death penal­ty on sys­temic racial grounds has cleared an ini­tial hur­dle at the California Supreme Court and is now head­ed to an evi­den­tiary hear­ing in Sacramento Superior Court, accord­ing to report­ing from the Washington Post. The suit argues that California’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment statute is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al because of the racial dis­par­i­ties in how it operates statewide.

A wealth adviser who gambled with the portfolio of a client, now age 90, and caused assets to dwindle from a value of $2,616,421 in August 2019 to $475,099.23 in December 2020, can be held liable for financial elder abuse though he did not pocket any of the property, Div. One of this district’s Court of Appeal has declared in affirming a $6 million award plus three-quarters of a million dollars in attorney fees.