The complex legal battle for ex-San Francisco 49ers star Dana Stubblefield — who six years ago was imprisoned after a rape conviction and later got it overturned on appeal — entered a new phase this summer after the state Supreme Court vacated the reversal and ordered that it be re-evaluated under new case law. Now the 6th District Court of Appeal, which overturned Stubblefield’s conviction in 2024, must assess whether racially prejudicial language that a prosecutor gave in his closing arguments during the 2020 trial was a “harmless error” or if it unfairly swayed a jury. 

(Subscription required) Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Susan J. Townsend draws on lessons learned from her immigrant parents, nearly two decades as a prosecutor and years of community work as she balances accountability with second chances. 

Tarzana attorney Michael J. Libman has been disbarred for his role in purportedly conspiring with lawyers inside the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office to initiate a “friendly” class-action lawsuit against the municipality over the Department of Water and Power’s 2013 rollout of a new problem-riddled billing system and allegations that he hired Israeli operatives to hack into personal accounts of a Los Angeles Superior Court judge.

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.