(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.

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.