Div. Six of this district’s Court of Appeal has held that hospitals enjoy broad immunity from claims relating to actions taken by mentally ill patients after their release from an involuntary period of in-patient psychiatric treatment, rejecting the assertion by the parents of a man who killed himself hours after he was set free from a Ventura County hospital, over their protestations, that an exception exists for cases of gross negligence.

Div. One of the Fourth District Court of Appeal held yesterday that the warrantless search of a parked vehicle, which contained a shooting target and loose high-powered rifle ammunition visible in the back seat as well as a tactical vest in plain view through the partially-open lid to the rear compartment, was violative of the Fourth Amendment, drawing dissent over the circumstances under which a party can be said to have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

President Donald Trump’s Justice Department initially filed lawsuits seeking the records from hospitals nationwide, but nearly a dozen federal judges rejected their suits. In response, attorney Shannon Minter of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights said, the department then quietly opened criminal investigations and threatened to prosecute hospitals that did not release their records by this Wednesday.

Farid, a UC Berkeley computer science professor who recently departed to teach at Dartmouth, is best known for his work as a deepfake detective, analyzing videos and images for traces of manipulation by digital or AI tools. Over the past year, deepfake content has grown at a rate of roughly 900%, according to the cybersecurity firm Deepstrike, driven by the rise of generative AI apps like ChatGPT, Gemini, ElevenLabs and Google’s Veo 3.