In a quartet of cases, the California Supreme Court last week made its first rulings interpreting the state’s Racial Justice Act (RJA), a landmark statute designed to eradicate racial bias from criminal prosecutions. Among its rulings, the court overturned a death sentence imposed after a prosecutor compared the defendant, a Black man, to a “Bengal tiger.” But otherwise, two justices argued, the court narrowed the law’s protections — raising the bar for RJA violations and allowing “harmless” violations to go unremedied — in ways contrary to the statute’s text and broad remedial purpose.

(Subscription required) After a 33-year career as a Los Angeles County prosecutor, Judge Georgia A. Huerta achieved a longtime goal of joining the bench. Now she's presiding over unlawful detainer cases in West Covina.

President Donald Trump’s agenda looms large at the Supreme Court as the justices prepare to ink rulings on mail-in ballots, executive branch firings and immigration.

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.