Nota Bene

The Daily Breeze reports:

Pressured by the city auditor and women’s groups, Los Angeles city officials pledged Tuesday to spend $2.5 million a year to clear up a backlog of more than 7,000 rape cases by hiring more technicians and outsourcing some work to private labs.

“All victims of rape deserve justice. All rapists deserve prison,” Police Chief William Bratton said at a City Hall news conference with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and City Council members to announce the plan.

Villaraigosa, who has made public safety one of his top priorities, said he found extra money to hire the technicians, or criminalists, for the Los Angeles Police Department crime lab by working with unions to save money on health costs.

The City Council today is scheduled to consider the first part of the funding, a nearly $1 million program that will hire 10 technicians and six support staff and authorize $250,000 to pay for work by private labs.

Under the full program, 16 scientists and technicians will be hired every six months - as quickly as they can be trained - for the next 2-1/2 years.

The first work will be done on the oldest DNA rape kits to try to avoid any problems with the statute of limitations.

City Controller Laura Chick, in a scathing audit last week, said more than 200 cases had to be abandoned because of failure to process kits in a timely fashion. She has said she wants to see a three-year program to clear up the backlog.

The EFF reports:

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger yesterday signed Assembly Bill 2433 and filled a significant gap in protection for anonymous speech online. Authored by Assemblymember Paul Krekorian and co-sponsored by EFF, the California Anti-SLAPP Project and the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the new law allows speakers who successfully oppose the use of bogus out-of-state litigation to obtain their identities to recover attorneys’ fees. Assemblymembers Sally Lieber and Anthony Portantino co-authored the bill.

The AP reports:

O.J. Simpson is being isolated from other prisoners for his own safety, and is focusing on a motion for new trial and a strong bid for appellate reversal of his conviction for kidnapping and robbery, his lawyer said Sunday.

Attorney Yale Galanter told The Associated Press he will continue to pursue a request for Simpson to be released on bond pending appeal.

Meanwhile, Galanter said Simpson will be living a lonely life, advised by his lawyers to do no media interviews and allowed to see only family members and a few friends placed on a special list at the jail.

The LA Times reports:

The phone rang at a rare moment between Angie Akins’ frantic drives from her home and her husband’s bedside in an intensive-care unit, between shuttling to her job and driving her 14-year-old daughter to after-school sports and ballet.

It was a lawyer who’d spotted her husband’s name among those badly injured in the Sept. 12 Metrolink crash in Chatsworth. An attorney she had never met was urging her to retain him and sue the government railroad for all it was worth. Only a week had passed since her comfortable suburban life had been upended by tragedy.

“I didn’t even write down the name, I was so upset at the time,” Akins recalled. “I said I couldn’t think about a lawsuit now when my husband might be dying!”