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From Los Angeles Times

Early release proposed for crack cocaine offenders

Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. backs an early release proposal to retroactively correct sentence disparities between crack and powder cocaine offenders. The plan, which would apply to 5,500 prisoners, would take effect Nov. 1.

by Richard A. Serrano, David G. Savage and Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

June 1, 2011

Reporting from Washington and Los Angeles

Thousands of federal prisoners could have an average of three years shaved off their prison terms to correct wide disparities in sentences between crack and powder cocaine offenders, under a proposal supported by Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr.

More than 12,000 federal prisoners — nearly 6% of the inmates in the badly overcrowded U.S. prison system — could be affected. But Holder recommended Wednesday that the early release be applied to only 5,500 prisoners, whose crimes did not involve the use of weapons and who did not have long criminal histories. The releases could begin later this year.

The proposal is intended to remedy a legacy of the war on drugs that meted out much harsher sentences to crack cocaine users, who are mostly black, than to powder cocaine users, often white and sometimes affluent. Congress changed the sentencing law last year but did not address the fate of thousands of prisoners already sentenced under the old system or arrested just before the law was changed.

The proposal under consideration by the U.S. Sentencing Commission comes after a divided Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates. It drew immediate fire from some prominent conservatives.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said he was "disappointed by the Obama administration's position" on early releases for drug offenders and indicated he might push Congress to intervene if the U.S. Sentencing Commission votes to make the changes this month that would take effect Nov. 1. "It shows they are more concerned with the well-being of criminals than with the safety of our communities."

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it was a "bad idea" and that "I strongly disagree" with Holder's recommendations.

But blocking the move would be an uphill battle. To stop the sentence reductions, opponents would have to introduce a bill rejecting the early releases and the House and Senate would have to pass that legislation and send it to the White House for President Obama's signature — an unlikely sequence. Smith was the only lawmaker to speak against the change in the law last year.

"I would be extremely surprised if Congress got worked up about this," said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington group that pushes for reform in sentencing laws. "The law that was passed last year had strong bipartisan support and it's within the commission's authority to make sentencing guideline changes retroactive."

The number of prisoners who stand to benefit in California is relatively small, fewer than 300, because prosecutors have targeted drug gangs rather than individual dealers.

In testimony before the commission, Holder said his years as a federal prosecutor, federal judge and, now, the country's top law enforcement officer "compelled" him to seek equity between an offender convicted in a crack case and someone serving a shorter term for powder cocaine.

"There is simply no just or logical reason why their punishments should be dramatically more severe than those of other cocaine offenders," Holder said.

The six-member commission, presidential appointees comprising federal judges, lawyers and academics, are expected to vote later this month on amending the Fair Sentencing Act to grant the reprieves retroactively.

The commission has received 37,000 letters and emails on the subject, the majority of them from prisoners and their families who support early releases and equity between crack and powder cocaine offenders.

Mauer, who also testified at Wednesday's commission hearing, said the average crack offender would see a reduction of 37 months in his sentence.

The relief is justified, he said, because there is "no meaningful pharmacological difference between the two drugs" and "large percentages" of low-level crack dealers are serving long sentences designed for serious traffickers.

He added that the crack versus powder cocaine disparity particularly affects African Americans, who account for 82% of those convicted for federal crack offenses.

"For many African Americans," Mauer said, "this fundamental unfairness has undermined the legitimacy of the criminal justice system."

If the amendments are approved and become effective Nov. 1, prisoners or their attorneys can petition their sentencing judges for an early release, commission officials said. Or the judge or the director of the Bureau of Prisons could act unilaterally.

In the past, some judges have readily agreed to lower prison terms in response to changes in the sentencing guidelines. Others have been reluctant to do so.

"This process will be coordinated among the courts, probation offices, U.S. attorneys offices and the federal public defenders service," said Jeanne Doherty, a commission spokeswoman.

The harsh punishments for crack cocaine were rooted in the mid-1980s, when the epidemic of crack cocaine swept through major cities. Legislation was rushed through Congress in the weeks before the 1986 election and resulted in a series of penalties that has haunted judges, lawyers, prison wardens and untold families since.

Without time to study the issue, Congress wrote into law specific penalties for different versions of the same drug. Someone caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine or 5 grams of crack cocaine would get five years in prison. Possession of 5,000 grams of powder cocaine called for a mandatory 10-year term. The same was true for 50 grams of crack cocaine.

This 100-to-1 ratio based on the weight of powder and crack cocaine was adopted in the U.S. sentencing guidelines, and it has been used for deciding prison terms for more than 91,000 inmates since.

After years of growing criticism, Congress voted last year to change the ratio to 18 to 1. The law called for less severe prison terms for newly convicted defendants. However, it did not say what should happen to those already sentenced to long terms under the now-repealed ratio, and left it open for the commission to make available retroactive reductions.

In the Central District of California, which covers Los Angeles and six other counties, 138 prisoners would be eligible for relief.

Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles, said that although each of the 94 federal prosecution offices nationwide had its own guidelines about what cases to bring, "in the area of narcotics, we like to focus our resources on drug trafficking organizations as opposed to a guy selling a rock."

California state prisoners serving time for cocaine offenses won't be affected by federal sentencing reductions and disparities in the state system are fewer.

Carl Gunn of the federal public defender's office in Los Angeles said the proposed federal sentence reductions were a step in the right direction but that they did not go far enough to correct the injustice of a law that so severely punishes users of one form of the drug and not others.

"There are still a lot of people out there suffering the ill effects of a horribly unjust law," he said of the thousands of other federal prisoners sentenced to mandatory minimums that cannot be lifted by the sentencing commission.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-holder-crack-20110602,0,4134707,print.story

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High-profile panel urges non-criminal approach to world drug policy

The report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which includes former U.N. chief Kofi Annan and past presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, was swiftly dismissed by the U.S. and Mexico.

by Ken Ellingwood and Brian Bennett, Los Angeles Times

June 1, 2011

Reporting from Mexico City and Washington

Calling the global war on drugs a costly failure, a group of high-profile world leaders is urging the Obama administration and other governments to end "the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but do no harm to others."

A report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which includes former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and past presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, recommends that governments try new ways of legalizing and regulating drugs, especially marijuana, as a way to deny profits to drug cartels.

The recommendation was swiftly dismissed by the Obama administration and the government of Mexico, which are allied in a violent 4 1/2 -year-old crackdown on cartels that has killed more than 38,000 people in Mexico.

"The U.S. needs to open a debate," former Colombian President Cesar Gaviria, a member of the panel, said by telephone from New York, where the report is scheduled to be released Thursday. "When you have 40 years of a policy that is not bringing results, you have to ask if it's time to change it."

An advance copy of the report was provided to The Times.

Three of the report's Latin American signatories, Gaviria and former Presidents Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, made similar recommendations two years ago. Their views failed to change the enforcement-based approach that dominates drug policies worldwide.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, a conservative, has made the battle against drug cartels a centerpiece of his administration. Although the growing death toll has stirred widespread public dismay in Mexico, Calderon shows no sign of turning back before his six-year term ends next year. A poll on security matters released Wednesday found broad public opposition in Mexico to legalizing drug sales.

The U.S. government has backed the Mexican crackdown with law enforcement equipment, training and encouraging words from President Obama.

"Making drugs more available — as this report suggests — will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe," said Rafael Lemaitre, spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Although the Obama administration has emphasized a "public health" approach to drug policy, officials have taken a hard line against legalization.

"Legalizing dangerous drugs would be a profound mistake, leading to more use, and more harmful consequences," drug czar Gil Kerlikowske said this year.

Administration officials dispute the idea that nothing can be done to reduce the demand for drugs in the United States. A spokesman for the White House drug agency said U.S. consumption peaked in 1979, when surveys showed that 14% of respondents had used illegal drugs in the previous month. Now that figure has dropped to 7%.

"This is not a problem for law enforcement alone," Kerlikowske said in February at the George Washington University in Washington.

In its 2012 budget, the administration has requested $1.7 billion for drug prevention programs, a 7.9% increase from the previous year.

Administration officials have promoted the use of drug courts where judges can sentence offenders to treatment and other terms as alternatives to jail time. The White House also is working to expand reentry programs that aim to reduce recidivism rates by assisting the nearly 750,000 drug offenders released from prison each year to transition more easily back into communities.

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who has examined U.S. drug policy, said the Obama administration has pushed the issue in a "considerably better direction. Nonetheless, she added, "a lot of it stayed at the level of strategy and rhetoric."

"If [Obama] is going to spend his political capital on something, it won't be drug policy," said Felbab-Brown, author of "Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs."

Gaviria, the former Colombian president, said he saw signs of a shift in opinion last year, when Californians voted on a ballot measure that would have legalized possession of small amounts of marijuana. Although the measure failed, "people are changing their minds," he said.

The new report said the world's approach to limiting drugs, crafted 50 years ago when the United Nations adopted its "Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs," has failed to cut the supply or use of drugs. The report, citing figures from the world body, said global marijuana consumption rose more than 8% and cocaine use 27% between 1998 and 2008.

The group cited a U.N. estimate that 250 million people worldwide use illegal drugs, concluding, "We simply cannot treat them all as criminals."

More treatment options for addicts are needed, the report said. And it argued that arresting and incarcerating "tens of millions" of drug-producing farmers, couriers and street dealers have not answered economic needs that push many people into the trade.

The assessment cited studies of nations, such as Portugal and Australia, that found decriminalizing the use and possession of at least some drugs has not led significantly to greater use.

The group's members include former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, the writers Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group.

In Mexico, thousands have died in drug-related violence since late 2006, when Calderon deployed the military in a stepped-up fight against organized crime. Most of the deaths stem from turf wars between rival trafficking gangs.

Last month, tens of thousands took to the streets in Mexico City to protest the violence and demand an end to the drug war. Calderon says it would be irresponsible to give up the fight now.

Calderon criticized the legalization measure in California, saying it would undermine his government's crime fight. The Mexican president has said he is open to differing views on the issue but that it would be "absurd" to consider legalization in Mexico as long as narcotics are barred north of the border, where the massive demand determines the prices and profitability of the drug trade.

Other analysts reject the notion that curbing drug profits through legalization would cut overall crime, arguing that many violent trafficking gangs have broadened into other criminal activities, such as kidnapping, extortion and producing and selling pirated merchandise.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-drug-policy-20110602,0,4305923,print.story

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Bill on financial aid for undocumented college students advances in California Legislature

The Legislature also moves on measures for police monitoring of sex offenders' Internet use and ending the fingerprinting of food stamp recipients.

by Patrick McGreevy and Michael J. Mishak, Los Angeles Times

June 2, 2011

Reporting from Sacramento -- State lawmakers Wednesday advanced measures that would allow undocumented university students to apply for financial aid, would help police monitor use of social networking websites by sex offenders and would end the fingerprinting of food stamp recipients.

Legislators also moved on bids to prevent Bell-style financial scandals, pension "spiking" and disruptive picketing at military funerals.

The bills were among more than 200 passed by the Senate or Assembly and sent to the other house.

The state aid that undocumented students could become eligible for would include Cal-Grants, institutional aid and fee waivers at publicly funded colleges. Then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed measures that would have provided the same privileges.

Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) said his proposal, which passed the lower house, would help "children brought here through no choice of their own, who embrace our values and learn the language."

Republicans voted en masse against the measure, AB 131, saying it would create an incentive for illegal immigration.

Over in the Senate, members voted to require that registered sex offenders disclose to law enforcement their online names, email addresses and social networking accounts to help reduce Internet-related crime.

"It does give sex offenders reason to think before engaging in predatory practices on the Internet," said Sen. Sharon Runner (R-Lancaster), author of the legislation, SB 57.

Lawmakers also moved to eliminate a fingerprinting requirement for food stamp recipients. The practice was put in place to prevent fraud, but supporters of a repeal described it as too expensive and unneeded because of other existing protections.

Democrats cited a state audit that estimated the cost of fingerprinting for next year alone at $17 million, which the lawmakers deemed excessive. Most Republicans voted no, reasoning that striking the fingerprinting requirement would be an invitation to fraud. But the measure, AB 6, passed the Assembly.

"Why would we continue wasting money and keeping people from food?" asked Assemblyman Roger Dickinson (R-Sacramento).

Fraud of another kind is the target of legislation that would give the state controller more power to delve into the financial records of California cities. Sen. Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills) introduced the proposal in response to the scandal in Bell.

The state controller now is limited to sending auditors into local agencies when the annual financial reports they file show evidence that state money is misspent. Pavley wants to give the controller broad power to examine the financial records of cities and other local agencies without relying on the reports. Her bill, which moved out of the Senate, is SB 449.

Senators also approved a bid to stop pension spiking and double-dipping by public employees who retire from one government job only to immediately start another — and receive money from two state sources simultaneously.

The bill was introduced by state Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) amid reports that state and local employees, including administrators in Bell, had their pay boosted substantially in hopes of increasing their pension benefits.

Under Simitian's proposal, SB 27, the California Public Employees' Retirement System and the State Teachers' Retirement System would be prevented from raising pension benefits based on end-of-career salary hikes. In addition, employees would be barred from returning to work for a government agency for 180 days after retiring from one.

Another bill advanced by the Senate would make it a misdemeanor to picket a funeral in a disruptive way unless protesters are at least 1,000 feet away and on public property. Sen. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) said his legislation would preserve "the sanctity and dignity of funerals."

The vote follows a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a Kansas church has a constitutional right to picket military funerals as part of a campaign asserting that the deaths of U.S. soldiers are divine retribution for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality. No lawmakers spoke out against Lieu's measure, SB 888, in Wednesday's session.

Another proposal would allow minors sentenced to life behind bars without parole to have their cases reviewed by the courts after 15 years. Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) said his bill recognizes that young people are more prone to impulsive acts and have a better chance of rehabilitation than older criminals.

"This bill is about giving kids a second chance," Yee said.

Republican senators objected to the legislation, SB 9, saying serious criminals should serve their full sentences.

Other legislation approved Wednesday would:

-- Require online retailers such as Amazon.com to collect sales tax on purchases by California residents. Many giant e-retailers are exempt under current law because they do not have physical plants in the state.

-- Give counties the power to impose extra vehicle license fees to pay for local services, if two-thirds of the board of supervisors votes to put the matter on the ballot and a majority of voters approve.

-- Restrict public pensions to the federal cap of $195,000.

-- Require law enforcement agencies to annually report rape-kit data to the state Department of Justice. The measure is, in part, a response to Times reporting that showed Los Angeles County had more than 10,000 unopened rape kits in 2008.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-legislature-20110602,0,7559824,print.story

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Death of 91-year-old spotlights line between care and killing

Maria 'Concha' Lopez, living with her great-niece, dies weighing 35 pounds and covered with sores. Was the 91-year-old's death murder or natural causes?

by Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times

June 2, 2011

Reporting from Madera, Calif. -- 'Don't leave me," Stephanie Hernandez implored, as she fumbled with her cellphone to dial 911. "I need you. I need you."

Hernandez had just changed her great-aunt's diaper and was coaxing her to take a sip of water when Maria "Concha" Lopez, 91, stopped breathing.

CPR was out of the question, Hernandez told the emergency dispatcher: "She's too fragile. We could break her, her bones." The dispatcher talked the distraught 26-year-old through the basics of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

But when firefighters and paramedics opened the door to the little house on South A Street that December morning, they were immediately overwhelmed. By the stench — urine, feces, rotting flesh. By the mess — soiled diapers, used bandages, a stained mattress.

Most of all, though, by Lopez's body. The bed-bound woman who'd suffered from dementia and shied away from doctors weighed just over 35 pounds and was covered in bedsores, some so deep they bared bone. A metal rod from hip surgery was visible.

Hernandez was arrested and then charged with murdering the woman she had bathed, fed and changed for three years. She would be put on trial, accused not of any overt violence against the woman who had raised her but of failure as a caregiver.

During five weeks of emotional testimony this spring, defense attorneys portrayed Hernandez as a loving niece whose meticulous efforts kept an old woman alive even as she lost 65% of her body weight. Projecting gruesome autopsy photos on a big white screen, the prosecutor described neglect so severe it amounted to criminal negligence.

In the end, the trial showcased the difficult questions facing doctors, courts and families today, when the "old old," 85 and up, are the fastest-growing segment of the population, when more than 43 million Americans care for aging relatives or friends and when neither science nor the law has kept pace.

What is elder abuse? When does inadequate care become criminal? Can the elderly be forced to seek help? And what exactly does a "normal" death look like?

"I would say that first responders and medical examiners haven't seen a lot of cases like this — yet," said Dr. Brad Stuart, chief medical officer for Sutter Care at Home and a researcher in the management of advanced illness. "But this is not going to be an unusual case in a few years."

It is April, mid-trial, and Hernandez reminisces from behind a thick plastic barrier in the visiting area of Madera County jail. She has been held here for more than a year and in the process lost custody of her 4-year-old daughter, Alyanna.

Hernandez had lived on South A Street in this hard-knocks farm town since she was 4 months old. Her mother, an agricultural worker, needed to go back to the fields and left the infant in the care of her four great-aunts — Guadalupe, Ramona, Frances and Concha Lopez.

Guadalupe retired from the fields to care for Hernandez but died when the girl was 12. Neither Guadalupe nor her sisters ever married.

"I was basically her daughter," says a tearful Hernandez. "Her last words were, 'I love you, Stephanie' in the hospital."

Madera Community Hospital is less than a mile from the jail. Hernandez knows the squat, tan facility well; she spent long days and nights there as her great-aunts fell to the scourges of age.

"Ramona declined in my senior year in high school, '01," says Hernandez. "She had a massive heart attack and a mild stroke at home. I was there. She had fallen.... I picked her up and called 911."

Frances died in 2003. Ramona went three years later. Concha Lopez had watched her sisters die in medical facilities and made her family promise to spare her such an end.

Then she broke her hip.

Hernandez had been working her way through Fresno City College by selling cellphones. She left school when she became pregnant with Alyanna in 2006, and her family pressed her into caring for Lopez.

At first, the work was housekeeping, grocery shopping, helping Lopez in and out of bed. Then the older woman became incontinent, stopped walking, couldn't feed herself, developed sores that would not heal. She waved off visiting nurses, refused to go to the doctor.

Hernandez says she tried to find a doctor who would make house calls, but Lopez was adamant: no outsiders.

"I wanted to go back to school, but I felt like everybody in my family, my mom, made me obligated to stay with my aunt," Hernandez would tell authorities. "It was just me, my aunt and my daughter, always alone in the house."

Prosecutor Angela Hill snaps on the overhead projector in Department 1 of Madera County Superior Court and turns to face her expert witness, Dr. Kathryn Locatell. People's Exhibit 19 flashes on the screen, an autopsy photograph of a 2-inch bedsore enlarged to the size of a manhole cover.

Locatell, a geriatrician, explains the physiology of pressure ulcers, gesturing with a red laser pointer at the ghastly wound. Jurors flinch. Hernandez, seated with her lawyers at the defense table, puts her left hand over her mouth.

Then comes People's Exhibit 25, Lopez's back, emaciated and pocked with six deep wounds. The sores, Locatell tells jurors, were at least a month old.

"I have never seen someone with this skin condition, the numerous wounds, the inflammation, the rashiness," Locatell says. "There's no treatment. It's evidence of neglect. It's not part of normal dying. It's not part of dying at all."

Even in hospice care, where everyone is at the end of their lives, she says, only 3% of patients get bedsores.

Lopez would not have died when she did if she had received adequate care, Locatell says. And she died hurting.

"These wounds," Locatell says, "are extremely painful.... The skin is loaded with nerve endings. This is —" Her voice trails off. She pauses. "This is appalling."

But where Locatell sees evidence of "utter neglect," Dr. John Fullerton sees a condition called "terminal skin failure."

Fullerton, a geriatrician and the defense's expert witness, explains to the jury what happens when someone like Lopez loses more than half her body weight.

Private, independent and stubborn, the 4-foot, 10-inch woman weighed a scant 100 pounds in 2001. Five years later, when she fractured her hip, her weight had dropped to 88 pounds. By the time she was hospitalized in 2008 with an ulcer on her left shin, she was down to 64 pounds.

"She blew past 60 pounds and went all the way to 35. How did she live?" Fullerton exclaims. "It's remarkable. This isn't someone whose life is cut short. This is someone whose life is extended by living at home."

The sores? They were unavoidable, he tells the jury. When a dying person whose weight plummets is confined to bed, the skin can fail like any other organ.

Defense attorney Martin Jones: "Is it common for someone doing coroner's work to see someone who died of terminal skin failure?"

Fullerton: "It's not their bread and butter."

Jones: "Did my client do anything wrong?"

Fullerton: "I can't come up with something she did wrong. It makes me as a hospice medical director really kind of want to sit down with families when they're caregiving and make them realize what they're getting into.

"Even when they try to do everything right, the system is just not set up to view them fairly or favorably."

In the windowless Madera courtroom, the jurors deciding Stephanie Hernandez's fate have front-row seats to the controversies swirling around America's elderly and the people who care for them.

There are disputes about what elder abuse is and just how much of it occurs. According to the National Center on Elder Abuse, between 1 million and 2 million Americans 65 or older have been "injured, exploited or otherwise mistreated by someone on whom they depended for care or protection." But for every report, it is believed that five more incidents never come to the attention of authorities.

Dr. Laura Mosqueda, director of the Center of Excellence on Elder Abuse and Neglect at UC Irvine, has begun studying elder deaths in California to figure out what coroners view as normal and what they consider "older adults being neglected to death."

Mosqueda believes that medical examiners under-report elder abuse deaths because of a sense that the victims are old and will die anyway.

But others fear caregivers could be overzealously prosecuted by authorities who confuse symptoms of terminal dementia with abuse.

Last year, the National Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel convened a group of experts to address uncertainties in wound care. The group agreed that some bedsores are unavoidable and that "the condition of skin failure exists."

Stuart, the chief medical officer for Sutter Care at Home, who advocates for improved end-of-life care nationally, believes cases like Lopez's are a warning.

"We live in a society that's in a place where no culture has ever been," he says, with the baby boom generation hitting 65 and the ranks of the "oldest old" swelling. "We'll have to come to a better way of dealing with this than arresting a young caregiver."

But that's what happened here.

On April 12, Hill beseeches the seven women and five men of the jury to find Hernandez guilty of murder and elder abuse: "All she had to do was pick up the phone and call for medical help. It would have kept Concha from dying. She had a duty to act."

Craig Collins, Hernandez's other defense attorney, counters: "There's absolutely not one shred of evidence that Stephanie knew that if Concha died and the pictures looked bad she'd be accused of murder.... The evidence is clear. Stephanie didn't cause Miss Lopez to die."

Two days later, jurors send a question to Superior Court Judge Joseph A. Soldani: "Is involuntary manslaughter murder?"

"I about hit rock bottom," Collins said.

"They're going to convict her."

By the end of the day, there is a verdict. The attorneys arrive at the courtroom. Hernandez, tearful, is at the defense table. Her mother and sister are absent from their usual seats behind her. Collins, fearing the outcome, did not tell them that a verdict was about to be announced. Cousins who blamed Hernandez for Lopez's death wait behind Hill.

The verdict is read: Not guilty of murder. Not guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Not guilty of felony elder abuse.

The jury deadlocked on the lesser charge of misdemeanor elder abuse.

Afterward, jurors say there wasn't enough evidence that Hernandez had intended to harm the elderly woman.

Hernandez clutches attorney Jones' hand and sobs: "Thank you! Thank you!"

For the first time in 14 months, she is free.

Hernandez will not be retried on the misdemeanor charge. She is fighting to regain custody of Alyanna while she looks for a job in a city with more than 20% unemployment.

She sleeps in the room where Concha Lopez died. And she helps care for another elderly relative, her grandfather.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-elderly-homicide-20110602,0,4649759,print.story

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53 guns found in home where 2-year-old fatally shot 6-year-old

(Video on site)

Fresno police said they found 53 guns inside a home where a 2-year-old boy fatally shot his 6-year-old stepsister over the weekend.

Police said the toddler found the loaded gun in a bedroom Sunday, picked it up and discharged it. The bullet hit 6-year-old Emily Lavender in the chest.

Investigations found the other guns when they responded to the shooting scene, according to the Fresno Bee, which also reported that five other children in the home were taken into protective custody by the county.

The girl's school was in mourning Tuesday.

"Emily was a very sweet and a loving, loving young girl here at Maple Creek and she's going to be missed," Maple Creek Elementary School Principal Gina Kismet told KFSN-TV News.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/06/53-guns-found-in-home-where-2-year-old-fatally-shot-6-year-old.html

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