Sara Catania

WASHINGTON -- In one of the most important cases of the term, the U.S. Supreme Court last week considered whether it is cruel and unusual punishment for the state to execute a mentally retarded person, even if that person committed a terrible crime. By most accounts, the answer, expected in......

Much has been made of the 99 death-row inmates who have been freed across the U.S. over the past quarter-century when they turned out to be innocent. Now executions are being reconsidered on another front, one that could spare the lives -- though not the lifelong prison sentences -- of......

”Snowball‘s Chance“ read the lead headline on the San Francisco Chronicle’s front page Tuesday, the day condemned inmate Stephen Wayne Anderson was executed at San Quentin. It referred to a freak Arctic storm that blanketed the Bay Area, but also could have described the odds faced by Anderson‘s attorneys as......

Clemency hearings in California are fundamentally strange: Neither of the people at the center of the proceedings actually shows up. Last Friday in Sacramento, the missing men were death-row inmate Stephen Wayne Anderson, whose court appeals have been exhausted and who is scheduled to die January 28, and Governor Gray......

At JUSTPAST midnight on January 28, convicted killer Stephen Wayne Anderson is scheduled to die by lethal injection at San Quentin. Anderson admits that he committed a brutal murder 21 years ago in rural San Bernardino County, but legal experts now say the circumstances of the crime did not warrant......

The backers of a massive development at the northern edge of L.A. County are capitalizing on the region‘s worsening housing crisis in an effort to curry favor for their long-delayed mini-city. “There is a critical housing crisis in Southern California,” said Steven W. Weston of Weston Benshoof, which provides legal......

Since the September 11 attacks, the station to watch for comprehensive coverage of the Middle East is Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based, 24-hour Arabic news channel that boasts an estimated 35 million viewers worldwide (including about 150,000 satellite subscribers in the U.S.). The network, whose name means “the island,” has correspondents in......

We want to tell the American children that Afghanistan feels your pain. —official statement from Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, Afghanistan’s Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Curious consolation, not only considering the source, which as of this writing was not above suspicion in Tuesday’s attacks, but because of who it excluded. The......

A few illegal immigrants running down the beach in front of your hotel can ruin your whole day. So Mireya Navarro reported on the front page of The New York Times on August 21. Up until pretty recently, a steady stream of Mexicans were illegally crossing the border at Imperial......