Sirhan, a 35-year-old murderer, is cheerful and relaxed and happy to tell his story. He's especially proud to describe the efficiency with which he shot his young sister Suzanne in the head four times last March. "She came to the house at 8:15," he relates, "and by 8:20 she was dead." Three days before, the 16-year-old girl had reported to police that she had been raped. "She committed a mistake, even if it was against her will," says Sirhan. "Anyway, ...

Barack Obama's autopen does not sleep. So, unlike the President, who was roused from a hotel bed recently at 5:45 a.m. in a French resort town to approve a last-minute extension of the Patriot Act, the machine never missed a wink. As the minutes ticked toward midnight on May 26 in Washington, Obama wrote a document authorizing an immediate phone call from the hotel hallway to the White House, where, in an undisclosed room in the building next door, the ...

One of the big problems plaguing law-enforcement officers dealing with narcotics addicts is how to determine quickly and conclusively whether a suspect is or is not on drugs. Most seasoned addicts are expert at concealing needle marks . Although addicts show withdrawal symptoms when they are cut off from drugs for one to two days, in many cases there are no legal grounds for holding suspects until the symptoms appear. The solution, California's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement believes, lies ...

Every year around this time, millions of American kids graduate from high school, throw massive parties and get drunk. Police end up arresting a lot of these kids, causing them legal trouble for months or even years. So, every year around this time, there's a new debate about whether we should lower or even abolish the legal drinking age. What's different this time is that an entire organization — a conspicuously sober group led by a ...

For the past couple of years, Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has been shaking the trees on Wall Street. Since October 2009, Bharara has charged 46 people in his investigation of insider trading tied to "expert networks." The biggest case is against hedge-fund giant Raj Rajaratnam, who ran Galleon Group and is now on trial in lower Manhattan. Expert networks are firms that broker information by connecting corporate insiders with hedge funds and ...

American tennis legend Andre Agassi has admitted using crystal methamphetamine a year before he won the French Open in 1998, and that he lied to the sport's governing bodies in the same period about a positive drugs test to avoid a ban.Later in the year an Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) doctor confirmed to Agassi -- who is currently married to former number one women's tennis player Steffi Graf -- that his use of recreational drugs had shown up in ...

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has successfully brought dozens of war criminals to justice, but a "truth commission" is still necessary if the region's ethnic factions are ever to achieve lasting reconciliation, according to a former legal adviser to the court.

Home foreclosure isn't a legal abstraction for Yolanda Paschal, a recent graduate of the University of Miami School of Law. Her parents are facing foreclosure on the Miami house she grew up in. They're luckier than others, since they have another home to fall back on, but the experience has convinced Paschal how acute the crisis is in Florida, which now has the nation's highest mortgage foreclosure rate, at 17%. "I'm part of this community," says Pascal, 25. "I ...

When "Marta" was 12, she entered the United States illegally, hoping to join her mother, who had left her in Central America years ago to search for work. Three years later she was sitting in immigration detention by herself waiting to be deported back home to her grandmother, who was dying of cancer. Her case is typical of the 7,211 children known to have entered the United States illegally in 2008 by themselves, according to the federal Office of Refugee ...

A retired prosecutor whose comments in a 2008 HBO documentary threatened to derail a 31-year-old sex case against film director Roman Polanski now says he lied. David Wells told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Thursday that he "buttered up" his role in the Polanski case for the documentary crew. He said he lied about trying to goad a judge to sentence Polanski to prison in 1978 for having sex with a 13-year-old girl. Wells' comments in "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" ...