Anita Chabria is a California columnist for the Los Angeles Times, based in Sacramento. Before joining The Times, she worked for the Sacramento Bee as a member of its statewide investigative team and previously covered criminal justice and City Hall. Follow her on Bluesky @anitachabria.bsky.social and on X @anitachabria.
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Matthew Muller was convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault in a 2015 case in which Vallejo police initially accused the victim and her boyfriend of making up the story about her abduction. Muller has now been charged with two earlier home invasions.
This past year was dominated by a presidential race unlike any other. With Trump set to retake the White House, columnists Anita Chabria and Mark Z. Barabak puzzle out the past 12 months and put 2025 in perspective.
A shocking series of murders stunned the rural California mountain town of Placerville in the 1980s. Authorities were under intense pressure to solve the cases, and for a while it seemed they did. But Times reporters Anita Chabria and Jessica Garrison spent more than a year reexamining the crimes and found troubling questions about both justice and the justice system.
California law enforcement is in the midst of a culture war, as experts inside and outside the system question a commonly used police interrogation method that they say can lead to false confessions and wrongful convictions.
Lombardo Palacios and Charlotte Pleytez were convicted of a 2007 gang-related murder. They maintained their innocence, and on Friday, L.A. County’s new D.A. agreed with his more liberal predecessor that they should be freed.
In my last newsletter of the year, I’m offering up three good-news stories to take us into the holidays.
Forty years ago, Michael Anthony Cox was convicted of the murders of three girls in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Years later, the two main witnesses at his trial, also teenagers, recanted, saying police had pressured them into false stories. So why is Cox still on death row?
Texas is suing a New York doctor for providing abortion medications to one of its residents. It marks a new front in the war over access to reproductive care, one that California will soon be dragged into.
Austin Tice was kidnapped in Syria 12 years ago. His family has waited with hope and anxiety as the fall of Syria’s ruler has opened a window for his return.
Trump has promised that ‘we’re not touching’ Social Security benefits, but will he keep that promise? Does he even want to?