Much -- might we say perhaps too much? -- has been made of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's "wise Latina" comment, especialy by the Senate Judiciary Committee considering her nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Today's Op-Ed page gives voice to four Latinas to interpret the meaning of that phrase through their own experiences. Antonia Hernandez writes, for example:

Many years ago, one of the first times I went to court, the bailiff stopped me and said, "Excuse me, you belong on the other side with the interpreters." At least he didn't think I was the defendant. You learn survival skills from this kind of experience. You learn how to bridge; you learn how to be entrepreneurial. It's a cliche, but we are framed by our experiences.

Also on the Op-Ed page, the author of a book on plague -- the literal disease -- argues that threats of bioterrorism (Need we say more than "anthrax"?) have been overblown and that too much money and fear is being wasted on biothreats.

On the other side of the fold, the editorial board chastizes Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for wasting time instead of resolving the budget crisis and then saying that the wasted time actually accomplished something. The board also faults the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department for failing to test its rape kits, collections of evidence on each rape case that have been found in other jurisdictions to dramatically increase arrest rates. The LAPD found the money to start clearing its backlog of untested kits, the board notes, and so can the sheriff.

And the board says thanks, but no thanks, to Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, who has offered to investigate the execution-style killing of a human rights worker who was documenting Chechnya's political murders and kidnappings. Kadyrov is the same man who earlier threatened the worker:

U.S. and European officials must keep a spotlight on these cases and demand that the murderers be brought to justice. Only then is there any hope of reducing the violence in Chechnya. Only then will they quit killing the messengers.

* Photo of Sonia Sotomayor by J. Scott Applewhite / AP

In the same Nov. 4, 2008 election in which Barack Obama was elected president, Los Angeles voters defeated (but just barely) a $36-per-property parcel tax measure to fund youth and anti-gang programs. Measure A was spearheaded by Councilwoman Janice Hahn; as a local tax, it had to pull in two-thirds, or 66.67% of the vote to win. It got 66.27%. Times endorsements may not have the clout they once did, but I think it's safe to say that our opposition helped make a difference on this one.

Hahn wants to try again, and wants to know what it would take to win us over this time. Fair question.

The subject came up at Tuesday's City Council committee hearing, at which Deputy Mayor Jeff Carr reported on the last six months of the city's still-new Gang Reduction and Youth Development programs.

When the Times called for a "no" vote on Measure A, we said the city had not shown it was ready to use new tax money properly. We explained that Los Angeles had floundered with anti-gang efforts for years, throwing money at programs without knowing whether they were working or even defining what they were supposed to accomplish. Just months earlier, the city had scrapped L.A. Bridges and authorized the mayor to take charge of gang programs and to establish standards and evaluation methods. Carr was a newcomer. It was too early to tell whether the city had improved. Here's a snippet, in case you don't want to click on the link and wade through the while thing:

The universal chestnut about graduation days is that they're about endings and beginnings, joy and sadness.

But the sentiment was framed in a startlingly different way Wednesday at the Locke High School commencement, held on the expansive athletic field of the Watts school. Security was heavy; beefy guys wearing shirts that identified them as anti-gang detail looked out of place next to the beaming students in their pastel blue caps and gowns. Locke has been much safer during its first year as a Green Dot charter school, but a student was shot just outside the campus in April. Surrounded as Locke is by gang activity and violence, school officials were clearly aiming to keep any trouble at bay.

I was sitting in the bleachers next to proud dad Gregory McMiller, snappily dressed for his son Johnathan's big day, hanging on to a gigantic mylar balloon that he gallantly tried to keep from batting me in the head every time the breeze picked up.

"It's happy, but it's also sad," McMiller started. I waited for the predictable next words  -- happy because his child had grown up, sad because ... well, his child had grown up. Instead, he continued, "Because you know after today some of these kids are going to die. Some will go down a bad path and get taken out too young."

Not everything about commencement -- like the belief that the grads are headed to limitless futures -- is universal.

The editorial board bemoans the U.S. Supreme Court decision that inmates have no right to DNA testing that could exonerate them. Attempts by an accused person to find exculpatory evidence should be considered a basic part of due process. The board agrees with Colombian leaders that they, not the United States, should be the ones to try a man accused of holding 15 hostages including three who worked for military contractors. The board also takes a look at the Alameda Unified School District's new curriculum for teaching elementary school children about tolerance toward gays and lesbians, and concludes that the lessons take too heavy-handed an approach for such young children:

It's high time that schools took anti-bullying measures more seriously. We just never thought that would include requiring fifth-graders to recite the meaning of each letter in LGBT.

In attempting to discourage taunting of gay students, the Alameda Unified School District turned what should be a basic lesson on treating others kindly into a primer on sexual identity. Its new anti-bullying curriculum for kindergartners through fifth-graders will begin in the fall and focus solely on gay and lesbian issues -- as if harassment based on race, religion or failure to wear cool clothes were nonexistent. Parents who might object cannot opt their children out of it.

On the other side of the fold, writer Richard Farrell describes the haunting heights and low points of life with his domineering, sometimes abusive, sometimes intensely loving father. And a UCLA English professor parses the language of Middle East coverage and finds that it favors Israel over the concerns of Palestinians.

Illustration by Polly Becker for The Times

If you were stuck in the southbound 405 Freeway mess Tuesday, you had plenty of time to listen to the radio, so you probably know it was all because of a guy who dodged the cops for nearly 12 hours after allegedly committing a crime.

Not murder. Not rape. He was supposedly stealing copper wire.

From about 3 a.m., when the LAPD answered a call about a burglary in an empty building alongside the 405 in North Hills, the effort to flush out this suspected burglar at first closed down the entire southbound freeway and then, as the hours wore on, the three right lanes stayed shut -- all this according to news reports.

The southbound 405 Freeway is already one of the nine circles of traffic hell at the best of times, and to have it tied up for a dozen hours to catch ... a copper burglar?

The guy was wily, I'll give him that -- the cops caught his alleged partner, but he raced right off into a storm drain. He dodged police who tried to grab him. He cut a rope that the cops dropped down to him. He resisted the bitter blandishments of tear gas and stayed stubbornly put. At one point, authorities were pumping oxygen down the storm drain. One deputy chief quoted by the Associated Press said that they had to get the man out of there for his own good: the storm drain runoff could amount to ''gas and anti-freeze and battery acid and God knows what else.''

Now, I am a fan of the "broken windows" school of policing, about stopping small crimes to prevent bigger ones. But at some point, shouldn't someone in authority have been asking, ''What's the trade-off here?'' Thousands of people mired in miserable traffic, millions of dollars in commuters' time lost, and then the cost to public resources. The guy's alleged partner in crime had already been caught and surely could have fingered the fellow any time, with a leisurely arrest to follow -- after all, the guy in the storm drain reportedly said he had a newborn baby at home. Maybe police could have closed off one end of the storm drain and waited him out at the other. Wasn't there just a teeny bit of fear of losing face going on here, with this 12-hour-long standoff?

It was a great saga for the TV cameras, but the question needs to be asked: Did L.A. taxpayers get their money's worth on this one?

The Times' editorial board goes long today on the shortfall in state revenue, laying out a dozen principles for Sacramento to follow as it closes a $24 billion budget gap. The first and most important, the board says, is to avoid default. And although the board urges lawmakers to avoid cutting health care and human services as much as possible, it nevertheless says that lawmakers must take an axe to some sacred cows. Reflecting the amount of work that must be done quickly, the editorial is heavy on the imperative:

Meanwhile, on the Op-Ed page, journalist and author Peter Schrag blasts a proposed constitutional amendment to give the state legislature formal control over the University of California system. Joel Sappell, a former editor at The Times, writes about the changes that California's wave of foreclosures have brought to his Eagle Rock neighborhood. Journalist and woodworker Greg Goldin offers a tribute to Alan Bohnhoff and Jaime Sanchez, who were slain last month at Bohnhoff Lumber Co. in Vernon.  And runner Greer Wylder, who recently finished her seventh L.A. Marathon, calls for a new route along streets that are distinctive, rather than ones that are easy to close:

Other cities have created ambitious courses highlighting their characters and history.... Each of the courses is different, but they all reflect a sense that organizers deliberately chose routes to highlight their cities' most appealing characteristics -- diversity, natural beauty, neighborhood charm, history. None of that is much evident running beside the fast-food outlets and car dealers along South Figueroa.

Finally, in Letters to the Editor, readers of the Times offer their takes on President Obama's speech in Cairo, the anniversary of the China's Tiananmen Square massacre, the vandalism of Channise Davy's home in Duarte and Steve Lopez' column about three dentists' charitable efforts.

Illustration: Sean Kelly / For The Times

The United States is the only nation in the world in which a child can be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. California has more than 200 inmates who were sentenced to remain behind bars forever for crimes they committed before they became adults. Under a bill that passed today on the Senate floor, they would get a chance to petition the court to have their sentences converted to 25-years-to-life. That wouldn't guarantee parole or eventual release; it would simply give them a chance at a hearing.

The Times editorialized in favor of SB 399, which now moves to the Assembly. It's authored by Leland Yee, D-San Francisco. Read our editorial here, and a follow-up blogpost here. Here is a support blog and site.

This is a worthy bill and deserves to pass and be signed into law. Support is not based on naive or romantic notions about innocent children wrongly locked up for life. This is not a movie. The dozens of people the bill would affect were convicted of committing serious and often brutal felonies. Yes, many were following the lead of criminal adults, and many others were too scarred or traumatized by violent families or neighborhoods to fully grasp the horror of their actions. But punishment makes sense.

Life without parole, however, does not -- at least, not in every case. Under this bill, many, perhaps most, of the California inmates sentenced for crimes committed in their youth would remain in prison for life and will eventually die there. But for some who can demonstrate that as adults they have grown, repented and reformed, they may be able to look forward to the possibility of a portion of their adulthood outside prison bars. 

Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

Or at least, that's how it seems to me. After meeting with the angry attorneys general of Connecticut, Illinois and Missouri, Craigslist has decided to end its "erotic services" ad section and replace it with an "adult services" section. Ostensibly this new feature is for adults who don't want to do erotic things. You know, they'll be hooking up to do the Sunday crossword puzzle together.

Craigslist's new policy comes in the wake of the death of a masseuse in a Boston hotel room and an assault on another woman in Rhode Island; the 23-year-old medical school student charged in the murder allegedly had responded to the victims' ads on the site.

New ads will cost $10 and will be manually approved by Craigslist before being posted. How this will prevent a "masseuse" from posting an ad and meeting a strange man in a hotel for, let's say, an innocent back rub isn't clear to me. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal says he'll be watching to see the change really does eliminate prostitution and pornography, so we'll see.

According to cnn.com, last year Craigslist added some safeguards to the erotic services section, including requiring a verified credit card number and a phone number from people participating in the world's biggest brothel. The changes still relied on Craigslist users to police the site, however, which wasn't enough for Cook County (Ill.) Sheriff Tom Dart, who sued Craigslist in March for facilitating prostitution. The company has argued that the changes it made last year were successful, reducing the amount of illegal services being advertised and making it easier for police to enforce vice laws. It also has argued that Craigslist users are responsible for fewer violent crimes than, say, readers of newspaper classifieds. Besides, its executives said, the federal Communications Decency Act immunized it from liability because it acted as a conduit for information posted by its users. By actively reviewing the adult ads submitted to its site, the company may be putting its immunity in jeopardy.

Help me out here. Will this change really make a difference in Craigslist's ads? Or is something better than nothing?

The Times' editorial board in the coming days will most likely address President Obama's decision to block the release of new photos showing alleged abuse of prisoners by U.S. personnel in overseas prisons. The administration's policy is a reversal of the Defense Department's previously stated position on the issue.

Here's the administration's position:

"The president was concerned about harm to the troops," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday afternoon. "The president, as you all know, met with his legal team last week because he did not feel comfortable with the release of the photos."

Gibbs added, "the president reflected on this case and believes that they have the potential to pose harm to the troops. ... Nothing is added by the release of the photos."

Click here to read reaction from other blogs, newspapers and the like.

Before we weigh in, we're interested in hearing what you have to say. Tell us what you think by taking our unscientific poll, leaving a comment or both. 

Credit: Win McNamee / Getty Images

The Times published an editorial April 30 criticizing life sentences without parole for California juveniles as young as 14 and supporting a bill by state Sen. Leland Yee that would permit such inmates to eventually seek parole – after they've spent at least a quarter century in prison. The editorial cited the case of South Los Angeles resident Antonio DeJesus Nuñez, who may be the only person in the world sentenced to life without parole for a crime he committed as a minor in which no one died or was injured.

That's not an overstatement. The New York-based Human Rights Watch asserts that the United States is the only nation in which minors are sentenced to life in prison without parole; we have 2,571.

A 2007 report from the University of San Francisco did find some youth outside the U.S. sentenced to life without parole: a grand total of seven of them, all in Israel. [*UPDATED: See below.]

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child bans life without parole for youth, but the United States is one of only two U.N. member nations that have not signed it -- the other being Somalia.

Nuñez was 14 at the time of his arrest. He was convicted of a frightening and brutal crime – kidnapping a man for ransom. And, by the way, he shot at police officers when they gave chase. Prosecuting him made sense. Imprisoning him made sense. But life? With no chance of parole? For a crime he committed when he lacked the judgment and maturity, in society's view, to drive a car, vote, honor a contract, marry without parental consent, join the military or go to an R-rated movie? Should he never get a second look, once he grows up and we can see whether he studied in prison, behaved, repented? Do we believe that some youths are simply irredeemable, and that in our wisdom we can look them over at age 14 and know which ones can be salvaged as adults and which can't?

The same day the editorial ran, California's Fourth District Court of Appeal granted Nuñez's habeas corpus petition and threw out his life without parole (the legal jargon is LWOP) sentence, ruling that it violated constitutional strictures against cruel and unusual punishment and ordering the trial court to resentence the inmate, who is now 22. Read the court's opinion here.

For those who believe it's too costly, too cruel and just plain too bizarre to sentence a teenager to LWOP (more jargon – JLWOP, with the J standing for juvenile), the ruling was good news. But only sort of.