The Brief

A CalMatters investigation has found that poor people accused of crimes, who account for at least 80% of criminal defendants, are routinely convicted in California without anyone investigating the charges against them.

Close to half of California’s 58 counties do not employ any full-time public defense investigators. Among the remaining counties, defendants’ access to investigators fluctuates wildly, but it’s almost always inadequate.

The cost of this failure is steep, for individual defendants and for the integrity of California’s criminal justice system.

Defense investigators interview witnesses, visit crime scenes, review police reports and retrieve video surveillance footage that might prove the defendant was on the other side of town when a crime was committed, or that an assault was an act of self-defense. They do work that most lawyers are not trained to do. Without them, police and prosecutorial misconduct — among the most common causes of wrongful convictions — remain unchecked, significantly increasing the likelihood that people will go to prison for crimes they did not commit.

In our new investigation, we examine the consequences of this pervasive issue through a reopened kidnapping and murder case in Northern California’s Siskiyou County.

Here are the takeaways:

1. Of the 10 California counties with the highest incarceration rates, eight have no defense investigators on staff. 

The lack of investigators affects counties throughout the state, from poor, rural areas like Siskiyou to the state’s largest and most well-funded public defense offices.

Los Angeles employed just 1 investigator for every 10 public defenders — one of the state’s worst ratios, according to 2023 data from the California Department of Justice. Only seven California counties met the widely accepted minimum standard of 1 investigator for every 3 attorneys.

2. The situation is most alarming in the 25 California counties that don’t have dedicated public defender offices and pay private attorneys. 

Most of these private attorneys receive a flat fee for their services, and the cost of an investigator would eat away at their profits. Some counties allow contracted attorneys to ask the court for additional funds for investigations, but court records show the attorneys rarely make those requests.

In Kings County, which has one of the highest prison incarceration rates in California, contracted attorneys asked the court for permission to hire an investigator in 7% of criminal cases from 2018 to 2022. In Lake County, attorneys made those requests in just 2% of criminal cases over a three-year period; in Mono County, it was less than 1%. To earn a living from meager county contracts, research shows, private attorneys and firms must persuade defendants to accept plea deals as quickly as possible. An investigation is an expensive delay.

3. Prosecutors have an overwhelming advantage when it comes to investigator staffing. 

In Riverside, the district attorney has 30% more lawyers than the public defender but 500% more investigators, state data shows, in addition to the support of the county sheriff and various municipal police departments.

This pattern repeats throughout the state. In what is supposed to be an adversarial legal system, indigent defendants and their attorneys are often on their own, facing an army of investigators who are working to secure a conviction.

4. Hidden in the data is the greatest tragedy of failing to investigate cases: wrongful convictions. 

The National Registry of Exonerations is filled with cases in which convictions were overturned when someone finally looked into the prisoner’s claims, years or even decades after they were imprisoned.

Hundreds of those cases are in California. In one exoneration out of Fresno, Innocence Project investigators found nine witnesses who corroborated their client’s alibi: He was more than 25 miles away at a birthday party at the time of the crime. In a recent case out of Los Angeles, investigators found evidence of their client’s innocence in a police detective’s handwritten notes, material that had been included in a file turned over to the defense before trial. If their cases had been investigated on the front end, these men might have been spared a combined 30 years in prison.

Maurice Possley, the exoneration registry’s senior researcher, said that a failure to investigate is at the heart of most of the registry’s 3,681 cases.

When he looks at the evidence that overturned these convictions, he’s astounded the defense didn’t find it when the case was being prosecuted.

“If someone had just made the effort,” he said. “This was all sitting there.”

5. California, once a leader in public defense, has fallen far behind.

The nation’s first public defender office opened in Los Angeles in 1913. By the time the U.S. Supreme Court established in 1963 that defendants have the right to an attorney in state criminal proceedings, more than a dozen California counties were already providing free representation to poor people accused of crimes.

As the nation caught up, California slipped behind. The state kept its defender system entirely in the hands of its counties. Today, it is one of just two states — alongside Arizona — that don’t contribute any funding to trial-level public defense, according to the Sixth Amendment Center. The state does not monitor or evaluate the counties’ systems. There are no minimum standards and, for many defendants, no investigations — even in the most serious cases.

Investigations affect every part of the criminal justice process. They’re not just about figuring out whether a client is innocent. Even if a case is moving toward a plea deal, an investigation can turn up information that forces a prosecutor to reduce the charge or compels a judge to grant bond or shorten a prison sentence.

Lawyers are discouraged from interviewing witnesses on their own. If a witness later changed their story or disappeared before trial, the attorney could have to testify on their client’s behalf and recuse themself from the case.

6. This is a national problem.

In 2007, the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducted a census of the nation’s public defender offices. It found that 40% had no investigators on staff and that 93% failed to meet the National Association for Public Defense’s industry standard of at least 1 investigator for every 3 attorneys.

The study made it clear that, across the country, investigators were seen as a luxury, not a necessity. CalMatters interviews with top public defenders in several states, along with recent reports examining indigent defense systems, suggest that’s still the case.

In Mississippi, only eight of the state’s 82 counties have public defender offices. The rest rely on private attorneys who are paid a flat fee — one that rarely covers the cost of an investigator. A 2018 report found that, in many Mississippi counties, with the exception of murder cases, the attorneys “never hire investigators and have no time to investigate cases themselves.” Appointed attorneys told researchers they would “get laughed out of court” for requesting additional funds for an investigator.

Public defender systems that are funded and controlled by state legislatures also have severe investigator shortages. The head public defender in Arkansas, Greg Parrish, said he has only 12 staff investigators, responsible for assisting in felony cases, including capital cases, in all of the state’s 75 counties. Minnesota’s top public defender, William Ward, said he is trying to maintain a ratio of at least 1 investigator for every 7 public defenders but knows that’s not enough. “I would rather have a great investigator and an average lawyer than an average investigator and a great lawyer,” he said. “Investigators make all the difference on a case.”

7. New York stands as a model of how to reform the system. 

New York was once very similar to California. Its counties managed their own public defender systems, without much input or funding from the state, until a class-action lawsuit, settled in 2015, led to statewide changes.

New York created an office tasked with improving public defense, eventually giving it some $250 million to dole out each year. Counties that take the money must prioritize certain aspects of public defense, including investigations. In a recent report to the agency overseeing the effort, these counties consistently said the ability to investigate cases was among the most profound impacts of the new funding. Some described specific cases that ended in acquittal or significantly reduced charges as a result.

California was also sued over claims it failed to provide competent defense. To settle the lawsuit, filed in Fresno County, Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020 expanded the scope of the Office of the State Public Defender, which had previously handled death penalty appeals, to include support and training for county-based public defender systems.

But the governor committed only $10 million in one-time grants to the effort, and that money has since run out.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Meta will lay off 10% of its staff in May, according to an internal memo which was published by Bloomberg. A Meta spokesperson confirmed the report's accuracy to NPR.

The layoffs will take place on May 20 and affect some 8,000 workers. Meta will also not hire for 6,000 open roles that it had intended to fill.

In the memo, Meta's chief people officer Janelle Gale wrote, "We're doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we're making. This is not an easy tradeoff and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here."

Calling it "unwelcome news" that "puts everyone in an uneasy state," Gale wrote, confirming the layoffs to employees now "is the best path forward, given the circumstances."

Meta and other big players in artificial intelligence have been spending vast amounts of money to build data centers and try to win the AI race — one in which Meta lags behind competitors such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

In January, Meta forecast record capital expenditures this year of up to $135 billion — almost double what it spent last year.

The pivot to AI comes at a time when Meta seems to be backing away from its previous focus on its virtual reality Metaverse products. The Metaverse was once key to CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision for the company's future — so fundamental that in 2021, he changed the name of the company from Facebook to Meta.

In a separate round of layoffs this month, the company announced that it was laying off some 700 people as part of its efforts in "right-sizing" its investment in Reality Labs, the division that runs the company's Metaverse products.

Meta is also facing a string of costly legal challenges. The company lost two pivotal court cases earlier this year: a New Mexico jury found that Meta failed to protect young users from child sexual exploitation. Penalties in that case could reach $375 million.

Meanwhile, a jury in Los Angeles found the company — along with Google — liable for the mental health problems experienced by a woman who used social media as a small child, awarding her $6 million.

In the Los Angeles case, the woman's lawyers argued that Meta's products were designed to be addictive to kids.

Meta has said it will appeal both lawsuits.

The company faces similar lawsuits, including one brought by several school districts against Meta and several other social media companies, which will be heard in Oakland, California this year.
Copyright 2026 NPR

The first thing you notice when you unwrap the fried chicken sandwich from Hokkaido Fried Chicken is the craggy crust, almost geological in its texture — the kind of fry that makes you want to reconsider every other fried chicken sandwich you've ever eaten.

The craggy, crunchy Hokkaido fried chicken

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Courtesy Hokkaido Fried Chicken

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The chicken itself — shattering on the outside, improbably juicy within — holds its own against everything surrounding it. With the miso vinaigrette slaw, the pickled cucumbers, the chili truffle shoyu sauce, it’s a revelation — and for me, the best fried chicken sandwich I’ve ever eaten in L.A., hands down.

Hokkaido by way of Arcata

Hokkaido Fried Chicken, which is online-only, has been running since January out of an unassuming ghost kitchen on the edge of Koreatown. It’s the brainchild of Ronuk Patel, an Indian American who grew up outside Chicago, fell in love with snowboarding, and relocated to Arcata, a Northern California town about three hours from the Oregon border.

Ronuk Patel, chef and owner of Hokkaido Fried Chicken and Hokkaido Soup Curry, at his ghost kitchen on Olympic Blvd on the outskirts of Koreatown.

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Courtesy Hokkaido Fried Chicken

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There, he built a career as a cannabis farmer — and began making regular snowboarding pilgrimages to Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, chasing powder and, eventually, some of the most interesting food he'd ever eaten. It was on that first trip to Sapporo, over a decade ago, that he met Gory, a Japanese chef who would become a close friend and, eventually, his collaborator.

In 2024, Patel sponsored Gory's visa and brought him to Arcata to help launch Susukino Ramen Bar — named after the Sapporo neighborhood where they first met. It was there, with Gory's family zangi recipe on the menu as an appetizer, that the seed of Hokkaido Fried Chicken was planted.

What is zangi?

Most Angelenos with a passing familiarity with Japanese cuisine know karaage — the lightly battered, juicy fried chicken that has become a fixture on Japanese menus across the city. Zangi is Hokkaido's answer to that tradition, and it plays in a different register entirely. Where karaage tends toward a lighter touch — a brief marinade, a delicate crust — zangi goes deeper. The marinade is heavier on soy and sake, more aggressive with garlic and ginger and almost always incorporates a fruit component that varies by chef.

Patel and Gory pushed it further still, applying a dry batter separately after marinating — rather than mixing everything together in the traditional wet batter method — for a crust that fries up dramatically craggier and crunchier. The result is chicken that is deeply seasoned all the way through and improbably juicy — both of which hit you immediately on first bite.

The HFC sandwich up close — the craggy, dry-battered crust is the first thing you notice, a direct result of Patel and chef Gory's decision to depart from zangi's traditional wet batter.

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Gab Chabrán

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LAist

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Inside the sandwich

Bite into the sandwich ($10.99), and you immediately understand why it took four or five months to get here. Every detail is thought through. The miso slaw cuts the richness of the chicken without competing with it. The cucumbers, pickled in a brine riffed from Patel's own recipe, add brightness and snap. The chili truffle shoyu sauce, born from mixing his ramen shop's house chili with a white shoyu-truffle product he'd been experimenting with, ties it together with a depth that sneaks up on you.

Just getting started

Fried chicken sandwiches aren't all that's on the menu at HFC. Nuggets and tenders round out the chicken offerings, along with the fries, which are definitely worth ordering — particularly the loaded pork belly fries ($10), topped with chashu pork belly, spicy truffle aioli and green onions over crispy shoestring fries, and the furikake fries ($5), whose umami-rich seasoning makes them a natural companion to the chicken.

Patel has also launched a second concept out of the same ghost kitchen: Hokkaido Soup Curry, a Japanese dish that combines aromatic curry spices with a lighter, broth-based preparation rooted in the same Hokkaido culinary tradition that inspired HFC — and one that hints at the Japanese-Indian fusion menu Patel says he's only just beginning to develop.

For Patel, none of it feels calculated — and that, perhaps, is the point.

"It just happened really organically, naturally, just like us being in the kitchen, having a good time."

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

When I first started, I went alone. I couldn’t convince any of my friends to commit to riding 20 miles on a bicycle on a Friday night through a city known for its car culture. It didn’t help that I told them the bike ride would start in Koreatown, among the most densely populated neighborhoods in the whole country. 

I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. 

What I discovered is that Los Angeles Critical Mass (LACM) is the largest community bicycle ride in the United States, drawing almost 4,000 riders each month, according to the group’s own records. 

The modern Critical Mass movement began in San Francisco in 1992 as a grassroots effort to reclaim the streets has since grown into a global movement, with Los Angeles now hosting one of its largest rides.

LACM Vice President JoJo Valdez, told The LA Local that the event is ”a living example of what safer, more human-centered streets could look like” in the City of Angels. 

Critical Mass Los Angeles riders roll through Koreatown, January 2026.

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Courtesy of LACM

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The ride takes place on the last Friday of every month on the corner of Western and Wilshire across from The Wiltern. Routes change monthly, turning each ride into a moving tour of the city. Some rides head west toward Marina del Rey, others east toward Mariachi Plaza, passing through neighborhoods that rarely feel connected outside of car travel.

As the ride moves through different neighborhoods, it often brings energy — and customers — to local businesses along the route as riders stop for food, drinks and supplies throughout the evening.

Valdez said, “Cyclists, skaters and riders moving together make the demand for alternative transportation impossible to ignore.”

A cyclist takes off on a monthly Critical Mass ride in Koreatown on Nov 8th, 2025.

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Steve Saldivar

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The LA Local

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L.A. is the last place you’d expect a mass cycling movement to take hold. That’s probably why it did. In a city defined by gridlock, LACM offers something rare — movement through neighborhoods at a human pace.

I’ve experienced it firsthand. 

For me, LACM became an alternative to the typical night out. Instead of bars or clubs, it became a way to decompress, stay active and explore the city differently.

Over time, I built connections that turned into a consistent group of six friends I now ride with each month. I’ve even brought my girlfriend along, and it’s become one of our favorite end-of-month traditions.

Critical Mass Los Angeles riders roll through Los Angeles.

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Courtesy of LACM

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How a ride typically goes

The LA chapter of Critical Mass is led by LACM President Lisa Lundie and Valdez, who both began as volunteers before stepping into leadership roles for the Los Angeles chapter. According to the organization, their focus includes accessibility, community and mental wellness accessibility, community and mental wellness — and those values show up throughout the ride itself.

Valdez said that what people see — the crowds and energy — is only part of the story. There is real coordination and planning to keep the ride safe and organized as it moves through the city.

“We look out for each other. We ride together. If you’re alone, you won’t stay that way for long,” he said.

Critical Mass Los Angeles riders roll through Hollywood Boulevard, December of 2024.

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Courtesy of LACM

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Ride marshals help guide traffic, support newer riders and keep the group together, while a lead vehicle sets the pace and support riders follow behind to ensure no one is left behind. The result is a ride that may feel overwhelming at first, given the number of people, but quickly settles into a relaxed rhythm.

With everyone following the lead car and built-in stops to regroup, it becomes approachable for first-timers and more communal than a typical solo ride through Los Angeles.

As the ride unfolds, speakers carried by riders create a shifting soundtrack — hip-hop, EDM, reggae and Latin music blending with each neighborhood the group passes through, turning the streets into a moving reflection of L.A.’s culture.

Critical Mass Los Angeles riders roll through Koreatown.

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Louie Martinez

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The LA Local

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Some rides carry deeper meaning, including moments of silence for cyclists lost to traffic accidents and ongoing calls for safer streets.

This month’s ride, taking place on April 24 at 7:00 p.m., will celebrate West Coast hip-hop legend DJ Battlecat, who will perform from the lead vehicle, transforming the ride into a rolling party on wheels.

The distance might sound intimidating, but the pace is manageable, with plenty of breaks and lots of potential new friends.  Whether you come with a group or show up solo, Critical Mass offers a new way to experience Los Angeles one ride at a time.

Cyclists gather for the monthly Critical Mass rides in Koreatown on Nov 8th, 2025.

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Steve Saldivar

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The LA Local

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