In burglary-plagued Oakland, it's easy to pick on this workshop

OAKLAND — Burglaries have plagued just about every corner of this beleaguered city of late: Last year, Oakland averaged one break-in every 42 minutes — a 44% increase over 2011.

So when Mayor Jean Quan recently included a workshop on lock-picking in the "Something for Everyone" section of her newsletter, it didn't go over well.

"Of all the incredibly unbelievable things I've witnessed in my life, this tops the list," one resident wrote in a letter that asked Quan to cancel the class. "What next?" another wrote on a neighborhood chat forum. "The fundamentals of armed robbery?"

In a hasty apology, Quan said she regretted the "inappropriate listing," which was part of a 20-page cut-and-pasted newsletter of local events assembled by volunteers. "It strikes the wrong note when we're doing everything we can to bring down crime," she said.

The Introduction to Lock-Picking class, to be held Saturday evening, is part of a downtown Workshop Weekend that includes more than 40 offerings, including Build a Robot, Electroluminescent Wire Projects, DNA Sequencing and Telescope Making.

The event was launched two years ago by a pair of brothers eager to help residents of all ages find their passion and learn how things work. But now Gil and J.D. Zamfirescu have found themselves doing damage control while giving this city a primer in the subculture of "sport-picking."

"We recognize there is a lot of community concern," Gil Zamfirescu said in an interview. "But the best way to combat crime is to educate yourself, to understand locks so you know how to protect yourself better."

Or, in the words of the 19th century locksmith and lock-picker Alfred Charles Hobbs: "Rogues knew a good deal about lock-picking long before locksmiths discussed it … the spread of the knowledge is necessary to give fair play to those who might suffer by ignorance."

Hobbs is a legend to the hobbyist lock-picker community. His quote graces the website of the Open Organisation of Lockpickers — or TOOOL — a group that started in the Netherlands and expanded to the U.S. in 2004.

In light of the Oakland brouhaha, the organization — which is hosting the Saturday class — has agreed not to offer the lock-pick kits normally sold at workshops and competitions. And just to ensure that all goes well, U.S. TOOOL co-founder Babak Javadi (a Philadelphia security consultant) and fellow board member Brian Rea (a security expert known in lock-picking circles as Deviant) are making a special trip to Oakland.

TOOOL has a strict code of ethics that association members and workshop participants must follow, including, of course, no lawbreaking.

And instructors abide by guidelines on what they will and won't teach. Rea said they dispense lock-pick kits but don't sell bump keys — which are used to quickly and forcefully open a lock. (They do explain bumping and discuss ways to make locks bump-proof.)

Though Javadi and Rea do provide know-how on covert entry, or the secret sexy stuff of James Bond movies, to their private clients, largely law enforcement and security officials, "we temper how we disseminate information, depending on who the audience is," Javadi said.

As for the risk of educating burglars, he said most can find guidance online without having to "pay $40 and come to an event where you have to use your real name." Besides, he said, the vast majority of burglars enter through open doors, kick them in or are lucky enough to find a key hidden under a rock.

Saturday's workshop description beckons: "In many cases, opening a lock without a key is easier than you think!" Open to participants ages 10-101, it has sold out.

"Sometimes a 12-year-old will come to a meeting and they're great. They just get it," said Michael Fitzhugh, a member of San Francisco's TOOOL chapter, who will be teaching the workshop. "For most people, it takes a lot of time and practice."

As for Quan, she called the class "part of a do-it-yourself, garage-science sort of event, and those are popular in our creative community." Still, she promised to "do a better job reviewing these listings in the future."

lee.romney@latimes.com

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Best Sci-Fi Effects of All Time, as Voted by You

Sometimes it's the little things that send the mind soaring. Take the pen that floats, weightless, before being plucked from the air by a space stewardess in 2001: A Space Odyssey: It's a simple scene, but it feels real and sends the imagination into hyperdrive.

Still, when Wired.com asked its readers to name their favorite sci-fi visual effects of all time, we got plenty of over-the-top nominations, from Alien's vicious extraterrestrials to Avatar's groovy bioluminescent trees. The conversation that unfolded in the comments section of our Monsters giveaway post was surprisingly thoughtful — and surprisingly long. We received more than 1,300 comments.

Here, in no particular order, is a sampling of the best sci-fi visual effects of all time that readers recalled.

Above:

The best visual effect in any sci-fi film has to be the floating pen in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's just floating in the spaceship and the woman grabs it outta midair and starts writing with it! How did Kubrick do that in 1969? Still my favorite film from my favorite director. —machin3man

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U.S. Judges Offer Addicts a Way to Avoid Prison

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Emily Leitch of Brooklyn, with her son, Nazir, 4, was arrested for importing cocaine but went to “drug court” to avoid prison.

Federal judges around the country are teaming up with prosecutors to create special treatment programs for drug-addicted defendants who would otherwise face significant prison time, an effort intended to sidestep drug laws widely seen as inflexible and overly punitive.

The Justice Department has tentatively embraced the new approach, allowing United States attorneys to reduce or even dismiss charges in some drug cases.

The effort follows decades of success for “drug courts” at the state level, which legal experts have long cited as a less expensive and more effective alternative to prison for dealing with many low-level repeat offenders.

But it is striking that the model is spreading at the federal level, where judges have increasingly pushed back against rules that restrict their ability to make their own determination of appropriate sentences.

So far, federal judges have instituted programs in California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington. About 400 defendants have been involved nationwide.

In Federal District Court in Brooklyn on Thursday, Judge John Gleeson issued an opinion praising the new approach as a way to address swelling prison costs and disproportionate sentences for drug trafficking.

“Presentence programs like ours and those in other districts mean that a growing number of courts are no longer reflexively sentencing federal defendants who do not belong in prison to the costly prison terms recommended by the sentencing guidelines,” Judge Gleeson wrote.

The opinion came a year after Judge Gleeson, with the federal agency known as Pretrial Services, started a program that made achieving sobriety an incentive for drug-addicted defendants to avoid prison. The program had its first graduate this year: Emily Leitch, a Brooklyn woman with a long history of substance abuse who was arrested entering the country at Kennedy International Airport with over 13 kilograms of cocaine, about 30 pounds, in her luggage.

“I want to thank the federal government for giving me a chance,” Ms. Leitch said. “I always wanted to stand up as a sober person.”

The new approach is being prompted in part by the Obama administration, which previously supported legislation that scaled back sentences for crimes involving crack cocaine. The Justice Department has supported additional changes to the federal sentencing guidelines to permit the use of drug or mental health treatment as an alternative to incarceration for certain low-level offenders and changed its own policies to make those options more available.

“We recognize that imprisonment alone is not a complete strategy for reducing crime,” James M. Cole, the deputy attorney general, said in a statement. “Drug courts, re-entry courts and other related programs along with enforcement are all part of the solution.”

For nearly 30 years, the United States Sentencing Commission has established guidelines for sentencing, a role it was given in 1984 after studies found that federal judges were giving defendants widely varying sentences for similar crimes. The commission’s recommendations are approved by Congress, causing judges to bristle at what they consider interference with their judicial independence.

“When you impose a sentence that you believe is unjust, it is a very difficult thing to do,” Stefan R. Underhill, a federal judge in Connecticut, said in an interview. “It feels wrong.”

The development of drug courts may meet resistance from some Republicans in Congress.

“It is important that courts give deference to Congressional authority over sentencing,” Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, a member and former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. He said sentencing should not depend “on what judge happens to decide the case or what judicial circuit the defendant happens to be in.”

At the state level, pretrial drug courts have benefited from bipartisan support, with liberals supporting the programs as more focused on rehabilitation, and conservatives supporting them as a way to cut spending.

Under the model being used in state and federal courts, defendants must accept responsibility for their crimes and agree to receive drug treatment and other social services and attend regular meetings with judges who monitor their progress. In return for successful participation, they receive a reduced sentence or no jail time at all. If they fail, they are sent to prison.

The drug court option is not available to those facing more serious charges, like people accused of being high-level dealers or traffickers, or accused of a violent crime. (These programs differ from re-entry drug courts, which federal judges have long used to help offenders integrate into society after prison.)

In interviews, the federal judges who run the other programs pointed to a mix of reasons for their involvement.

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Economix Blog: Bernanke Defends Stimulus as Necessary and Effective

The Federal Reserve’s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, picked an unusual time to offer his most recent defense of the Fed’s campaign to stimulate the economy: 7 p.m. on a Friday night in San Francisco, 10 p.m. back home on the East Coast.

The basic message was the same as Mr. Bernanke delivered to Congress earlier this week: The Fed regards its current efforts as necessary and effective, and the risks, while real, are under control.

“Commentators have raised two broad concerns surrounding the outlook for long-term rates,” Mr. Bernanke told a conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. “To oversimplify, the first risk is that rates will remain low, and the second is that they will not.”

If rates remain low, it may drive investors to take excessive risks. If rates jump, investors could lose money – not least the Fed.

Regarding the first possibility, Mr. Bernanke said that the Fed was keeping a careful eye on financial markets. But he noted that rates were low in large part because the economy was weak, and that keeping rates low was the best way to encourage stronger growth. “Premature rate increases would carry a high risk of short-circuiting the recovery, possibly leading — ironically enough — to an even longer period of low long- term rates,” he said.

At the other extreme, Mr. Bernanke said the Fed could “mitigate” any jump in rates by prolonging its efforts to hold rates down, for example by keeping some of its investments in Treasury and mortgage-backed securities.

Three more highlights from the question-and-answer session after the speech.

1. Mr. Bernanke, asked about the outlook for the Washington Nationals, responded by accurately quoting the “Las Vegas odds” of a World Series appearance: 8/1.

2. Although the decision may be made under a future chairman, Mr. Bernanke said the Fed should continue to offer “forward guidance” — predicting its policies — even after it concludes its long effort to revive the economy.

“Providing information about the future path of policy could be useful, probably would be useful, under even normal circumstances,” he said in response to a question. “I think we need to keep providing information.”

3. Not surprisingly, Mr. Bernanke often is asked to reflect on the financial crisis. He offered something a little different than his normal response on Friday night.

“In many ways, in retrospect, the crisis was a normal crisis,” he said. “It’s just that the intuitional framework in which it occurred was much more complex.”

In other words, there was a panic, and a run, and a collapse – but rather than a run on bank deposits, the run was in the money markets. Improving the stability of those markets is something regulators have yet to accomplish.

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Bell jurors ordered to begin anew after panelist is dismissed

After nearly five days of deliberations, jurors in the Bell corruption trial were ordered Thursday to begin anew after a member of the panel was dismissed for misconduct and replaced by an alternate.

The original juror, a white-haired woman identified only as Juror No. 3, told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Kathleen Kennedy she had gone onto a legal website to look up jury instructions and then asked her daughter to help find a definition for the word "coercion."

Although all but one defense attorney requested that the woman stay, Kennedy said the juror needed to be removed. "She has spoken about the deliberations with her daughter, she has conducted research on the Internet, and I've repeatedly, repeatedly throughout this trial — probably hundreds of times — cautioned the jury not to do that," the judge said.

The removal came after jurors notified the judge that they were deadlocked and that continued deliberations seemed fruitless.

It was unclear how to interpret the day's events, whether the dismissed juror had been a lone holdout or an indication of a fractured jury.

The juror started to tell the judge which way she was leaning in the case, saying she had gone online "looking to see at what point can I get the harassment to stop.... How long do I have to stay in there and deliberate with them when I have made my decision that I didn't think there was —"

Kennedy cut her off before she could finish.

The woman clasped her hands over her mouth and said, "I'm sorry."

Two defense attorneys thought she was leaning toward acquittal and wanted her to stay. "I would have preferred the deadlock to a guilty verdict," said Alex Kessel, the attorney for George Mirabal, one of six former council members charged with misappropriation of public funds.

The council members are charged with inflating their salaries in what prosecutors contend was a far-reaching web of corruption in which fat paychecks were placed ahead of the needs of the city's largely immigrant, working-poor constituents.

When attorneys and defendants were summoned to the courtroom Thursday morning, they were initially told that the jury appeared to be deadlocked.

"Your honor, we have reached a point where as a jury we have fundamental disagreements and cannot reach a unanimous verdict in this case," read a note signed by two jurors, including the foreman, that was given to Kennedy.

A note from another juror alerted the judge that Juror No. 3 had consulted an outside attorney. That did not appear to be the case, but her other actions were revealed under questioning from the judge.

The same juror made a tearful request Monday to be removed from the panel because she felt others were picking on her. Kennedy told the woman that although discussions can get heated, it was important to continue deliberating.

On Thursday, however, the juror again broke into tears and said she had spoken with her daughter about "the abuse I have suffered." She said her daughter told her, "Mom, they're trying to find the weak link."

The woman said she had turned to the Internet to better understand the rules about jury deliberations and came across the word "coercion." After her daughter helped her look up the word's definition, she wrote it down on a piece of paper and brought it with her to court. When the judge asked to see the paper she went into the jury room to retrieve it.

The woman later left the courtroom in tears.

With an alternate in place, Kennedy told the panel to act as if the earlier deliberations had not taken place. The alternate had sat in the jury box during the four-week trial but did not take part in deliberations.

Former council members Luis Artiga, Victor Bello, George Cole, Oscar Hernandez, Teresa Jacobo and Mirabal are accused of drawing annual salaries of as much as $100,000 a year by serving on boards that did little work and seldom met, part of a scandal that drew national attention to the small city in 2010.

Prosecutors said that Bell's charter follows state law regarding council members' compensation. In a city the size of Bell, council members should be paid no more than $8,076 a year.

The trial began in late January, and the case went to the jury last Friday.

As the jury resumed deliberations in downtown Los Angeles, the verdict was clearly in on the streets of Bell.

One resident unfurled old protest banners and signs from the days when the pay scandal was first exposed and then called former members of an activist group that had led the charge for reform in the city.

"We're holding our breaths and waiting," Denise Rodarte, a member of the grassroots group Bell Assn. to Stop the Abuse, said in regard to a verdict.

"It's cut and dry: Local elected officials were supposed to make a certain amount of money, and they made a lot more."

corina.knoll@latimes.com

jeff.gottlieb@latimes.com

Times staff writer Ruben Vives contributed to this report.

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What Ousted Groupon CEO's <cite>Battletoads</cite> Reference Meant

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason is many things, and one of them is clearly a Nintendo kid from the 1980s. After his firing Thursday from the daily-deals company that he co-founded, he sent a jocular e-mail to his staff admitting that he had been fired, asking for recommendations for a “fat camp” so he could lose the “Groupon 40,” and most inscrutably (to some) comparing his dismissal to playing the videogame Battletoads:

I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey. If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through.

This was, to put it lightly, an extremely specific metaphor. It probably has a lot of investors scratching their heads today. To those of us about Mason’s age who played the same videogames he did, it makes total sense.

You might infer, with no other context, that Battletoads must be a really hard videogame. It’s probably fair to say that for those of us whose primary gaming device was the Nintendo Entertainment System, Battletoads was the hard videogame. It was by Rare, the developer that seemed to squeeze more juice out of the aging 8-bit console than anyone, even Nintendo itself, could manage. (It got a license to develop software after it impressed Nintendo by reverse-engineering the device.) Battletoads was the pinnacle of its performance on the NES. It had absolutely gorgeous graphics. Every level had a totally different gameplay feel than the last, never feeling repetitive.

And it was one of the hardest damned games, to the point of absolute unfairness. Beating the first level wasn’t so bad, completing the second one took some practice, and good luck after that unless you had the patience of Job. You couldn’t play Battletoads levels once and scrape by with quick reflexes; you had to play them over and over again, memorizing the traps and enemies so that you could avoid them with pixel-perfect precision. Some players stuck it out; some (like me) gave up.

Mason clearly stuck it out, because the specific level he referenced, the Terra Tubes, comes quite late in the game. Aficionados consider it the difficile de la difficile of Battletoads levels. Watch the video above and see how the player begins to dodge the game’s traps before they even appear on the screen — the only way to get around them.

So there are really two specific things that Mason is implying with this reference:

1. To get to the Terra Tubes on one’s first try, having never played the game before, would be a Herculean, almost impossible, achievement. Therefore, getting this far with Groupon was in and of itself either a colossal feat of genius or a lucky miracle, depending on how charitably you want to interpret the metaphor.


2. Dying on the Terra Tubes, which are designed to make you die over and over, is no shameful thing.

Whether you agree with Groupon’s ousted CEO on these points or not is up to you, of course, but now you understand what he was saying.

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Cellar victim Kampusch raped, starved in film of ordeal

VIENNA (Reuters) – A new film based on the story of Austrian kidnap victim Natascha Kampusch shows her being repeatedly raped by the captor who beat and starved her during the eight-and-a-half years that he kept her in a cellar beneath his house.

Kampusch was snatched on her way to school at the age of 10 by Wolfgang Priklopil and held in a windowless cell under his garage near Vienna until she escaped in 2006, causing a sensation in Austria and abroad. Priklopil committed suicide.

Kampusch had always refused to respond to claims that she had had sex with Priklopil, but in a German television interview on her 25th birthday last week said she had decided to reveal the truth because it had leaked out from police files.

The film, “3,096 Days” – based on Kampusch’s autobiography of the same name – soberly portrays her captivity in a windowless cellar less than 6 square metres (65 square feet) in area, often deprived of food for days at a time.

The emaciated Kampusch – who weighed just 38 kg (84 pounds) at one point in 2004 – keeps a diary written on toilet paper concealed in a box.

One entry reads: “At least 60 blows in the face. Ten to 15 nausea-inducing fist blows to the head. One strike with the fist with full weight to my right ear.”

The movie shows occasional moments that approach tenderness, such as when Priklopil presents her with a cake for her 18th birthday or buys her a dress as a gift – but then immediately goes on to chide her for not knowing how to waltz with him.

GREY AREAS

Antonia Campbell-Hughes, who plays the teenaged Kampusch, said she had tried to portray “the strength of someone’s soul, the ability of people to survive… but also the grey areas within a relationship that people don’t necessarily understand.”

The British actress said she had not met Kampusch during the making of the film or since. “It was a very isolated time, it was a bubble of time, and I wanted to keep that very focused,” she told journalists as she arrived for the Vienna premiere.

Kampusch herself attended the premiere, looking composed as she posed for pictures but declining to give interviews.

In an interview with Germany’s Bild Zeitung last week, she said: “Yes, I did recognize myself, although the reality was even worse. But one can’t really show that in the cinema, since it wasn’t supposed to be a horror film.”

The movie, made at the Constantin Film studios in Bavaria, Germany, also stars Amy Pidgeon as the 10-year-old Kampusch and Danish actor Thure Lindhardt as Priklopil.

“I focused mainly on playing the human being because… we have to remember it was a human being. Monsters do not exist, they’re only in cartoons,” Lindhart said.

“It became clear to me that it’s a story about survival, and it’s a story about surviving eight years of hell. If that story can be told then I can also play the bad guy.”

The director was German-American Sherry Hormann, who made her English-language debut with the 2009 move “Desert Flower”, an adaptation of the autobiography of Somali-born model and anti-female circumcision activist Waris Dirie.

“I’m a mother and I wonder at the strength of this child, and it was important for me to tell this story from a different perspective, to tell how this child using her own strength could survive this atrocious martyrdom,” Hormann said.

The Kampusch case was followed two years later by that of Josef Fritzl, an Austrian who held his daughter captive in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her.

The crimes prompted soul-searching about the Austrian psyche, and questions as to how the authorities and neighbors could have let such crimes go undetected for so long.

The film goes on general release on Thursday.

(Reporting by Georgina Prodhan, Editing by Paul Casciato)

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Jane C. Wright, Pioneering Oncologist, Dies at 93

Dr. Jane C. Wright, a pioneering oncologist who helped elevate chemotherapy from a last resort for cancer patients to an often viable treatment option, died on Feb. 19 at her home in Guttenberg, N.J. She was 93.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter Jane Jones, who said her mother had dementia.

Dr. Wright descended from a distinguished medical family that defied racial barriers in a profession long dominated by white men. Her father, Dr. Louis T. Wright, was among the first blacks to graduate from Harvard Medical School and was reported to be the first black doctor appointed to the staff of a New York City hospital. His father was an early graduate of what became the Meharry Medical College, the first medical school in the South for African-Americans, founded in Nashville in 1876.

Dr. Jane Wright began her career as a researcher working alongside her father at a cancer center he established at Harlem Hospital in New York.

Together, they and others studied the effects of a variety of drugs on tumors, experimented with chemotherapeutic agents on leukemia in mice and eventually treated patients, with some success, with new anticancer drugs, including triethylene melamine.

After her father died in 1952, Dr. Wright took over as director of the center, which was known as the Harlem Hospital Cancer Research Foundation. In 1955, she joined the faculty of the New York University Medical Center as director of cancer research, where her work focused on correlating the responses of tissue cultures to anticancer drugs with the responses of patients.

In 1964, working as part of a team at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, Dr. Wright developed a nonsurgical method, using a catheter system, to deliver heavy doses of anticancer drugs to previously hard-to-reach tumor areas in the kidneys, spleen and elsewhere.

That same year, Dr. Wright was the only woman among seven physicians who, recognizing the unique needs of doctors caring for cancer patients, founded the American Society of Clinical Oncologists, known as ASCO. She was also appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the President’s Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke, led by the heart surgeon Dr. Michael E. DeBakey. Its recommendations emphasized better communication among doctors, hospitals and research institutions and resulted in a national network of treatment centers.

In 1967, Dr. Wright became head of the chemotherapy department and associate dean at New York Medical College. News reports at the time said it was the first time a black woman had held so high a post at an American medical school.

“Not only was her work scientific, but it was visionary for the whole science of oncology,” Dr. Sandra Swain, the current president of ASCO, said in a telephone interview. “She was part of the group that first realized we needed a separate organization to deal with the providers who care for cancer patients. But beyond that it’s amazing to me that a black woman, in her day and age, was able to do what she did.”

Jane Cooke Wright was born in Manhattan on Nov. 30, 1919. Her mother, the former Corinne Cooke, was a substitute teacher in the New York City schools.

Ms. Wright attended the Ethical Culture school in Manhattan and the Fieldston School in the Bronx (now collectively known Ethical Culture Fieldston School) and graduated from Smith College, where she studied art before turning to medicine. She received a full scholarship to New York Medical College, earning her medical degree in 1945. Before beginning research with her father, she worked as a doctor in the city schools.

Dr. Wright’s marriage, in 1947, to David D. Jones, a lawyer, ended with his death in 1976. She is survived by their two daughters, Jane and Alison Jones, and a sister, Barbara Wright Pierce, who is also a doctor.

As both a student and a doctor, Dr. Wright said in interviews, she was always aware that as a black woman she was an unusual presence in medical institutions. But she never felt she was a victim of racial prejudice, she said.

“I know I’m a member of two minority groups,” she said in an interview with The New York Post in 1967, “but I don’t think of myself that way. Sure, a woman has to try twice as hard. But — racial prejudice? I’ve met very little of it.”

She added, “It could be I met it — and wasn’t intelligent enough to recognize it.”

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F-35 Jets Returned to Service by Pentagon

The Pentagon lifted its grounding of the new F-35 jet fighter on Thursday after concluding that a turbine blade had cracked on a single plane after it was overused in test operations.

The office that runs the program said no other cracks were found in inspections of the other engines made so far, and no engine redesign was needed.

It said the engine in which the blade cracked was in a plane that “had been operated at extreme parameters in its mission to expand the F-35 flight envelope.”

The program office added that “prolonged exposure to high levels of heat and other operational stressors on this specific engine were determined to be the cause of the crack.”

All flights were suspended last week for the 64 planes built so far once the crack, which stretched for six-tenths of an inch, was found during a routine inspection.

Pratt & Whitney, which makes the engines, investigated the problem with military experts. The company, a unit of United Technologies, said on Wednesday that the crack occurred after that engine was operated more than four times longer in a high-temperature flight environment than the engines would in normal use.

The F-35, a supersonic jet meant to evade enemy radar, is the Pentagon’s most expensive program and has been delayed by various technical problems. The program could cost $396 billion if the Pentagon builds 2,456 jets by the late 2030s.

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Divergent views on illegal immigration emerge in state GOP

WASHINGTON — California's elected Republicans have long had a simple approach to illegal immigration: Those who broke the law coming here should leave.

But the confluence of politics and personal threat have now put many Republican legislators in Washington and Sacramento in a very different place: eager to embrace an overhaul of immigration laws and willing to consider legal status for some of the country's nearly 12 million illegal immigrants, 3 million of whom live in California.

In Sacramento and Washington, party orthodoxy is being defied. At least six GOP legislators in Sacramento have aligned themselves with Democrats to support a path to citizenship for those in the country illegally. Several congressional Republicans from California have said they would consider granting legal status to some illegal immigrants as part of a comprehensive immigration overhaul.

The issue, which has tormented California Republicans for a generation, is unlikely to be far from members' minds this weekend as the state party holds its spring convention in Sacramento.

Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona), who once declared himself "wholeheartedly against amnesty," is among those now willing to consider granting legal status to some illegal immigrants, under specific conditions.

"I have a number of people who say, 'hell no,' " said Calvert, whose district is 36% Latino. "But I have a lot more people who understand that we're not going to do mass deportations."

A number of California Republicans remain vehemently opposed to granting legal status to illegal immigrants or won't consider it until convinced that the border is secure.

"You've got to secure the border, and you've got to prove it's secure. Period. We'll talk after that," said Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine).

"There is a path to citizenship," added Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Granite Bay.) "It's followed by millions of legal immigrants who have obeyed all of our laws."

The shift among others has been driven by recent election results and the expectation that Republicans' woeful trajectory in the state will not change without an alteration in the party's views.

In November, Republicans in Sacramento ceded a supermajority to Democrats in both houses of the California Legislature for the first time since 1883. At the same time, the number of Republicans in the state's 53-member House delegation dropped to 15, their lowest share since 1936, according to UC San Diego political scientist Gary Jacobson.

Barring a change, the future looks more bleak. The fastest-growing group of voters in the state are Latinos, whose voter registration has soared in the years since Republicans pushed 1994's Proposition 187, which would have banned government services to illegal immigrants. Latinos are expected to surpass whites to form a plurality of California's population by next year, according to state Department of Finance estimates, and Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo estimates that 23% of the state's registered voters are Latino. And they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

"The demographic changes are … irrefutable, and they require not just small message changes in the Republican Party but a tectonic shift," said Assemblyman Jeff Gorell (R-Camarillo), one of those who has broken with GOP orthodoxy. Gorell is among those who support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. He also supports granting them driver's licenses if they can document they have paid taxes in California, as proposed in legislation by Assemblyman Luis Alejo (D-Watsonville).

Already the state's demographic shifts have cast an ominous shadow over some Republicans. Mary Bono Mack, a veteran Republican member of Congress seen as having statewide potential, was ousted from her Palm Springs district last year by a Latino Democrat, Raul Ruiz. And four of the state's 15 GOP members of Congress represent districts where Latinos make up 40% or more of the population; five represent districts at least 30% Latino, according to the National Assn. of Latino Elected Officials Educational Fund.

"I'd not be truthful if I said that didn't have an impact," said Rep. John Campbell (R-Irvine).

Republicans also have come under pressure from interests in the Central Valley who back immigration measures that would allow a steady stream of farm workers. That area is home to many of the surviving Republican elected officials.

Nonetheless, some in the party dispute the notion that a change in policy is required. (The state party's platform asserts that "allowing illegal immigrants to remain in California undermines respect for the law.")

"I don't think pandering to a small group of people is going to help the Republican Party," said Celeste Greig, president of the California Republican Assembly, a grass-roots organization promoting conservative ideas within the party. "I don't think we should grant citizenship to people who blatantly came and broke the law."

California GOP Chairman Tom Del Beccaro also opposes measures that include a path to legalization. The country should secure the border before it considers what to do about residents who arrived illegally, Del Beccaro said.

Jim Brulte, the former Senate minority leader widely expected to be elected Sunday to replace Del Beccaro as chairman, has said the party needs to work harder to reach Latino voters. But Brulte declined to stake a position on the party's platform, saying his focus would be fundraising and rebuilding the organization's infrastructure.

richard.simon@latimes.com

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

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