Volunteers fill City Attorney jobs

Faced with drastic budget cuts that have forced the early retirement of dozens of prosecutors, the Los Angeles City Attorney's Office has turned to training law school graduates or entry-level attorneys who volunteer to try criminal cases for free. C.J. Lin in the Daily News.

More than 100 of these volunteers have tried more than 250 misdemeanor criminal cases - ranging from DUIs, battery, domestic violence and vandalism charges - since City Attorney Carmen Trutanich launched the program in September 2009.

The volunteers, all of whom have passed the bar, go through a month of training and then prosecute cases for five months. They have helped fill in a gap left by the loss of about 70 prosecutors who took early retirement packages after an 18 percent cut to the office's budget in 2009 as the city struggled to make ends meet.