LOS ANGELES

Dog-killing trial winds down to final arguments

The San Francisco dog mauling case is coming down to the law.

Superior Court Judge James Warren plans to instruct jurors in the law of manslaughter and second-degree murder today before they hear final arguments by prosecutors and the defense.

Then, the jury will have to decide whether Marjorie Knoller and Robert Noel were indifferent to the safety of their neighbors when they decided to keep two huge presa canario dogs, Bane and Hera.

Prosecutors called 30 people who described scary encounters with the dogs long before Diane Whipple was mauled to death by 140-pound Bane.

Bane was destroyed immediately after the attack. Hera was put down after the couple lost a long legal fight to keep her alive.

If convicted, Knoller could draw up to 15 years in prison, while Noel could be sentenced to four years.

California

Cancer study tracks Hispanic farmworkers

A state agency’s study found that Hispanic farmworkers have higher rates of brain, leukemia, skin and stomach cancers than other Hispanics in California, a phenomenon their union blames on pesticide exposure.

Female Hispanic farmworkers also had more cases of uterine cancer than the rest of the state’s Hispanic women, according to the Cancer Registry of California study, “Cancer Incidence in the United Farm Workers of America, 1987-1997.”

The study, published in the November issue of the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, doesn’t directly link pesticide use to the higher rates of cancer.

Another study will examine what pesticides were used and how long farmworkers were exposed to them, said Paul Mills, the study’s author and cancer epidemiologist at the Cancer Registry.