Panetti has been on Death Row in Texas since 1995 and has been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Panetti's lawyers and attorneys for the state said he was mentally disturbed. The question was whether he was sufficiently mentally ill that it would violate the 8th Amendment, which bars cruel and unusual punishment, to execute him.

Panetti was hospitalized for mental illness 14 times in the decade before using a shotgun to kill his former in-laws in the Texas hill-country town of Fredericksburg, as his estranged wife Sonja and her son watched.

Panetti was ruled mentally competent to stand trial, to represent himself and to be executed. Before Thursday's decision, four courts, including the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, rejected pleas by Panetti's lawyers to spare his life.

The case presented a particularly thorny question, because evidence was introduced that Panetti was aware that he had killed Amanda and Joe Alvarado. But expert testimony was presented that Panetti, known as "the Preacher" on Death Row, believed he was going to be executed because Texas was conspiring with the devil to block him from preaching the Gospel to fellow inmates -- not because of the Alvarado murders.

Kennedy found that Panetti's execution would be inconsistent with a 1986 Supreme Court decision that a person should not be put to death if he could not perceive "the connection between his crime and his punishment."

He was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

Dissenting was Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito Jr.

The Supreme Court sent the case back to a federal judge in Austin, Texas, to reassess Panetti's mental health in light of the decision issued Thursday. Ted Cruz, the Texas solicitor general, said he would continue to press for Panetti's execution.

The high court's decision was hailed by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, which submitted a friend-of-the-court brief, as did the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association.

"For once, law has caught up with medical science," said Ronald Honberg, NAMI's director of policy and legal affairs.

"The circumstances of this case are tragic. ... However, execution of someone who is profoundly ill would only compound the original tragedy and represent a profound injustice for us all," Honberg said.

Under the terms of the settlement, Sony will pay $8.5 million in overtime wages to current and former employees, and will also "reclassify class members with a job title of Associate Artist and Artist 1 as nonexempt employees under the wage and hour laws of California and the federal Fair Labor Standards Act."

In spite of the settlement, Sony has denied the allegations in the suit and has admitted no liability or wrongdoing. According to a statement from the law firm, the settlement is conditional, "contingent upon court approval, and the settlement may be rescinded if a sufficient number of class members opt out of the settlement."

Frederick J. Lewis, a founding partner of Lewis Fisher, said he feels the joining of the two firms will add tremendous opportunities for Lewis Fisher as well as the Memphis business community. "I think (the combination will help Memphis companies) in the same way we see our firm as benefiting - it gives the resource of having a firm with 365 lawyers and 30 different offices across the country," Lewis said. "We serve clients across the country, but this obviously increases our ability to do that. It gives us depth.

"As far as the Memphis market, it gives clients in Memphis an opportunity to call on the resources of a nationwide firm when they have a case that calls for that."

Southern presence

The attorneys of Lewis Fisher will have the benefit of Ogletree Deakins' reputation that comes from representing more than half of the Fortune 50 companies in the United States, entities such as Home Depot, Dillard's, Nissan, Dollar General and Dell Corp.

Twelve attorneys from Lewis Fisher's Memphis office and seven from its Jackson, Miss., office will make up the first Ogletree Deakins offices in each city. Lewis, Thomas L. Henderson, Whitney King Fogerty, Charles V. Holmes, O. John Norris III and Craig A. Cowart will open the Memphis office as shareholders of Ogletree Deakins. Donna K. Fisher, a founding partner of Lewis Fisher, will join in an of counsel position.

Lewis Fisher, which began operating in 1998 in its current form, already had two attorneys operating out of an office in Los Angeles, so those attorneys will move into the L.A. office of Ogletree Deakins.

The Memphis office will become Ogletree Deakins' second office in Tennessee. The firm opened an office in Nashville in 1986.

Firm shareholder Kevin Frazier, who works out of Ogletree Deakins' Nashville office, said the firm was interested in Lewis Fisher for a number of reasons.

"The first attraction was the quality of the lawyers. When we are looking at cities, that is the first thing we look for," said Frazier, who is on the executive committee of Ogletree Deakins.

The marriage of the two firms also gives Ogletree Deakins a presence in a region that it would otherwise not have had access to before. Offices in Memphis and Jackson, Miss., offer exactly that for Ogletree Deakins, Frazier said.

"I have known Tom (Henderson) and Fred (Lewis) for probably 10 years, and have always been interested in doing something with them, and the opportunity just presented itself," Frazier said.

Only a matter of time

For Ogletree Deakins, combining with Lewis Fisher was part of the firm's overall strategy to address some of the current trends in the area of labor and employment law, Frazier added.

While Lewis Fisher attorneys had crossed paths with attorneys at Ogletree Deakins for years on various cases, Lewis said it was not until recently that the two firms began to talk about combining their resources.

Lewis and Henderson, who is a partner at Lewis Fisher, were in Nashville working on a case that also involved some Ogletree Deakins attorneys. They went to lunch one day after court and discussed the possibility of working together.

"We obviously had a productive lunch," Lewis said of that February meeting. "It has been a quick courtship."

One of the main reasons Lewis said his firm was interested in working with a firm as large as Ogletree Deakins was the trend in labor and employment law for cases to be filed as class actions. That trend opens companies such as the ones Ogletree Deakins represents to more liability than before.

Another trend in labor and employment that makes the combination of firms work well is that major corporations have begun to severely restrict the number of law firms they use, meaning companies that might have at one time used 20 law firms around the country, might only use two or three firms now.

"What that does for Lewis Fisher and their client base is it gives them an opportunity to say, 'We can do your work at 30 different locations with quality lawyers we know at one firm,'" Frazier said.

Ogletree Deakins already has begun to see the benefits since news of the combination became public earlier this month. The firm has picked up three lawsuits through Ogletree Deakins contacts in Memphis that it would not have been able to get without the office here, Frazier said.

A teenager has pleaded guilty to a murder that sent a mob of the victim's relatives on a search for the killer, ending in the fatal beating of another man they thought was involved.

Leonard Staton, 19, pleaded guilty Thursday to killing Patrick McClendon, 20. Staton faces a minimum of 24 years in prison for second-degree murder, kidnapping, robbery and possession of a stolen firearm.

Staton called police last summer to confess to killing McClendon, his one-time friend, over 2 ounces of marijuana.

Hours before that call, a search party of McClendon's family and friends came across the victim's car, hidden among pine trees on property that belonged to the family of Tony Blakeney, 40.

The search party then turned on Blakeney, who lived at the house and was part of the search party, authorities said. Sheriff's deputies found Blakeney lying on the ground, and he died at a hospital.

Eleven men - most of them relatives of McClendon's, and all under 30 - face murder charges in Blakeney's death.

Investigators have said Blakeney had no part in McClendon's killing.

Schultz-Reineke, a German citizen living in Manhattan, faces up to 85 years in prison on the charges. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 28.

"It was a tragic day for him," said Roland Riopelle, Schultz-Reineke's lawyer. "We look forward to completing the proceedings. He looks forward, at some point, to going home to Germany."

Prosecutors alleged that Schultz-Reineke and others engaged in a scheme to defraud clients of Results Securities and Signature Investments. Many of the investors were German, prosecutors said.

Schultz-Reineke and others would secretly pay significantly more than publicized in its fee schedule to individuals employed by the companies to induce clients to invest, the government said.

Prosecutors said Schultz-Reineke and others also caused to be created customer account statements and trade confirmations that falsely represented purchases and sales of securities, as well as profits and losses incurred on those trades.

Schultz-Reineke and others directed a substantial portion of the investors' money be used for purposes other than trading securities, including for the firms' operating expenses and for their personal use.

The Democratic chairmen of the two committees seeking the documents accused Bush of stonewalling and disdain for the law, and said they would press forward with enforcing the subpoenas.

"With respect, it is with much regret that we are forced down this unfortunate path which we sought to avoid by finding grounds for mutual accommodation,'' White House counsel Fred Fielding said in a letter to the chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees. "We had hoped this matter could conclude with your committees receiving information in lieu of having to invoke executive privilege. Instead, we are at this conclusion.''

Thursday was the deadline for surrendering the documents. The White House also made clear that Miers and Taylor would not testify next month, as directed by the subpoenas, which were issued June 13. The stalemate could end up with House and Senate contempt citations and a battle in federal court over separation of powers.

"Increasingly, the president and vice president feel they are above the law,'' said Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. He portrayed the president's actions as "Nixonian stonewalling.''

His House counterpart, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., said Bush's assertion of executive privilege was "unprecedented in its breadth and scope'' and displayed "an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government.''

In his letter, Fielding said Bush had "attempted to chart a course of cooperation'' by releasing more than 8,500 pages of documents and sending Gonzales and other senior officials to testify before Congress. The White House also had offered a compromise in which Miers, Taylor, White House political strategist Karl Rove and their deputies would be interviewed by Judiciary Committee aides in closed-door sessions, without transcripts.

Leahy and Conyers rejected that offer. Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said the Democrats should have accepted it.

"We would be much farther ahead in finding out whether there's any real impropriety here or not,'' said Hatch, a former chairman of the committee. He also said presidents have legitimate reasons to protect the confidentiality of the advice they get.

In his letter, Fielding explained Bush's position on executive privilege this way: "For the President to perform his constitutional duties, it is imperative that he receive candid and unfettered advice and that free and open discussions and deliberations occur among his advisors and between those advisors and others within and outside the Executive Branch.''

This "bedrock presidential prerogative'' exists, in part, to protect the president from being compelled to disclose such communications to Congress, Fielding argued. And he questioned whether the documents and testimony the committees seeking are critically important to their investigations.

It was the second time in his administration that Bush has exerted executive privilege, said White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto. The first instance was in December, 2001, to rebuff Congress' demands for Clinton administration documents.

Tensions between the administration and the Democratic-run Congress have been building for months as the House and Senate Judiciary panels have sought to probe the firings of eight federal prosecutors and the administration's program of warrantless eavesdropping. The investigations are part of the Democrats' efforts to hold the administration to account for the way it has conducted the war on terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Democrats say the firings of the prosecutors over the winter was an example of improper political influence. The White House says U.S. attorneys are political appointees who can be hired and fired for almost any reason.

Democrats and even some key Republicans have said that Gonzales should resign over the U.S. attorney dismissals, but he has steadfastly held his ground and Bush has backed him.

Just Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney's office, demanding documents pertaining to terrorism-era warrant-free eavesdropping.

Separately, that panel also is summoning Gonzales to discuss the program and an array of other matters - including the prosecutor firings - that have cost a half-dozen top Justice Department officials their jobs.

The Judiciary panels also subpoenaed the National Security Council. Leahy added that, like Conyers, he would consider pursuing contempt citations against those who refuse.